Abstract EN:

Counter-utopias appeared as a literary genre long before the dystopias of the twentieth century. Our aim is to document the emergence of classical dystopias between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries. We start from the idea that Renaissance utopias were conceived as humanist alternatives to the Terrestrial Paradise of the Christian tradition. Thomas More, Francis Bacon, Johann Valentin Andreae, Tommaso Campanella and many other thinkers and writers sought to recover the Garden of Eden for humankind, to replace the city of God with a city of Man. Nevertheless, utopian optimism was soon challenged by several theoretical critiques and institutional attacks, formulated under three important doctrines: Counter-Reformation theology, Cartesian rationalism and English empiricism. Throughout the pre-modern age, these ideologies raised a series of decisive arguments against the hope that mankind could by itself establish a perfect society and a paradise on earth. Starting with Joseph Hall (Mundus alter et idem, 1605) and Artus Thomas (L'Isle des Hermaphrodites, 1605), an important number of authors took on official and public censorship and reshaped their fiction into critiques of utopian visions. Instead of imagining ideal places, they began to conceive counter-utopian societies and terrestrial infernos.