Around the turn of the twentieth century, French artists were asked to picture daily life in the year 2000. The result was En L'An 2000 ("In the Year 2000"), a series of at least 78 small colour cards printed in 1899, 1900, 1901 and 1910. Jean-Marc Côté is the best-known artist behind them, though others contributed. The cards were first produced as inserts for cigar boxes and later as picture postcards, which, according to most accounts, were never distributed.
For decades they were almost forgotten. The only known set ended up with the science writer Isaac Asimov, who reproduced them with his own commentary in Futuredays: A Nineteenth Century Vision of the Year 2000 (1986). Today they circulate widely online thanks to collections such as The Public Domain Review.
What makes them so enjoyable is the mix of insight and charm. The artists guessed that machines would take over tedious work, that flight would become ordinary and that information might travel by wire. Yet the people in the pictures still wear Belle Époque clothes, keep the same jobs and live in the same social order. Below is each card in this collection, with what it shows and how it compares with the real year 2000.
School, work and the home
At School. A teacher feeds books into a grinding machine while a pupil turns the crank. Wires carry the "processed" knowledge to headsets on each student's head. It is the most quoted card in the set because it seems to foresee e-learning and audiobooks, yet it also shows a very passive idea of learning, with the children simply receiving information. The picture at the top of this article is another scan of the same card, without the printed title; small differences in colour and cropping come from different surviving copies.
The New-Fangled Barber. A customer sits still while mechanical arms shave and comb him, controlled by an attendant at a panel of switches. Automated barbers never really caught on, but the image captures a theme that runs through the series: electricity and machinery handling personal services.
A Very Busy Farmer. The farmer sits at a control box, working machines across his fields by remote control while power lines stretch to the horizon. Compared with many cards, this one aged well: modern farms use GPS-guided tractors, sensors and automated irrigation, though the farmer is rarely quite so relaxed.
A House Rolling Through the Countryside. A two-storey house with a roof garden travels along a country road on wheels, smoke rising from its chimney. It reads like a grand ancestor of the motorhome. Camper vans and caravans did become common in the twentieth century, if rarely with a balcony.
Flying everywhere
Aerial Firemen. Firefighters with bat-like wings swoop around a burning building, aiming hoses at the flames and rescuing residents. Personal wings never became practical, but helicopters and aerial firefighting aircraft took over some of the job the artist imagined.
The Rural Postman. A postman pedals a small winged machine and hands a letter to a man leaning from an upper-floor window. Delivery by air is now being tested with drones in several countries, so this card looks more prophetic than it did a few decades ago.
Aviation Police. A winged officer grabs a fleeing figure in mid-air above a city skyline while other flying machines buzz past. Police forces did eventually take to the air, though with helicopters and, more recently, drones rather than personal wings.
An Aerial Battle. An armed airship and winged craft fight above a sea where warships exchange fire. Unlike the playful cards, this one proved grimly accurate: within fifteen years of the first printing, aircraft were fighting over Europe in the First World War.
City life and leisure
Aero-Cab Station. Small one-person flying cabs land on a raised platform marked "Aero-Cabs" above a busy street. The idea of air taxis has never gone away, and companies are still developing electric vertical take-off aircraft for city hops more than a century later.
Fishing for Seagulls. Divers in helmets swim underwater with lines that reach to the surface, using fish as bait to catch the birds above. It is a whimsical role reversal, but the diving gear is worth noticing: practical scuba equipment arrived in the 1940s and opened underwater sport to millions.
A Croquet Party. Elegantly dressed players in diving helmets play croquet on the sea floor while fish drift by. The card says more about its own time than about the future. Croquet was a fashionable pastime, and the artist simply moved it to a new setting without changing the dress or the manners.
What the artists got right, and what they missed
Seen from today, the cards blend clever guesses with blind spots. The artists were good at imagining machines that would do existing tasks faster: shaving, farming, delivering post, putting out fires. They were much less able to imagine new kinds of work, new social roles or new technologies with no clear Victorian equivalent. There are no computers here, no television, no antibiotics, and almost every working figure is a man.
It is also worth correcting a common misreading. These images were not made in a pre-industrial world. France in 1899 already had railways, factories, electric lighting and early cars, and the first cards appeared only a few years before the Wright brothers' first powered flight in 1903. The artists were extending the technologies they could already see, which is exactly why the future they drew looks like a busier version of their own present.
Why these old futures still matter
Looking back at past predictions is a useful exercise for thinking about our own. Today's forecasts of robot workers, flying taxis and AI tutors may look just as dated in a hundred years, and probably for the same reasons. We tend to picture tomorrow's gadgets in today's clothes and today's social arrangements.
The cards also remind us that technology alone does not decide what a future feels like. The classroom card shows wired learning, but not whether pupils enjoy it. The farmer card shows automation, but not who owns the land. Those human questions are still the hardest to predict.
If you were drawing life in 2126, what would you include, and what would you be likely to leave unchanged without noticing?
For a modern artist who turns everyday objects into imagined spacecraft, see Eric Geusz Turns Household Shapes Into Spaceship Art.
Sources: En L'An 2000 (Wikipedia); The Public Domain Review: France in the Year 2000 (1899-1910); First shared by Collective Evolution.
More from the archive:
- These 30+ Street Art Images Testify Uncomfortable Truths
- Smartphone Cartoons About Attention and Conversation
- Toby Morris' On a Plate Comic Explores Privilege
- Twenty-Nine Social Satire Illustrations by Paweł Kuczyński
- Disturbing (But Amazing) Pictures Expose The Absurdities Of Modern Culture *Warning: Graphic Images*
- Human–Animal Role Reversals in Ethical Cartoons
- A Short Comic About Love and Everyday Care
- John Lennon’s Imagine in Comic Form
- A Reflection on Choices, Consequences and Comparison
- The Pen Is Mightier Than The Sword: 28 Cartoonists Pay Tribute To The Victims Of The Charlie Hebdo Shooting
- Arab Newspapers React To ‘Charlie Hebdo’ Attacks With Cartoons Of Their Own
- Korean Artist Puuung Captures What Real Love Looks Like
- Western Fairy Tales Get an Eastern Makeover by Korean Artist Na Young Wu
- Lauren Wade's Retouched Paintings Question Beauty Standards
- Thirty Pencil Drawings That Create an Illusion of Depth
COMMENTS