Mesdames Nos Aïeules - Robida, Albert

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Biographie:
Albert Robida (14 May 1848 - 11 October 1926) was a French illustrator, caricaturist, novelist and editor whose imagination yoked medieval nostalgia to audacious visions of the machine age-and of mechanised war. A carpenter's son from Compi?gne, he exchanged notarial drudgery for the Parisian press, c?founding the weekly La Caricature (1880?92) and ultimately producing some 60,000 drawings and eighty books, inspiring one critic to call him an inexhaustible dynamo.Robida's renown rests on three graphic novels that mapped the coming century: The Twentieth Century (1883), War in the Twentieth Century (1887) and Electric Life (1890). Delighting readers with air?taxis, videophones and emancipated women, they also forecast the darker face of progress. War in the Twentieth Century depicts fleets of armoured airships bombarding cities, mobile artillery slinging poison shells and wireless telephotographs directing fire-devices chillingly close to the zeppelins, gas and aerial reconnaissance of 1914?18. His later serial La Guerre Infernale (1908) pushed the vision further, showing orbiting gun?platforms and continent?spanning alliances that eerily pre?echo the total wars of the twentieth century. Historians now credit Robida-long overshadowed by Jules Verne-as the first illustrator?novelist to give war its modern technological grammar.Yet his futurism was never mere technophilia...