A War of Sensibilities: Recovering Henri Barbot’s Paris en feu (Ignis ardens)

In a wild combination of science fiction and religious mysticism, Henri Barbot’s novel Paris en feu (Ignis ardens) predicted in July 1914 a war of Zeppelins and radio waves with Germany. While Barbot’s contemporaries imagined this scenario as a prophesy of the Great War that broke out only a few weeks after the publication of his novel, we should see in this text a subtler commentary on a change in French society accelerated by WWI. Paris en feu is unique in its preview of the war’s displacement of French identity away from a historical and political context, to a primarily affective one.