Utopies et catastrophe, Revers et renaissances de l’utopie (XVIe–XXIe siècles) [Utopias and Catastrophe. Reversals and Revivals (16th-21st centuries)] ed. by Jean-Paul Engélibert and Raphaëlle Guidée (review)

This first-rate collection of essays in French stems from several international colloquia organized by a joint research program on utopia and catastrophe at the universities of Bordeaux-Montaigne and Poitiers between 2011 and 2013. Globally, as the title of Jean-Paul Engélibert and Raphaelle Guidée's excellent introduction ("Actualité de l'utopie," 7–21) makes immediately clear, the volume questions and refutes the depreciation of utopia expressed (and analyzed) frequently in the last decades: the contemporary propensity to point, if not to the death of utopia, to the flourishing of dystopias since the nineteenth century and the view that utopias themselves are the root cause of most twentieth-century crises and catastrophes.

The first section is dedicated to the ambivalence of utopia from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. Five essays have no difficulty proving that a skeptical if not outright dystopian dimension was already embedded or implied within utopia from an early period on. Jean-Michel Racault ("Utopie et utopisme, catastrophe et catastrophisme dans les littératures des XVII^e et XVIII^e siècles," 25–42) paves the way in providing a valuable theoretical framework and a set of definitions of, among others, the broad meaning of the relatively new term catastrophe. He then proposes to distinguish between utopias that promote a positive type of catastrophism—a disruption deemed necessary to accomplish either a divine plan or the course of history (e.g., in Campanella, Montesquieu, or Deschamps)—and utopias that depict a negative type—where the ideal society is deemed incompatible with humanity or becomes unbearable itself (as in Foigny's 1676 Terre australe connue, among others). Izabella Zatorska's contribution ("Utopiser en catastrophe. Utopie et colonisation, XVI^e–XVIII^e siècles," 43–52) provides an equally useful reminder that most early modern ideal societies are founded on violence. Colonization is best exemplified in the unabashed massacres perpetrated by Fontenelle's Ajaoian philosophes, but, as is also argued here, Foigny's hermaphrodites are no strangers to extermination. By this point one cannot fail to notice that Foigny's La Terre australe provides much food for thought in this opening part of the volume. Indeed his imaginary journey is central to Catherine Gobert's thought-provoking essay ("Une utopie catastrophique," 53–71). As she argues, in spite of seemingly prelapsarian characteristics, the Fall from Eden structures the hermaphrodites' conception of half-men, their condemnation of sensuality, and their suicide. A mostly ironic and dystopian reading of La Terre australe is also part of Nicolas Correard's finely crafted comparative analysis of Foigny's text with Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726) and Holberg's Iter Subterraneum (1742); as Correard points out ("Idéal de la raison, catastrophe de la raison: Utopisme et scepticisme chez Foigny, Swift et Holberg," 73–93), the three writers portray Reason as the very source of the catastrophes that it seeks to remedy, and their denunciation of its excesses should be recognized as one of the skeptical tenets of the early modern anti-utopian tradition. Didier Coste then shows ("De l'ambiguïté allochtonique: Casanova et Aurobindo," 95–108) how catastrophe frames not only the beginning but the end of Casanova's Icosameron (1788), the monumental depiction of a prelapsarian subterranean world whose accidental discovery and progressive colonization by Europeans are finally brought to an emblematic, explosive conclusion. One regret here: the parallel with Sri Aurobindo's epic poem Savitri (1950–51) is tantalizing but all too brief. On the positive side, the very focus on Casanova makes for a fitting transition to the second part of the volume.

The seven chapters in that section are...