The Time of Enlightenment: Constructing the Future in France, 1750 to Year One
Mar 27, 2023
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The Time of Enlightenment: Constructing the Future in France, 1750 to Year OneThis page intentionally left blank
The Time of Enlightenment
WILLIAM MAX NELSON
© University of Toronto Press 2021 Toronto Buffalo London utorontopress.com Printed in Canada
ISBN 978-1-4875-0770-1 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-4875-3678-7 (EPUB) ISBN 978-1-4875-3677-0 (PDF)
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: The time of enlightenment : constructing the future in France, 1750 to year one / William Max Nelson.
Names: Nelson, William Max, 1976– author. Description: Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200346431 | Canadiana (ebook)
20200346601 | ISBN 9781487507701 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781487536787 (EPUB) | ISBN 9781487536770 (PDF)
Subjects: LCSH: Enlightenment – France. | LCSH: Enlightenment – France – Influence. | LCSH: Forecasting – Social aspects – France – History – 18th century. | LCSH: Future, The – Social aspects – France – History – 18th century. | LCSH: Future, The – Philosophy. | LCSH: Philosophy, French – 18th century. | LCSH: France – Intellectual life – 18th century.
Classification: LCC B1925.E5 N45 2021 | DDC 194 – dc23
CC-BY-NC-ND This work is published subject to a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivative License. For permission to publish commercial versions please contact University of Toronto Press. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support from the University of Toronto Libraries in making the open access version of this title available.
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.
Funded by the Financé par le Government gouvernement
of Canada du Canada
2 Living the Future: Ideas of Progress and Uncanny
3 “The Explosion of Light”: The Economic Order and
4 Generating Time: Buffon and the Biological Instruments
5 The Time of Regeneration: Renewal, Rupture, and
the Laws of Nature 21
Temporality 37
of Futurity 95
Conclusion: Colonizing the Future 144
Notes 155
Index 215
Acknowledgments
Given the subject matter of this book, it is perhaps fitting that I devel- oped it over a long period in which I was able to see the historical change of both it and myself. One of the happy side effects of the temporality of this book is that it has allowed me to meet many new friends and colleagues, gain new family members, engage with interlocuters, and witness an explosion of scholarship on the history of time.
For reading and commenting on parts of this book at various stages of its development, I thank Anika Bavas, Francis Cody, Paul Cohen, Dan- iel Crosby, Andrew Curran, Catherine Desbarats, Nicholas Dew, Helen Dewar, Gustavo Garza, Anthony Grafton, Allan Greer, Karl Gunther, Jens Hanssen, Julie Hardwick, István Hont, Alexandra Hui, Lynn Hunt, Margaret Jacob, Eric Jennings, Madhavi Kale, Michael Kwass, Kevin Lambert, Mary Lindemann, Laura Mason, Kirstie McClure, Sarah Mor- timer, William O’Reilly, Anthony Pagden, Jason Pearl, Bhavani Raman, Peter Hanns Reill, Jacques Revel, Pernille Røge, Joshua Rosenblatt, Emma Rothschild, Mary Terrall, David Todd, Lilia Topouzova, Eliot Tretter, and M. Norton Wise. In addition, I have benefited from com- ments from seminar audiences at California Institute of Technology, Cambridge University, McGill University, UCLA, University of Miami, and Université de Montréal.
It was my great privilege to begin this project as a doctoral student supervised by Lynn Hunt. She was unfailingly supportive and encour- aging as an advisor, challenging and wise as a reader. Over the years, she has provided not only invaluable comments on my work but also an example of an ideal mentor. M. Norton Wise was also an important supporter of this project from the beginning; he introduced me to the tableau économique, and his early encouragement and guidance were critical. Anthony Pagden helped me grapple with the intellectual his- tory of the Enlightenment, and Mary Terrall aided me in my encounters
viii Acknowledgments
with eighteenth-century life sciences. I am grateful to Kirstie McClure for her theoretical acumen and insightful questions.
For financial support of this research, I thank the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the California Institute of Technology, the Centre for History and Economics (Magdalene College and King’s College, Cambridge University), the Council on Library and Information Resources, the Huntington Library, the Society for French Historical Studies, UCLA, and the University of Toronto.
I moved a number of times since this project began, one of the great benefits of which has been the opportunity to make so many new friends and colleagues along the way. From my time at Cambridge University, I am indebted to colleagues at the Centre for History and Economics and Trinity Hall, particularly Caitlin Anderson, Richard Baker, Mary-Rose Cheadle, Martin Daunton, Gareth Stedman Jones, Melissa Lane, Inga Huld Markan, James Montgomery, William O’Reilly, Gabriel Paquette, Pedro Ramos Pinto, Pernille Røge, Emma Rothschild, David Todd, and Sasha Turner. At the University of Miami, I’d like to thank Michael Ber- nath, Eduardo Elena, Karl Gunther, Mary Lindemann, Michael Miller, Kate Ramsey, Dominique Reill, Tim Watson, and Ashli White. From my time at the Institute for Historical Studies and the Department of His- tory at the University of Texas at Austin, I thank Benjamin Brower, Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Lina del Castillo, Judith Coffin, Venkat Dhulipala, Julie Hardwick, Philippa Levine, Tracie Matysik, Michelle Moyd, Rob- ert Olwell, Jim Sidbury, and Ellen Wu.
I am also beholden to all of my colleagues at the University of Toronto in the Department of Historical and Cultural Studies at UTSC and in the Graduate Department of History. For their professional support, friendship, and critical conversations, I am grateful to Paul Cohen, Rick Halpern, Jens Hanssen, Jennifer Jenkins, Eric Jennings, Russ Kazal, Thomas Lahusen, Bhavani Raman, Natalie Rothman, Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, and Lynne Viola. In other parts of the university, and Toronto more generally, I also thank Naisargi Dave, Boris Pantev, and Kenneth Rogers.
At the University of Toronto Press, it was a pleasure working with my editor Len Husband; I’m deeply thankful for his wise stewardship, use- ful suggestions, and unfailing support of the book. I also thank copy- editor Terry Teskey for her sharp eye and sensible suggestions, Leah Connor for her work overseeing production, and Sergey Lobachev for his work on the index.
For their love and support, I thank my parents Bill and Joan and my sister Anika. They all read the manuscript at various stages, though I
Acknowledgments ix
have so much more to thank them for than that. As well I thank newer family members Ven, Reni, Venci, Maggie, Denis, Maria, and David.
Finally, I am deeply grateful to my wife Lilia Topouzova, a true part- ner in life and thought. It has been a joy to share the fullness of the world with her. Whether we are exploring larger topics or experiencing the everyday, I am constantly renewed by being with her. Max Topou- zov Nelson came into the world during the writing of the book, and he also helped me see the world anew. I would like to thank them both for totally transforming my experience of time.
This page intentionally left blank
THE TIME OF ENLIGHTENMENT
This page intentionally left blank
Introduction
A comparison of three books about Paris published across the last three decades of the eighteenth century, all by the same French author, Louis- Sébastien Mercier, reveals striking examples of how far historical expe- rience during this period exceeded many people’s expectations about what the future would, and could, bring.1
In his bestselling book of 1771, Mercier wrote about a dream-like vision of Paris in which he found “broad and beautiful streets” and “encountered no carriages ready to flatten me.”2 These safer and more easily navigated streets presented such a contrast with Mercier’s famil- iar experience of Paris that he returned to this orderliness, safety, and efficiency several times in the book. He found that aristocrats were no longer able to ride in coaches, while sumptuary legislation outlawed the six-horsed luxury carriages sometimes driven by financiers, cour- tesans, and dandies trying to outdo the nobles. In this improved ver- sion of Paris, pedestrians moved freely and easily, since the only people allowed to move around the city by coach were those “distinguished by their public service and bent under the weight of old age.”3 “I no longer saw the ridiculous and revolting scene of a thousand coaches jammed together, remaining immobile for three hours,” Mercier wrote.4
Although these passages could be read as opening a small and rather modest window into the everyday experiences and annoyances of Pari- sians around 1770, read in light of the two other books by Mercier they reveal how imagination and expectation were constrained by historical circumstances and an inherited sense that the future would be funda- mentally like the past and present. In fact, these short passages about coaches speak profoundly of how people thought and felt about the future.
This is the case because L’an deux mille quatre cent quarante: Rêve s’il en fût jamais (The year two thousand four hundred and forty: A dream if
4 The Time of Enlightenment
there ever was one) was the first futurist novel, inaugurating the modern literary genre of “uchronia,” in which the story is set in a distant future rather than being displaced spatially into the imaginative nowhere of utopia. Mercier used the device of a narrator who fell asleep and woke up in 2440 to imagine what Paris might look like in this distant time.5
If Paris was not an enlightened place in 1771, but rather one in the pro- cess of enlightenment, then Mercier provided it a futuristic vision of the fulfilment of this process.6 The novel presented a vision of Paris in 2440 that was a realization of the hopes of the philosophes. Mercier’s Paris of 2440 was the fictional fulfilment of Enlightenment becoming, and there- fore the Paris of 2440 could be easily understood in the terms of 1771. In the roughly six hundred and fifty years that separated the real Paris from its futuristic double, the changes that occurred did not bring any real conceptual or experiential incommensurability. The narrator was surprised by the absences of coaches, but that could be easily explained and the reasons were understandable.
Though Mercier in this book envisioned some political and social developments that were more transformative than the new street life, the orderly streets relatively free of carriages can stand for the ways that Mercier’s representation of historical change over more than six hun- dred and fifty years of history was less disruptive and transformative than the actual history that Mercier himself lived through in the three decades that succeeded the publication of his uchronia. In fact, the dif- ference between the Paris of 1771 and that of 2440 was significantly less than the difference between the Paris of the 1780s and the Paris of 1798, the years in which Mercier published his next two books about Paris, both of which were presented as panoramic non-fiction works attentive to many aspects of the place and its people.7 Tableau de Paris (Panorama of Paris) was a pioneering urban ethnography attempting to render a dynamic and detailed picture of life in the city. Mercier published this vivid account in twelve volumes between 1781 and 1788, just before the momentous events of the French Revolution radically transformed Paris and very quickly made his book a relic of a lost world.8 In Le nouveau Paris (New Paris) of 1798, Mercier once more presented a wide- ranging and detailed account of the city and its inhabitants, but now had to account for the unforeseen breadth and depth of change that came about with the events of the Revolution.9
While Mercier’s France of 2440 had a senate and regularly conven- ing estates, it was still ruled by a king. There was some type of equality and a prophecy of slave revolt, but neither Paris in 2440 nor France more generally had anything as conceptually or experientially jarring as revolutionary regicide, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the
Introduction 5
Citizen, the abolishment of nobility and the end of “feudalism,” the vio- lence of The Terror and the civil war in the Vendée, the period of aggres- sive de-Christianization, the regenerative projects for creating the “new man,” or the creation of a Republican era that began time anew with the pronouncement of 1792 as Year I. Yet all of these had come to pass by the end of the eighteenth century.10
While Mercier’s futurist fiction and his different visions of Paris are not the subject of further analysis in this study, they do highlight several of the problems and challenges associated with studying eighteenth- century ideas of the future. Perhaps the most significant of these is the fact that eighteenth-century writing did not often explicitly address the future. The philosophes, for example, did not write much about time and the future as philosophical topics. While Mercier’s futurist fiction is an important historical development and a rare case of an extended work about the future, it gave little sense that the future would be, or could be, much different from the past and present. The popularity of L’an deux mille quatre cent quarante demonstrates that there was some appe- tite for thinking about, or through, time and the future, but it was a future that looked similar to the moment from which it sprang.
This book traces the emergence of an active orientation towards the future out of developments in the middle of the eighteenth century as philosophes began to formulate new ideas about historical progress, create explanations of how and why groups of people move through stages of historical development, and tried to address the many forms of degeneration that contemporaries felt plagued France. Specific mech- anisms for constructing the future first arose through the development of practices and instruments aimed at countering the types of degen- eration contemporaries thought they found all around them. In their attempts to regenerate a healthy natural state, however, Enlightenment philosophes seemed to offer the means to exceed previously recognized limits of transformation and create a future that was not merely a recu- peration of the past, but fundamentally different from it.
This book is also, therefore, about how this active orientation towards the future was a part of a new understanding of historical temporal- ity that was characterized by new relations between past, present, and future. As the future became something that could be constructed in the present so as to be fundamentally different from the past, a new sense of historical change and human agency developed. Surprisingly, this complex shift of temporal relations and the new differentiation of past, present, and future was constructed on a foundation of beliefs in the uniformity of nature, the similarity of historical experience, and the human ability to identify laws of nature. The supposed uniformity of
6 The Time of Enlightenment
nature and the regularity of natural laws provided the theoretical foun- dation for philosophes to attempt to gain control of the historical devel- opment of complex natural and social systems. Ideas of uniformity and historical similarity enabled differences to be produced as the French philosophes tried to gain greater control of time by developing tools and practices to influence the development of the future. More than mere hopefulness, a desire for improvement, or a belief in the inevitability of progress, the philosophes developed an active approach to construct- ing the future. The story of this development constitutes a significant yet still poorly understood innovation of the Enlightenment. In fact, it reveals a new way in which the period from roughly 1750 to the French revolutionaries’ declaration of Year I was important in the formation of modern European history.11 It was in this period, in France, that a new approach to the future came into existence through reflections on historical change and the development of modern biological, economic, and social engineering. With the emergence of these ideas and prac- tices, the idea of the future began to transform from something largely believed to be divinely predetermined and beyond significant human intervention into something that some believed could be dramatically affected through actions in the present.
In attempting to demonstrate how an active orientation towards the future emerged from a more passive approach to the worldly future, my work is an exercise in both historical ontology and historical epis- temology; that is, I am interested in how the future came into being as an object that could be constructed and how knowledge of this object transformed from a taken-for-granted practical knowledge of the con- structability of the future into an explicitly articulated and self-aware knowledge that the future could be constructed.12 The self-aware knowledge that humans could construct the future was not simply the banal recognition that human actions had effects that would manifest at a later time or that some things that occurred in the present would endure through time into the future. The sense in which I use “construc- tion” goes beyond this simple sense of “influence.” I want to emphasize the agency and actions of historical actors in an attempt to demonstrate how people developed an active orientation towards the future.13 This activeness was not simply characterized by anticipation. In fact, the active orientation may be differentiated from what came before it pre- cisely in the way that constructing the future is different from antici- pating the future. Anticipation is still ultimately passive because it is primarily reactive: the future is given and one must react according to its pre-established form and content. Construction, on the other hand, is active in the sense that one is not simply trying to create what might be
Introduction 7
as a reaction to what will be. In an active relationship to the future, one is trying to make what might be into what will be – to turn a contingent possibility into a necessary result. It is fundamentally an exertion of will into the future in an attempt to control the process of becoming in a similar way that one can control aspects of the present.
The recognition of the constructability of the future was the aware- ness that humans could change the course of the development of com- plex processes and systems – whether in the natural or social realms – and achieve a significant degree of control of their outcomes. These complex processes and systems could be as large scale as the growth of wealth in a nation’s economy or as specific and limited as the develop- ment of the offspring created by two individual animals.
If one judged Enlightenment thought based upon only explicitly articulated ideas about the future and its relation to historical tem- porality, it could seem like the philosophes did not imagine a radically different future because this was something that lay outside of, or on the extreme margins of, their conceptual landscape. This judgment seems to be supported by the fact that I have been able to find only one unambiguous example from the eighteenth century in which some- one specifically articulated the idea that the circumstances in the future would, or could, be so different that it was impossible to intellectu- ally and experientially grasp this difference. Writing about a utopian future state that he called “the state of morals,” the heterodox Bene- dictine abbé Légér-Marie Deschamps claimed that a radically different form of communal life would bring about radical changes in people. “Both physically and morally,” Deschamps wrote, “they would be what it is beyond me to render as it should be, because of the extreme differ- ence there would be in all regards between what they would be and what we are.”14 Deschamps worked tirelessly to convert philosophes to his utopian system, contacting…
The Time of Enlightenment
WILLIAM MAX NELSON
© University of Toronto Press 2021 Toronto Buffalo London utorontopress.com Printed in Canada
ISBN 978-1-4875-0770-1 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-4875-3678-7 (EPUB) ISBN 978-1-4875-3677-0 (PDF)
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: The time of enlightenment : constructing the future in France, 1750 to year one / William Max Nelson.
Names: Nelson, William Max, 1976– author. Description: Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200346431 | Canadiana (ebook)
20200346601 | ISBN 9781487507701 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781487536787 (EPUB) | ISBN 9781487536770 (PDF)
Subjects: LCSH: Enlightenment – France. | LCSH: Enlightenment – France – Influence. | LCSH: Forecasting – Social aspects – France – History – 18th century. | LCSH: Future, The – Social aspects – France – History – 18th century. | LCSH: Future, The – Philosophy. | LCSH: Philosophy, French – 18th century. | LCSH: France – Intellectual life – 18th century.
Classification: LCC B1925.E5 N45 2021 | DDC 194 – dc23
CC-BY-NC-ND This work is published subject to a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivative License. For permission to publish commercial versions please contact University of Toronto Press. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support from the University of Toronto Libraries in making the open access version of this title available.
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.
Funded by the Financé par le Government gouvernement
of Canada du Canada
2 Living the Future: Ideas of Progress and Uncanny
3 “The Explosion of Light”: The Economic Order and
4 Generating Time: Buffon and the Biological Instruments
5 The Time of Regeneration: Renewal, Rupture, and
the Laws of Nature 21
Temporality 37
of Futurity 95
Conclusion: Colonizing the Future 144
Notes 155
Index 215
Acknowledgments
Given the subject matter of this book, it is perhaps fitting that I devel- oped it over a long period in which I was able to see the historical change of both it and myself. One of the happy side effects of the temporality of this book is that it has allowed me to meet many new friends and colleagues, gain new family members, engage with interlocuters, and witness an explosion of scholarship on the history of time.
For reading and commenting on parts of this book at various stages of its development, I thank Anika Bavas, Francis Cody, Paul Cohen, Dan- iel Crosby, Andrew Curran, Catherine Desbarats, Nicholas Dew, Helen Dewar, Gustavo Garza, Anthony Grafton, Allan Greer, Karl Gunther, Jens Hanssen, Julie Hardwick, István Hont, Alexandra Hui, Lynn Hunt, Margaret Jacob, Eric Jennings, Madhavi Kale, Michael Kwass, Kevin Lambert, Mary Lindemann, Laura Mason, Kirstie McClure, Sarah Mor- timer, William O’Reilly, Anthony Pagden, Jason Pearl, Bhavani Raman, Peter Hanns Reill, Jacques Revel, Pernille Røge, Joshua Rosenblatt, Emma Rothschild, Mary Terrall, David Todd, Lilia Topouzova, Eliot Tretter, and M. Norton Wise. In addition, I have benefited from com- ments from seminar audiences at California Institute of Technology, Cambridge University, McGill University, UCLA, University of Miami, and Université de Montréal.
It was my great privilege to begin this project as a doctoral student supervised by Lynn Hunt. She was unfailingly supportive and encour- aging as an advisor, challenging and wise as a reader. Over the years, she has provided not only invaluable comments on my work but also an example of an ideal mentor. M. Norton Wise was also an important supporter of this project from the beginning; he introduced me to the tableau économique, and his early encouragement and guidance were critical. Anthony Pagden helped me grapple with the intellectual his- tory of the Enlightenment, and Mary Terrall aided me in my encounters
viii Acknowledgments
with eighteenth-century life sciences. I am grateful to Kirstie McClure for her theoretical acumen and insightful questions.
For financial support of this research, I thank the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the California Institute of Technology, the Centre for History and Economics (Magdalene College and King’s College, Cambridge University), the Council on Library and Information Resources, the Huntington Library, the Society for French Historical Studies, UCLA, and the University of Toronto.
I moved a number of times since this project began, one of the great benefits of which has been the opportunity to make so many new friends and colleagues along the way. From my time at Cambridge University, I am indebted to colleagues at the Centre for History and Economics and Trinity Hall, particularly Caitlin Anderson, Richard Baker, Mary-Rose Cheadle, Martin Daunton, Gareth Stedman Jones, Melissa Lane, Inga Huld Markan, James Montgomery, William O’Reilly, Gabriel Paquette, Pedro Ramos Pinto, Pernille Røge, Emma Rothschild, David Todd, and Sasha Turner. At the University of Miami, I’d like to thank Michael Ber- nath, Eduardo Elena, Karl Gunther, Mary Lindemann, Michael Miller, Kate Ramsey, Dominique Reill, Tim Watson, and Ashli White. From my time at the Institute for Historical Studies and the Department of His- tory at the University of Texas at Austin, I thank Benjamin Brower, Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Lina del Castillo, Judith Coffin, Venkat Dhulipala, Julie Hardwick, Philippa Levine, Tracie Matysik, Michelle Moyd, Rob- ert Olwell, Jim Sidbury, and Ellen Wu.
I am also beholden to all of my colleagues at the University of Toronto in the Department of Historical and Cultural Studies at UTSC and in the Graduate Department of History. For their professional support, friendship, and critical conversations, I am grateful to Paul Cohen, Rick Halpern, Jens Hanssen, Jennifer Jenkins, Eric Jennings, Russ Kazal, Thomas Lahusen, Bhavani Raman, Natalie Rothman, Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, and Lynne Viola. In other parts of the university, and Toronto more generally, I also thank Naisargi Dave, Boris Pantev, and Kenneth Rogers.
At the University of Toronto Press, it was a pleasure working with my editor Len Husband; I’m deeply thankful for his wise stewardship, use- ful suggestions, and unfailing support of the book. I also thank copy- editor Terry Teskey for her sharp eye and sensible suggestions, Leah Connor for her work overseeing production, and Sergey Lobachev for his work on the index.
For their love and support, I thank my parents Bill and Joan and my sister Anika. They all read the manuscript at various stages, though I
Acknowledgments ix
have so much more to thank them for than that. As well I thank newer family members Ven, Reni, Venci, Maggie, Denis, Maria, and David.
Finally, I am deeply grateful to my wife Lilia Topouzova, a true part- ner in life and thought. It has been a joy to share the fullness of the world with her. Whether we are exploring larger topics or experiencing the everyday, I am constantly renewed by being with her. Max Topou- zov Nelson came into the world during the writing of the book, and he also helped me see the world anew. I would like to thank them both for totally transforming my experience of time.
This page intentionally left blank
THE TIME OF ENLIGHTENMENT
This page intentionally left blank
Introduction
A comparison of three books about Paris published across the last three decades of the eighteenth century, all by the same French author, Louis- Sébastien Mercier, reveals striking examples of how far historical expe- rience during this period exceeded many people’s expectations about what the future would, and could, bring.1
In his bestselling book of 1771, Mercier wrote about a dream-like vision of Paris in which he found “broad and beautiful streets” and “encountered no carriages ready to flatten me.”2 These safer and more easily navigated streets presented such a contrast with Mercier’s famil- iar experience of Paris that he returned to this orderliness, safety, and efficiency several times in the book. He found that aristocrats were no longer able to ride in coaches, while sumptuary legislation outlawed the six-horsed luxury carriages sometimes driven by financiers, cour- tesans, and dandies trying to outdo the nobles. In this improved ver- sion of Paris, pedestrians moved freely and easily, since the only people allowed to move around the city by coach were those “distinguished by their public service and bent under the weight of old age.”3 “I no longer saw the ridiculous and revolting scene of a thousand coaches jammed together, remaining immobile for three hours,” Mercier wrote.4
Although these passages could be read as opening a small and rather modest window into the everyday experiences and annoyances of Pari- sians around 1770, read in light of the two other books by Mercier they reveal how imagination and expectation were constrained by historical circumstances and an inherited sense that the future would be funda- mentally like the past and present. In fact, these short passages about coaches speak profoundly of how people thought and felt about the future.
This is the case because L’an deux mille quatre cent quarante: Rêve s’il en fût jamais (The year two thousand four hundred and forty: A dream if
4 The Time of Enlightenment
there ever was one) was the first futurist novel, inaugurating the modern literary genre of “uchronia,” in which the story is set in a distant future rather than being displaced spatially into the imaginative nowhere of utopia. Mercier used the device of a narrator who fell asleep and woke up in 2440 to imagine what Paris might look like in this distant time.5
If Paris was not an enlightened place in 1771, but rather one in the pro- cess of enlightenment, then Mercier provided it a futuristic vision of the fulfilment of this process.6 The novel presented a vision of Paris in 2440 that was a realization of the hopes of the philosophes. Mercier’s Paris of 2440 was the fictional fulfilment of Enlightenment becoming, and there- fore the Paris of 2440 could be easily understood in the terms of 1771. In the roughly six hundred and fifty years that separated the real Paris from its futuristic double, the changes that occurred did not bring any real conceptual or experiential incommensurability. The narrator was surprised by the absences of coaches, but that could be easily explained and the reasons were understandable.
Though Mercier in this book envisioned some political and social developments that were more transformative than the new street life, the orderly streets relatively free of carriages can stand for the ways that Mercier’s representation of historical change over more than six hun- dred and fifty years of history was less disruptive and transformative than the actual history that Mercier himself lived through in the three decades that succeeded the publication of his uchronia. In fact, the dif- ference between the Paris of 1771 and that of 2440 was significantly less than the difference between the Paris of the 1780s and the Paris of 1798, the years in which Mercier published his next two books about Paris, both of which were presented as panoramic non-fiction works attentive to many aspects of the place and its people.7 Tableau de Paris (Panorama of Paris) was a pioneering urban ethnography attempting to render a dynamic and detailed picture of life in the city. Mercier published this vivid account in twelve volumes between 1781 and 1788, just before the momentous events of the French Revolution radically transformed Paris and very quickly made his book a relic of a lost world.8 In Le nouveau Paris (New Paris) of 1798, Mercier once more presented a wide- ranging and detailed account of the city and its inhabitants, but now had to account for the unforeseen breadth and depth of change that came about with the events of the Revolution.9
While Mercier’s France of 2440 had a senate and regularly conven- ing estates, it was still ruled by a king. There was some type of equality and a prophecy of slave revolt, but neither Paris in 2440 nor France more generally had anything as conceptually or experientially jarring as revolutionary regicide, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the
Introduction 5
Citizen, the abolishment of nobility and the end of “feudalism,” the vio- lence of The Terror and the civil war in the Vendée, the period of aggres- sive de-Christianization, the regenerative projects for creating the “new man,” or the creation of a Republican era that began time anew with the pronouncement of 1792 as Year I. Yet all of these had come to pass by the end of the eighteenth century.10
While Mercier’s futurist fiction and his different visions of Paris are not the subject of further analysis in this study, they do highlight several of the problems and challenges associated with studying eighteenth- century ideas of the future. Perhaps the most significant of these is the fact that eighteenth-century writing did not often explicitly address the future. The philosophes, for example, did not write much about time and the future as philosophical topics. While Mercier’s futurist fiction is an important historical development and a rare case of an extended work about the future, it gave little sense that the future would be, or could be, much different from the past and present. The popularity of L’an deux mille quatre cent quarante demonstrates that there was some appe- tite for thinking about, or through, time and the future, but it was a future that looked similar to the moment from which it sprang.
This book traces the emergence of an active orientation towards the future out of developments in the middle of the eighteenth century as philosophes began to formulate new ideas about historical progress, create explanations of how and why groups of people move through stages of historical development, and tried to address the many forms of degeneration that contemporaries felt plagued France. Specific mech- anisms for constructing the future first arose through the development of practices and instruments aimed at countering the types of degen- eration contemporaries thought they found all around them. In their attempts to regenerate a healthy natural state, however, Enlightenment philosophes seemed to offer the means to exceed previously recognized limits of transformation and create a future that was not merely a recu- peration of the past, but fundamentally different from it.
This book is also, therefore, about how this active orientation towards the future was a part of a new understanding of historical temporal- ity that was characterized by new relations between past, present, and future. As the future became something that could be constructed in the present so as to be fundamentally different from the past, a new sense of historical change and human agency developed. Surprisingly, this complex shift of temporal relations and the new differentiation of past, present, and future was constructed on a foundation of beliefs in the uniformity of nature, the similarity of historical experience, and the human ability to identify laws of nature. The supposed uniformity of
6 The Time of Enlightenment
nature and the regularity of natural laws provided the theoretical foun- dation for philosophes to attempt to gain control of the historical devel- opment of complex natural and social systems. Ideas of uniformity and historical similarity enabled differences to be produced as the French philosophes tried to gain greater control of time by developing tools and practices to influence the development of the future. More than mere hopefulness, a desire for improvement, or a belief in the inevitability of progress, the philosophes developed an active approach to construct- ing the future. The story of this development constitutes a significant yet still poorly understood innovation of the Enlightenment. In fact, it reveals a new way in which the period from roughly 1750 to the French revolutionaries’ declaration of Year I was important in the formation of modern European history.11 It was in this period, in France, that a new approach to the future came into existence through reflections on historical change and the development of modern biological, economic, and social engineering. With the emergence of these ideas and prac- tices, the idea of the future began to transform from something largely believed to be divinely predetermined and beyond significant human intervention into something that some believed could be dramatically affected through actions in the present.
In attempting to demonstrate how an active orientation towards the future emerged from a more passive approach to the worldly future, my work is an exercise in both historical ontology and historical epis- temology; that is, I am interested in how the future came into being as an object that could be constructed and how knowledge of this object transformed from a taken-for-granted practical knowledge of the con- structability of the future into an explicitly articulated and self-aware knowledge that the future could be constructed.12 The self-aware knowledge that humans could construct the future was not simply the banal recognition that human actions had effects that would manifest at a later time or that some things that occurred in the present would endure through time into the future. The sense in which I use “construc- tion” goes beyond this simple sense of “influence.” I want to emphasize the agency and actions of historical actors in an attempt to demonstrate how people developed an active orientation towards the future.13 This activeness was not simply characterized by anticipation. In fact, the active orientation may be differentiated from what came before it pre- cisely in the way that constructing the future is different from antici- pating the future. Anticipation is still ultimately passive because it is primarily reactive: the future is given and one must react according to its pre-established form and content. Construction, on the other hand, is active in the sense that one is not simply trying to create what might be
Introduction 7
as a reaction to what will be. In an active relationship to the future, one is trying to make what might be into what will be – to turn a contingent possibility into a necessary result. It is fundamentally an exertion of will into the future in an attempt to control the process of becoming in a similar way that one can control aspects of the present.
The recognition of the constructability of the future was the aware- ness that humans could change the course of the development of com- plex processes and systems – whether in the natural or social realms – and achieve a significant degree of control of their outcomes. These complex processes and systems could be as large scale as the growth of wealth in a nation’s economy or as specific and limited as the develop- ment of the offspring created by two individual animals.
If one judged Enlightenment thought based upon only explicitly articulated ideas about the future and its relation to historical tem- porality, it could seem like the philosophes did not imagine a radically different future because this was something that lay outside of, or on the extreme margins of, their conceptual landscape. This judgment seems to be supported by the fact that I have been able to find only one unambiguous example from the eighteenth century in which some- one specifically articulated the idea that the circumstances in the future would, or could, be so different that it was impossible to intellectu- ally and experientially grasp this difference. Writing about a utopian future state that he called “the state of morals,” the heterodox Bene- dictine abbé Légér-Marie Deschamps claimed that a radically different form of communal life would bring about radical changes in people. “Both physically and morally,” Deschamps wrote, “they would be what it is beyond me to render as it should be, because of the extreme differ- ence there would be in all regards between what they would be and what we are.”14 Deschamps worked tirelessly to convert philosophes to his utopian system, contacting…
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