A group of French artists came together in 1899 to depict their vision of life in the year 2000 in a series of illustrated trade cards. At once beautiful and bizarre, the artists’ predictions play the expectations of our predecessors against real-world progress with fascinating results.
En L’An 2000 (In the Year 2000) was a collaboration between artists led by the French illustrator Jean-Marc Côté in which each artist was tasked with imagining what France would look like in 100 years. At least 87 pictures were produced, according to Captaloona Art, and while some of the artists’ visions seem outrageous, some are remarkably on the nose, reflecting real-world technological advances that we recognize today.
The novelist Christopher Hyde found and purchased the series in Parisian store, Editions Renaud, 50 years later, and he eventually shared the cards with the American science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov, reported Artnet News.
Flying firefighters and airborne law enforcement make for fanciful images, as do “divers on horseback” and underwater croquet parties. Roller skaters, electric cleaning apparatus, and classroom learning through headphones—although without books being blended and their contents siphoned into students’ ears—have really come to fruition, and an image depicting “intensive breeding” is an eerie foreshadowing of modern intensive farming practices.
Two huge advances from the last century that the trade cards missed are space travel and personal computers. Even futuristic machines that didn’t exist in 1900 were depicted using 19th-century mechanical features such as chains, wheels, and levers.
Another amusing observation is that while the artists rendered some wild advances in technology, no changes were made to clothing—even a diver wears an ankle-length dress—reiterating the theory that what is unknown is unthinkable.
