Future Tense: The Culture of Anticipation in France between the Wars - Tapa dura

"Roxanne Panchasi's core insight is that the future can be a congenial place to think about the present-even if the thoughts themselves are far from reassuring. She shows us how certain objects-artificial limbs, vitamins, domestic furnishings, America-intruded on the French imagination of the 1920s and 1930s, objectifying forebodings of stagnation and irrelevance. Future Tense is a timely book in the cultural history of anxiety."-Raymond Jonas, Giovanni and Amne Costigan Professor of History, University of Washington "Future Tense is constantly engaging and interesting. Looking at how people thought about the future, how the future shaped their present, is a striking angle to take on the French interwar years. Roxanne Panchasi demonstrates that everything in culture is interesting because everything is the result of people's thoughts, activities, and dreams. The consequence is that quotidian practices (like designing 'modern' kitchens) become rich with cultural meanings that go far beyond the cuisine. The variety of areas she examines is dazzling."-Richard Terdiman, University of California, Santa Cruz "Roxanne Panchasi's deft consideration of Paris as a site of anticipation, where past and future might well have to carry out a fight to the death, is quite intriguing indeed. In Future Tense, she brings imagination and an impressive variety of sources to bear on her argument that anticipation about the future is as much about the present doing the anticipating as it is about the future being anticipated. Her bold analysis enables her to bring in materials as diverse as schematics for prostheses, concepts of interior design, urban planning, war plans, travel literature, and debates over the proper language to use at the League of Nations."-Leonard V. Smith, Frederick B. Artz Professor of History, Oberlin College, author of The Embattled Self: French Soldiers' Testimony of the Great War "Roxanne Panchasi's masterful expose on the uncertain times of l'entre-deux-guerres examines how French scientists, engineers, designers, military strategists, politicians, and writers conceived multiple scenarios to shape the France of the future. . . . From household appliances, prosthetic limbs, the chaise longue, Ovomaltine as a dietary supplement, and the grand design of the Ligne Maginot, the author has compiled an exhaustive and enlightening panorama of the ideas and inventions that informed the collective imagination of one nation determined to undo the ills of its past."-Marie L. M. Schein, French Review (November 2010) "Investigating the impact of 'collective anticipation' on society, Panchasi successfully turns memory on its head, exploring how expectations of the future became manifested in public projects, ambitions and discourses during the interwar years. . . . This study is a solid and informative piece of work, which paints a vivid picture of the cultural and technological expectations facing interwar French society. Forcing the reader to reflect on the intersection between history and modernity during the interwar years, it offers a fresh approach to thinking about the exciting interwar period."- Daniel Lee, European History Quarterly (Vol. 41, No. 3)

In the years between the world wars, French intellectuals, politicians, and military leaders came to see certain encounters-between human and machine, organic and artificial, national and international culture-as premonitions of a future that was alternately unsettling and utopian. Skyscrapers, airplanes, and gas masks were seen as traces in the present of a future world, its technologies, and its possible transformations. In Future Tense, Roxanne Panchasi illuminates both the anxieties and the hopes of a period when many French people-traumatized by what their country had already suffered-seemed determined to anticipate and shape the future. Future Tense, which features many compelling illustrations, depicts experts proposing the prosthetic enhancement of the nation's bodies and homes; architects discussing whether skyscrapers should be banned from Paris; military strategists creating a massive fortification network, the Maginot Line; and French delegates to the League of Nations declaring their opposition to the artificial international language Esperanto. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Panchasi explores representations of the body, the city, and territorial security, as well as changing understandings of a French civilization many believed to be threatened by Americanization. Panchasi makes clear that memories of the past-and even nostalgia for what might be lost in the future-were crucial features of the culture of anticipation that emerged in the interwar period.