Future Tense: The Culture of Anticipation in France Between the Wars (review)

Given the recent fascination of historians of modern France with sites of memory, it must have seemed like a clever idea to focus on visions of the future in the 1920s and 1930s, and in many respects such a study offered promising possibilities. But as every tennis player knows, there is often many a slip between the idea and its execution, and that turns out to be the case in Roxanne Panchasi’s brief but dense study.

After informing us, a bit misleadingly, that her book is an “experiment in the history of ‘the future,’” Panchasi goes on in her introduction to argue that Future Tense “rests on the premise that the future anticipated at a particular historical moment can tell us a great deal about the cultural preoccupations and political perspectives of the present doing the anticipating, in this case the interwar years in France” (4). More interesting than this claim, to which I think no one would object, is her observation that the visions of the future she explores all expressed “a nostalgic longing for French values and cultural phenomena that had not yet disappeared (5). I should add that the heavy and at times surprising use of italics is one of the characteristics of Panchasi’s writing.

The five chapters that follow examine five themes: the human body; the rebuilding of Paris; the French border with Germany; the threat represented to French civilisation by the United States; and the threat represented to the French language by English and Esperanto. Throughout the book, Panchasi tells us, she plans to use the concept of “cultural prosthesis,” which we encounter in the first chapter in the form of the prosthetic rehabilitation of soldiers returning from the First World War. I confess that having read the book very carefully, I have only the vaguest notion what Panchasi means by “cultural prosthesis.” In any case, it permits her to construct an initial chapter in which she connects the prosthetic rehabilitation of mutilated soldiers returning from the First World War, the introduction to French households of mechanized appliances, and the design of furniture by Le Corbusier and other lesser know figures. By any standard, this is something of a conceptual leap. Returning to the notion of “cultural prosthesis,” Panchasi ends the chapter by asserting that by taking this idea as the model for the relationship between humans and the machine, the people she had discussed “suggested the eventual disappearance of the very humanity they purported to reinforce and improve” (42).

The second chapter takes up a topic that appears quite promising: the city of the future. Most of us know that Le Corbusier had ambitious plans for the rebuilding of Paris. Why he thought that Paris, which was considered by many to be the most beautiful city in Europe and was largely untouched by the war, was in need of massive rebuilding is another issue; but it is useful to remember that he wanted to replace a city that had been built horizontally with skyscrapers. One can only sigh with relief that he failed. Most curiously of all, Le Corbusier, for reasons Panchasi never explains, thought that skyscrapers would protect Paris from destruction in the coming air war, which was a common topic of discussion in the 1930s.

Concerns about air attack lead quite naturally to Panchasi’s next topic: how to respond to anticipated threats to the security of France, primarily if not exclusively from a resurgent Germany. The response, was the decision in 1929 to build the Maginot Line. This, of course, is well trodden historical ground. Relating the decision to build the Maginot Line along the eastern frontier and the debate that it inspired to her concept of “cultural prosthesis,” Panchasi claims that in wartime propaganda “the physical suffering of the nation’s bodies and the physical invasion and occupation of the national body were inextricably linked from 1914 to 1918” (82). I confess that despite having...