L'An 2440, rêve s'il en fut jamais (literally, in English, The Year 2440: A Dream If Ever There Was One; but the title has been rendered into English as Memoirs of the Year Two Thousand Five Hundred or Memoirs of the Year 2500, and also as Astraea's Return, or The Halcyon Days of France in the Year 2440: A Dream) is a 1771 novel by Louis-Sébastien Mercier.
It has been described as one of the most popular and controversial novels of the 18th century, one of the earliest works of science fiction, and the first work of utopian fiction set in the future rather than at a distant place in the present.
Plot
The novel describes the adventures of an unnamed man who, after engaging in a heated discussion with a philosopher friend about the injustices of Paris, falls asleep and finds himself in a Paris several centuries into the future. He wanders through the changed city, eventually ending up in the ruins of the Palace of Versailles. Mercier's hero notes everything that catches his fancy in this futuristic Paris. Public space and the justice system have been reorganized. Citizens' garb is comfortable and practical. Hospitals are effective and science-based. There are no monks, priests, prostitutes, beggars, dancing masters (i.e., dance teachers), pastry chefs, standing armies, slavery, arbitrary arrest, taxes, guilds, foreign trade, coffee, tea, or tobacco: such occupations, institutions, and products have been adjudged to be useless and immoral – as has much previously written literature, which has been willingly destroyed by the future librarians, who proudly display their library, reduced to a single room of only the most valuable works.
Written only 18 years before the French Revolution of 1789, the book describes a future secular, pacifist France that has been established through a peaceful revolution led by a "philosopher-king" who has set up a system resembling a parliamentary monarchy. The future utopian, egalitarian France is portrayed as having no religion and no military.
Editions and translations
Everett C. Wilkie Jr. notes that there have been many misstatements concerning the novel's publication history and Mercier's bibliography in general.
According to Evelyn L. Forget, Mercier finished the first manuscript in 1768, though Wilkie writes that parts of the book clearly date to 1770, as they reference events of that year. Sources also vary as to the year of the book's first edition, citing 1770 or 1771. Wilkie writes it might have been "pulled off the press so late in 1770 that it was dated 1771, the year it was actually sold", but "despite evidence to the contrary [as no known edition dating to 1770 has been found], scholarly practice has made the supposed 1770 edition of this novel an enduring bibliographical ghost". The confusion is partly the fault of Mercier himself, who at different times gave both dates as the year of the first edition's publication. Wilkie concludes that the only fact that Mercier was consistent about is that the first edition was published in Amsterdam by E. van Harrevelt, and existing evidence strongly favors 1771 – probably the summer – as the correct date of publication.
Due to its controversial criticism of the Ancien Régime and portrayal of a secular future, the novel was at first published illicitly, appearing anonymously, smuggled into France, and sold by underground booksellers. It was banned in France; in Spain by the Inquisition in 1778, supposedly burned by the Spanish king himself; and by the Holy See in 1773, placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. Nevertheless, it quickly became an underground bestseller in France, with over twenty editions during Mercier's lifetime, as well as a number of translations abroad, with many unauthorized and sometimes altered editions. It has been described as "one of the eighteenth century's most successful books" and "one of the most controversial", with an estimated 60,000 copies in several languages printed during that time, provoking a gamut of contemporary evaluations. By the late 1770s Mercier admitted his authorship of the novel, and his name finally appeared in the 1791 edition, after the fall of the Ancien Régime; due to Mercier's late admission of authorship, some early versions were attributed to Rousseau or to Voltaire.