located in Paris and is the first anticipation of coming times. This utopia is full of prophecies, some accurate and some wide of the mark. (The accurate ones were for the most part realized long before the prophesied dates.) Hère for the first time the dream-device is used, giving the hero an âge of seven hundred years so that he may be présent in the new time. Both this device, and the attention given to technological inventions, are symbolic of coming trends. This utopia is chiefly important because it represents a definite shift toward time-conscious représentations. Simultaneously we find a counter movement which takes the pure concept of progress in time and forces it once more into a spatial framework. Let us take as an example the treatment of history itself, which has alternated the temporal and spatial emphasis, and between the global and the nationalistic frame of référence. Voltaire is a typical transition-figure who struggled to escape from this ambiguity. History, says Voltaire, is nothing but a bag of tricks played on the dead. We change the past according to our présent wishes for the future; history demonstrates that everything can be demonstrated through history.2 His Lettres sur les Anglais was the cockcrow before the French Révolution. His famous "Essai sur les Moeurs," blamed for a lack of patriotism, considers Europe and the little pièce of it labeled France as but a peninsula of a new Other world in the East. Ultimately man's belief in himself and his own calling also led to a renewed belief in his own country, however, and again there was a revival of nationalistic and imperialistic aspirations. This degenerated into a look backward to the great past of one's nation instead of forward to the future of mankind. In France a chain of events unfolded from man, discovering his own individuality, to the Third Estate, discovering itself as the core of the nation, to the citizenry, discovering itself as sovereign over king and aristocracy, and finally to the mobilized masses, discovering themselves as the French nation in the Assemblée Nationale in 1871. Thus, at the same time that the related ideals of freedom and progress had expanded to encompass a sensé of world citizenship, the hard-won rights of man were being narrowed to support the principle of self-détermination of national groups. 2
His fiercely critical view of national and military history as a création of despots and gênerais led him to try rewriting the past as a history of culture and l'esprit de l'homme; he wrote studies of Charles XII, Louis XIII, and Louis XIV in quite a différent vein from the heroic saga of Henry of Navarre, written earlier in the Bastille.
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