En L'An 2000: Aerial Customs Police Chase a Smuggler, French Chromolithograph c.1900
From the celebrated 'En L'An 2000' series of French futurist postcards, likely illustrated by Jean-Marc Côté or a contemporary collaborator working in the Belle Époque chromolithographic tradition, this card imagines year-2000 law enforcement as winged customs officers wielding pistols in aerial pursuit of a bat-winged smuggler aboard a flapping ornithopter. Airships drift in the background over a pastoral French countryside, with a rooftop 'Douane' (customs) station anchoring the whimsical yet earnest vision of mechanized flight-suit policing.
More Jules Verne than Buck Rogers — the action is gleefully kinetic and imaginative, but rendered with charming Belle Époque decorum rather than lurid pulp excess. Think polite French futurism with loaded pistols.
“EN L'AN 2000 DOUANE In Pursuit of a Smuggler”
