Albert Robida
Albert Robida (1848-1926) was a prominent French illustrator and science fiction writer known for his imaginative works that blend satire and foresight. Born in Compiègne, France, he began his career as an illustrator at the Journal Amusant and later co-founded the satirical weekly La Caricature. Robida is celebrated for combining text with his illustrations, notably in his parody series that lampoons Jules Verne and his ambitious work Le Vingtième Siècle, which presents a farcical yet surprisingly insightful view of life in the future. His creativity extended to various literary forms, including fiction, essays, and early comic strips, often exploring themes of technology and society.
Robida's most significant contributions include a pacifist narrative, La Guerre au vingtième siècle, which critiques war and foresees the devastation brought by advanced weaponry. His later works reflected a shift in tone, as seen in L'Ingenieur Von Satanas, a scathing anti-war statement following World War I. Through his diverse body of work, Robida remains a key figure in the evolution of speculative fiction and visual storytelling, bridging the worlds of literature and illustration while encouraging reflections on the future of humanity and technology.
On this Page
Subject Terms
Albert Robida
Illustrator
- Born: May 14, 1848
- Birthplace: Compiègne, France
- Died: October 11, 1926
- Place of death: Neuilly-Sur-Siene, France
Biography
Albert Robida was born in 1848 in Compiègne, France, the son of a carpenter. He began to study law but did not complete the program, instead joining the staff of the Journal Amusant as an illustrator in 1866. He eventually founded his own satirical weekly, La Caricature, with Georges Decaux in 1880. His other productions included a shadow-theater show at Le Chat Noir and the “Old Paris” exhibit for the 1900 Exposition Universelle. He became one of the leading caricaturists of his day and illustrated many notable literary works, always showing a particular fondness for imaginative fiction.
Robida first combined his illustrations with his own text in 1879, in a five-part series of farcical adventures parodying Jules Verne, Voyages très extraordinaires de Saturnin Farandoul dans les cinq ou six parties du monde et dans tous les pays connus et même inconnus de M. Jules Verne. The five-story series was issued in a hundred parts. He followed it with an extraordinarily elaborate account of Le Vingtième Siècle (the twentieth century) issued in fifty parts. Although it is cast as a farcical comedy, the novel’s adventurous description of life in the 1950’s shows considerably more foresight than any other account of the future produced by that date.
Robida continued to elaborate his vision of twentieth century life in a long sequence of relatively brief subsidiary stories and fictionalized essays, including La Vie électrique, and various sidebars on the future of transport by air, road, and rail (the last-named with text by Octave Uzanne). By far the most important of these supplements was a pacifist account of La Guerre au vingtième siècle (partially translated—without illustrations—in I. F. Clarke’s 1995 anthology The Tale of the Next Great War, 1871-1914), which originated as a serial in La Caricature in 1883 but was extensively revised and expanded for book publication in 1887.
The imaginative scope of Robida’s fantasies was further expanded in Jadis chez aujourd’hui, serialized in Le Petit Français illustré in 1890—in which famous figures from the past are artificially resurrected—and L’Horloge des siècles, an early account of time marching backwards. He also made significant early contributions to the development of bandes dessinées (comic strips) shortly after the turn of the century in the Vernian periodical Journal des Voyages, including Les Fleurs carnivores and La Redécouverte d’Amerique.
Robida’s interest in exotic inventions was reflected in an exchange of pseudonymous letters on that subject in La Caricature in which Robida signed himself Théodule Assenbrouck of the Académie des Sciences de Flyssemugue, while Henri Mifrot (alias Henriot) signed himself Omer Garo, and Georges Colomb (alias Christophe) signed himself Polyxène Billentoque. After World War I, however, his enthusiasm for science waned; L’Ingenieur Von Satanas is a vitriolic antiwar polemic tracking the aftermath of the war, in which humankind is miniaturized before inventing an ultimate weapon that obliterates civilization. He died in 1926.