France in the Year 2000, as Envisioned in 1899

It’s wild to think about “futuristic visions” from the perspective of someone in the 1800s.

In 1899, decades before anyone had flown a plane or spoken into a telephone from across an ocean, a French artist sat down and tried to imagine daily life a full century ahead. The result was “France in the Year 2000” — a series of postcards, most of them attributed to illustrator Jean-Marc Côte, originally commissioned for a world’s fair exhibit and cigarette-box inserts that never quite made it to market. What survived is one of the most charming artifacts of imagined futures ever produced: part prophecy, part fever dream, entirely earnest.

We first told this story back in 2020 in the original piece, and the cards have only gotten more charming with time. So we’re taking a fresh, closer look at the full surviving set here, card by card.

Predictions That Landed, and Ones That Gloriously Missed

Some of the predictions land with startling accuracy — mechanized labor, remote learning, image transmission over distance. Others are gloriously, wonderfully wrong: whale-shaped water buses, roller-skating commuters, and firefighters who simply strap on wings and fly to the rescue. What makes the series so enduring isn’t its hit rate — it’s the optimism. Every card assumes progress will be delightful, a little theatrical, and available to everyone.

The Postcards: Eleven Visions of Life in the Year 2000

Here’s the full run of surviving cards from the series — eleven small, hand-painted bets on what daily life a hundred years out might actually look like.

What Would We Get Wrong About 2126?

We’d love to see a 2126 update to this series — what would today’s artists get charmingly, spectacularly wrong about a century from now?

This postcard series lives in our Retrofuturism guide, a visual archive of the futures the past imagined. If you love this particular flavor of hopeful guesswork, don’t miss how illustrator Charles Schridde pictured the year 2000 back in the 1950s — and got a surprising amount of it right — or browse our wider roundup of fabulous retro-futurism illustrations from decades past.

By Moss & Fog Staff