Jean-Marc Côté Future Moscow Airships & Submarine, En L'An 2000 c.1900
From the celebrated French 'En L'An 2000' (In the Year 2000) postcard series, this chromolithograph envisions a futurized Moscow waterfront bustling with dock workers loading cargo beneath a massive iron bridge. Cigar-shaped dirigibles and torpedo-like flying craft patrol the skyline above the Kremlin's distinctive silhouette. A streamlined submarine surfaces mid-river, suggesting total mechanization of transport by land, sea, and air — a quintessential example of Belle Époque retro-futurism imagining the twentieth century as triumphant technological utopia.
Closer to a bustling train station than an exploding space station — the spectacle is civilized and optimistic, a genteel Victorian dream of orderly technological progress. The dirigibles and submarine add genuine wonder without chaos.
