Three French futures: Australia, Antartica and Ailleurs.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Author: Dutton, Jacqueline
• Date: 22 September 2005

Towards the end of 2005, the international spotlight was focused on France, exposing images of burning cars, bombs in the banlieues, curfews and convictions in the land of 'Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite'. (1) The outbreak of three weeks of 'violences urbaines' followed the death by electrocution of two adolescents and the serious injury of a third, who were allegedly taking refuge from police pursuit in a power station in Clichy-sous-bois on the night of 27 October 2005. Their apparent persecution as representatives of the oppressed migrant underclass in French society became a catalyst for the revolutionary events that ensued, expressing the frustration and indignation that have been gathering momentum in the cites and banlieues over the past decade or so. Rioting and violence directed at the ambulance and fire brigades, police, public property and private vehicles quickly spread from the Parisian suburb of Clichy-sous-bois to Seine-Saint-Denis and then to Evreux, Saint-Etienne, Toulouse and Lille, and by early November the whole of France was in a state of emergency, provoking recourse to the 1955 law allowing the imposition of a curfew, which came into force on 7 November in threatened areas. When the crisis finally began to subside, and the return to a normal situation was declared by the national police on 17 November, preliminary figures showed over 9000 cars burnt, dozens of public buildings--including schools, warehouses and commercial centres--destroyed, and almost 3000 arrests made by the 11 000 police mobilized to control the situation. The monetary cost of the damage has been estimated at over 200 million Euros, (2) but the social and political cost to France is more difficult to measure.

Before, during and after the events, the Minister for the Interior and President of the UMP, Nicolas Sarkozy, only seemed to add fuel to the fire(s), with his derogatory remarks about the 'racaille' (scum) that needed to be eradicated from the suburbs, and the subsequent tightening of restrictions in the surveillance state of 'zero tolerance'. His comments and actions provoked outcry from all quarters of the French population, including French filmmaker Mathieu Kassovitz whose film La Haine brought the issues of the banlieues to the big screen in 1995. Refusing many requests for press interviews, he spoke out against Sarkozy on his website instead, likening him to a little Napoleon, whose egocentric exploitation of human suffering for political purposes made him little better than a dictator declaring war on an oppressed minority. (3) Azouz Begag, the Minister for the Promotion of Equal Opportunities, a well-known writer and activist for the rights of minorities in France, also criticized Sarkozy for his imprecise and antagonistic discourse designed to seduce the voters on the Far Right in an unmitigated attempt to promote his candidature for the forthcoming presidential elections in 2007. (4) Reactions from the international press, (5) as well as national political and social commentators, called into question the French model of integration and assimilation as the fundamental cause of the violence and unrest. Subsequent debate6 has confirmed that France is at a turning point: in order to move forward, it will have to reconsider the fundamental values of the Republic, including its immigration, integration and educational policies. It must be said that the reality of France in the current climate is a very long way from the utopian ideals of the 1789 Revolution.

In some ways, this bleak portrait of contemporary France makes the futuristic novels that it produces even more important as indicators of an imaginary escape from the here and now. (7) Of course, France is not the only country affected by the modern malaise. The last decade, spanning the turn of the millennium, the 'war on terror' and cataclysmic environmental phenomena all over the world, has produced a substantial body of literature offering alternative futures to counteract the current apocalyptic trends. However, it is the French novels set in the near and distant futures that are the subject of this study as they provide a variety of visions of the future from a French perspective, extrapolating from the present dilemmas to project utopian and dystopian scenarios on the distant horizon.

France has a long-standing tradition of futuristic fiction, having played a pivotal role in the development of this sub-genre of science fiction since its inception in the mid-17th century. The first example of a futuristic novel was Epigone, histoire du siecle futur, which appeared in 1659 and was formerly attributed to Jacques Guttin, but restituted to Michel de Pure in more recent times--both Frenchmen, at any rate. (8) The French Enlightenment contributed confidence in cognitive and social progress (9) with Louis-Sebastien Mercier's L'An 2440, published in 1771, commonly regarded as the first futuristic utopia, or uchronia, (10) followed by Retif de la Bretonne's Les Posthumes (1802) and Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville's Le Dernier homme (1805). The first literary criticism of futuristic fiction also bore the name of a French author, Felix Bodin, who invented the term 'litterature futuriste' in Le Roman de l'avenir (1834). Although most of the best known titles are not of French origin, such as George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), H. G. Wells' The Time Machine (1895), Yevgeny Zamyatin's We (1924), and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), there has nevertheless been an ongoing practice of the genre in France throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, ranging from Jules Verne's Paris au XXe siecle (1863) to Rene Barjavel's Le Voyageur imprudent (1944). (11) France has remained faithful to this trend through to the dawn of the 21st century, and its most recent contributions may even enter the futuristic canon, dominated until now by British and American authors, given the international success of Michel Houellebecq's latest novel, La Possibilite d'une ile.

From the various examples of futuristic French fiction, three texts are selected here with both chronological and ideological factors in mind. As indicated in the opening paragraphs, the recent 'violences urbaines', which surpassed even the student and popular union movements of May 1968 in damage and duration, herald a new revolution for France that has been brewing since restrictions on immigration were imposed in the 1970s and the French government joined the National Front party in declaring that the 'seuil de tolerance' (tolerance threshold) for immigrants had been reached. Exacerbated by the rise in unemployment and delinquency over the past ten years, with the general consensus linking immigrants to 'insecurite' in the primary campaign platform of all the parties in the 2002 presidential elections, faith in the Republican model of assimilation is shaky at best, and the values of universalism that underpin modern French society are also at stake. If the utopian ideals of the 1789 Revolution can no longer provide a solution to contemporary problems, then 'Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite' may have to cede to another slogan. And it is in the examples of French futuristic fiction published over the last decade that ideas for founding a brave new Republic may be identified.

In this chronology of escalating unrest, a new breed of futuristic writers has been born, transporting the vision of a projected society in the future from the borderlands of science fiction to the centre of conventional French fiction, 'la litterature blanche'. Unlike Jules Verne and Rene Barjavel, these authors are not dedicated genre writers, renowned for their contributions to science fiction, utopian or futuristic fiction. They are prize-winning, highly respected novelists from the literary mainstream, known for a body of work that does not necessarily focus on the future. The fact that these authors have been motivated to express their views on the world that awaits us is a revealing indication of the current state of dissatisfaction, as is usually the case in utopian and futuristic fiction. (12) The potential societies they describe may therefore be more representative of the modern malaise of the mainstream than the marginal imaginings of the unknown fantasy writer, for example.

A chronological introduction of the three writers examined in this article begins with Marie Darrieussecq, who had already written several best-selling novels before publishing White (2003), (13) a futuristic tale of a woman's escape from a troubled life in Texas to Antarctica, set in 2015. Not having travelled to Antarctica herself, Darrieussecq drew on the experiences of her husband, an astrophysicist who travels to the South Pole every two years to take samples of meteorites. (14) Although the remote and inaccessible nature of the icy continent...