Albert Robida and the Risks of the Future: Inventing a Visual Culture of Anticipation

This paper examines Albert Robida’s invention of a visual culture of anticipation in the press, the art of illustration, and literature in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It contextualises Robida’s work within the realms of print and imagery. Beyond his trilogy – Le Vingtième Siècle, La Guerre au Vingtième Siècle, and La Vie électrique – Robida embeds futurity within a graphic, editorial and panoramic media practice that engages with current affairs, and reimagines the future of modernity. As an illustrator, writer, and satirical journal editor, he developed a unique style of chronicling the news though words and images. His works covered everything from world’s fairs (including his “Vieux Paris” reconstruction) to the advent of the Parisian subway, while also promoting heritage and rural diversity.
Known as the “Jules Verne of the pencil”, Robida creates crowded ensemble scenes integrating humans into infrastructures. His caricatural line satirises triumphalist novelty and flimsy spectacle. His imagination, by turns playful and grave, maps social anxieties across domains such as women’s emancipation, urban mobility and new transport, advertising proliferation, overpopulation, processed foods, bacteriological war, modelling an original social foresight.
Drawing on media history, urban studies, literary criticism, art history and the history of technology, this paper aims to situate Robida within a francophone culture of anticipation that predates science-fiction. It then traces his visual language to later creators, notably Hayao Miyazaki, whose animation art adapts related aerial, mechanical, and ecological imaginaries, and to steampunk aesthetics that borrow his machines and airborne worlds. The argument establishes Robida’s cross-disciplinary legacy in creating modern visual futures.