Cultures of time in fin-de-siècle France: The popular literature and graphic art of Albert Robida (1848-1926)

The long nineteenth century in France witnessed a number of societal upheavals and technological inventions that had a significant impact on the way historical time was conceptualized and experienced. The overthrow of the traditional systems of social and political order in the wake of the Revolution, scientific discoveries about the age of the Earth, the acceleration of travel occasioned by mechanical transportation, the rise of capitalist economies: all of these transformations contributed to a shift in the cultural understanding of historical time. In short, history came to be understood as a linear (and accelerating) progression of events, and this model of historical time conditioned the way writers and artists engaged with the rapidly vanishing past and the increasingly proximate future. In this dissertation, I analyze the fin-de-siècle culture of temporality through the literary and artistic production of Albert Robida, in relation to such figures as Émile Zola, Jules Verne and Victor Hugo. The first chapter examines Robida\u27s chronicles and caricatures of the nineteenth century, analyzing his use of juxtaposition as a technique for capturing present temporality. The second chapter explores literary and visual projection in Robida\u27s illustrated romans d\u27anticipation, and argues that the imagined future is deeply rooted in an anachronistic imaginary. The third chapter looks at Robida\u27s designs for and execution of the immersive Le Vieux Paris exhibit for the 1900 universal exposition, and argues that this temporary reconstruction of the medieval city functions a site of memory in the context of post-Haussmannization Paris. Ultimately, I show that Robida\u27s oeuvre interrogates the boundaries and limits of the past, present and future through the staging of anachronistic confrontations between these temporalities. By creating echoes between the cultures (real and imagined) of different eras, Robida subverts fin-de-siècle narratives of progress and decadence, and calls into question the place of history in the context of modernity\u27s accelerated temporality