Vous consultezÉmile Souvestre ou la réclame telle qu’elle sera

In Le monde tel qu’il sera (1846), E. Souvestre criticises progress and, as a democrat, the perversities of modern life. The quest for profit implies the development of advertisement. Le monde tel qu’il sera imitates the typographical processes of advertisements while adopting a strategy of ironical distancing vis-à-vis the praise lavished by advertisements. Torn between laughter and anxiety, the reader of this novel of anticipation is made to imagine a world dominated by advertisement, whose reign neither public institutions, praised through the slogans of official propaganda, nor the productions of the mind, which will have become commodities, nor even human beings, rated the same way animals or goods are, will be able to escape. Whether involuntary showman or carrying, unbeknownst to himself, a sandwich-board of the signs of the discourse of advertisement, the man of the future will be a mutant, the homo publicitus.