One of the pleasures of reading proto-science fiction is coming across unexpected gems. Louis-Sebastien Mercier’s L’An 2,440: réve s’il en fut jamais (the original title) is an Utopian dream written in pre-revolutionary France. It was published in 1771 and became an underground success, one of the most important clandestine novels of it’s time. The author fled to Switzerland but came back from exile to take his place in the Convention during the revolution.

As a story it hardly exists at all, it is just a framework for Mercier’s vision of the future; the book starts with the author being wakened from a dream, but his dream has such an effect on him that he must write it down before he sleeps again. He sees a future where the feudal society of his day had been swept aside by a revolution and France along with other countries of the world enjoys a freer democratic society.

His dedicatory epistle nails his colours firmly to the mast:

“The names of the friends, the defenders of humanity, shall live and be honoured by their glory shall be pure and radiant, but that vile herd of kings, who have been, in every sense the tormentors of mankind, still more deeply plunged into oblivion than in the regions of death, can only escape from infamy by the favour of inanity.”

In his dream Mercier awakes to find himself in Paris in the year 2440 which like the rest of the world has been transformed: it is 670 years in the future when humans have become reasonable and public spirited and have lost the vices of avarice, vanity and ostentation. On his arrival, he creates a stir in the city because of his strange clothes, but somebody soon steps out of the crowd of on-lookers to help him in his confusion. He is taken to a clothes shop where loose fitting modern garments are bought for him and he is persuaded to part with his sword and his new friend takes him on a guided tour of the city. He is at once impressed by the changes; the wide boulevards, the cleanliness, the absence of the chaos on the roads and this is the strength of the book, because he is continually comparing the Paris of his dream to the Paris of his own time. We learn just what it was like to live in Paris in the 1770’s: the sheer volume of horses and carriages trying to make their way down the narrow streets, the big carriages of the rich barging their way through the throng, not caring about running over pedestrians, not keeping to the right side of the road and the inevitable long waits because of congestion and accidents. In the Paris of the future the hovels have been cleared away from the bridges and there are separate beds in the hospitals where people now have hope of being cured. The gunpowder magazines are no longer a feature in sections of the city and the air is clear and breathable.

After his walk around Paris he is taken to various building where he sees the new government in action. The monarchy still exists, but presides over a democracy and bows to the will of the people, slavery has been abolished, Countries no longer have colonies and the catholic church has ceased to exist, people believe in a supreme being, but teaching is based on philosophy, rather than faith, atheists are given the cold shoulder and their appears to be a re-education programme, women support their husbands and their duties are in the home, but marriages are no longer arranged or made for social advancement.

The authors vision of Utopia does not stretch to any scientific inventions or predictions, but is a cleaner, healthier, democrat society based on equality with the major advances being in medicine, education and government. The book is therefore a critique of society in the 1770’s, with many of its barbs aimed at inequality, poor government and the corruption of the noble classes.

In 2440 the nobility and the rich are treated the same as everybody else:

“ They use their own legs and so have more money and less of the gout”

It is not a Utopia that we might subscribe to today even within its narrow confines, the most striking thing is obviously the inequality for women and their place in society, but there are other issues that we could not accept. Although freedom of the press is sacrosanct, there has been a revision in the world of the arts. All books that do not conform to the new societies culture and morals have been burnt and others where the literature is still considered worth keeping have been excised of all ideas that are considered abhorrent: Jean Jaques Rousseau is about the only author who has come through unscathed. Painting and other visual arts must have moral worth and poetry is most highly praised when it brings fresh light on society. They regard universal education as madness, each child is educated according to his station in life and the author is told that:

“We teach them little history, because history is the disgrace of humanity”

There are some interesting ideas and the writing can be lively. The version I read was a translation by W Hooper who says in his introduction:

“who the author of this work is we will not pretend to determine: perhaps the reader will be satisfied with finding that he is a man of sense, of taste, and learning, of a lively imagination, a strong spirit of liberty, and, what is worth them all a warm benevolence of heart”

An interesting find which I rate as 3.5 stars. ( )

First published in 1771 as L'An 2440, the title of Louis-Sebastien Mercier's utopian fantasy was edited to Memoirs of the Year Two Thousand Five Hundred when William Hooper's English translation was published at Philadelphia in 1795. This change was made simply "for the sake of a round number," according to the "Advertisement" preceding the text, as "there appears no reason for fixing it to any particular year." Extremely popular in its day (it is one of the books profiled by Robert Darnton in his The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France), the book employs many of what we now think of as typical utopian tropes: man wakes up and finds himself hundreds of years in the future, and spends an incredulous day walking around learning how things are done, and wakes up at the end to find it'd all been a dream. But, as Darnton points out, Mercier's work was one of the first to use these techniques, which were entirely fresh and new to his original readers. There's not much plot at all: the narrator is simply guided from place to place, learning how people are clothed, fed, educated, governed, &c. in the very Rousseau-ian society of far-future France. I found it a somewhat intriguing window into the historical moment, but unless you've got a real soft spot for heavy-handed utopian fiction, probably safe to give this one a miss. ( )

one copy available on amazon for 70.