I had two thoughts.

1. Why don’t we design costumes for each function anymore? Under the Empire, State Councillors had incredible outfits. So did prefects and mayors. Today, it’s a miracle if you see a prefect dust off his dull black uniform for a patriotic ceremony. The reign of the suit and tie is, frankly, boring.

2. The Revolutionaries were completely insane. Everyone knows the Revolution was a chaotic and violent time, but it’s hard to imagine today the collective hallucination it must have taken to design a costume inspired by ancient Phrygia and decree that every citizen should wear it daily. In a way, I admire their level of enthusiasm and imagination. The modern far left, by comparison, is terminally dull. Who today proposes to redesign the entire French wardrobe? What a lack of imagination.

This madness wasn’t limited to the Revolutionaries. It was the spirit of the whole age, from before the Revolution to the end of the Empire. Grimm wrote in his Correspondance Littéraire as early as 1763:

“For a few years now, people have been rediscovering ancient ornaments and forms; taste has improved considerably, and the fashion has become so general that everything today is done à la grecque. The exterior and interior decoration of buildings, furniture, fabrics, jewelry of all kinds—everything in Paris is Greek-style. This taste has spread from architecture to the fashion shops; our ladies wear their hair à la grecque; our dandies would feel dishonored carrying a box that wasn’t Greek-style. The excess is ridiculous, of course, but who cares? If abuse is inevitable, better to overdo a good thing than a bad one. If this Greek taste ever becomes the mania of our hairdressers and cooks (for such great Greeks as we must surely be powdered and fed à la grecque), so be it.”

Today, the word neoclassicism sounds like something stiff and academic. But in truth, it was the nerdiest episode in all of history. For about thirty years, Europe lived through a collective obsession with Antiquity that far outstripped, in both intensity and weirdness, anything you’ll find today in fantasy or sci-fi fandoms.

Take Star Wars fans. The most devoted might dress up as Jedi for a convention or a movie night, but they don’t go about their daily lives that way. The fans of Antiquity in the 1780s and 1790s—that is, basically everyone—actually walked around dressed like ancient Greeks or Romans. Men wore “Titus” haircuts; women wore Greek dresses. And these dresses had nothing in common with the fashion that came before: big, layered, ribboned, opaque gowns. The new ones were transparent, minimalist, and draped like statues. It’s as if, overnight, every woman today started wearing dresses straight out of Game of Thrones.

The obsession even extended to names. Today, you might find the odd baby called Anakin or Daenerys, but that’s rare and usually mocked. During the Revolution, though, Achilles, Gracchus, Chloris, and Proserpine popped up everywhere, even among the educated elite. And when people had themselves sculpted in bust form, they posed half-naked, like antique heroes.

People decorated their homes like Pompeii, which had just been rediscovered. Decorative arts of all kinds took their inspiration from Antiquity. Painters like Vigée-Le Brun hosted “Greek suppers,” where guests were required to show up dressed as ancient Greeks. And it didn’t stop at art: the entire institutional framework of society was remade in classical style, with consuls, tribunes, legions, eagles. Society itself was cosplaying as an ancient city-state.

Of course, classical references weren’t new. Since the Renaissance, even before that, Antiquity had irrigated European culture. But around the turn of the 18th century, something unique happened: the taste for the ancient world reached an absolutely wild degree. I can’t think of any other society that, in just a few years, decided to change its décor, its clothes, its names, its ways of being, even its institutions, to adopt those of what was basically a fantasy universe. Because people back then weren’t aiming for historical accuracy; if I’m drawing comparisons with pop culture and fantasy here, it’s because the 18th century’s love of Antiquity came from fiction, like The Travels of Young Anacharsis in Greece, a wildly popular imagined travelogue published in 1788 by Jean-Jacques Barthélemy.

Do we have any true equivalent today? I don’t think so. Some of America’s tech-right types are obsessed with The Lord of the Rings, but it only shows in the names of their companies: Anduril, Palantir, Mithril Capital, Erebor. We haven’t yet seen Palmer Luckey dressing as a hobbit, though he’s one of Silicon Valley’s more eccentric figures. So I conclude that our society isn’t very fun: we’re more constrained in how we express our passions than people in the 18th century were; we dare less to change our surroundings; in a sense, we’re older than they were.

This incredible article by the brilliant Casey Handmer convinced me for the first time: the colonization of Mars is no longer a distant, quasi-science-fiction goal - it's coming soon, and we can already see precisely how.

I was never passionate about space, astronauts, and rockets. Until now, I found them somewhat sterile and slightly inhuman. We often visualize space exploration as a solitary and claustrophobic adventure in darkness (think 2001, The Martian, or Ad Astra). But SpaceX's latest advances with their Starship rocket, along with the detailed program underlying the enterprise, have changed my mind. The conquest of Mars isn't an aberrant excursion for humanity: it's a return to its origins.

What is a (real) colony?

For a long time, human cities grew through successive divisions. Far from constantly expanding like our current megalopolises, they practiced, whenever they experienced population growth, a kind of cellular mitosis: they separated a portion of their inhabitants and sent them to found a new city, far from the first.

The only exceptions were capital cities, world cities like Rome or Alexandria, which weren't seen again until London and Paris in the 19th century. No, for most of human history, cities only grew by establishing colonies in unknown lands. These colonies weren't imperial conquests, as we understand them in modern times. It wasn't about subjugating existing populations. Greek (and some Roman) colonies were actually foundations of new cities, often on virgin territory.

Why did people embark on such adventures? First, for demographic reasons. Sometimes, the available land wasn't sufficient to feed an ever-growing population, and the surplus was evacuated by sending them to new lands. This was often the case on small Aegean islands, where the slightest drought could lead to famine. Colonies could also be created hoping to exploit natural resources, such as precious metals from a mine (as in Thasos), or to more easily establish trade relations with other distant peoples (as in Marseille). But the deepest reason that drove cities to colonize was a desire to persevere in their being. Diotima told Socrates that having children was a mode of immortality: “The union of man and woman is production: and this production is divine work; fertilization, generation, this is what makes the mortal animal immortal”,2 and cities made colonies as individuals made children. That's precisely why they were called metropolises, meaning mother cities.

For the men and women who participated in these expeditions, however, the motives could be quite different. Some were forced to do so, either by their precarious situation or by force. A decree from the city of Thera, for example, forced one son per family to leave to found a colony on the Libyan coast, under penalty of death.3 But others went for the adventure, thirst for wealth, or pleasure of exploration, especially among those who led the expeditions (the oikists) and who would be remembered, sometimes almost mythologically, as the founders of the new city. In fact, the initiative to found a colony sometimes came not from the city but from private individuals.

Imagine the departure of such an expedition. They armed large ships, loaded the departing inhabitants aboard, stocked provisions and equipment, and set sail. It was a risky, painful, difficult undertaking. First, the sea wasn't accessible at all times. The Romans had the term mare clausum for the winter period when it was better not to venture into the Mediterranean in the vessels of the time. There was always the risk of storms, but even more so the risk of running aground on a reef or sandbank, with the end of the journey potentially being as or more dangerous than its middle. Not to mention currents, pirates, and wreckers.

Once arrived began the hardest part - founding the colony itself. In principle, if a colonization site had been chosen, it was precisely because it was empty of inhabitants, or at least of established society, and one could settle there freely. But this was exactly what made things complicated: there was no economic or social infrastructure to welcome the newcomers. These - only a few hundred people - had to become self-sufficient as quickly as possible in terms of food and manufacturing daily objects, but also in terms of security against potential aggressors. This is why the Homeric episode cited above immediately mentions the construction of an enclosing wall around the new city.

Not all succeeded. We see in some epigraphic texts cities allowing their colony founders to return five years later if the project had failed. Others perished on site. It required great logistical capacity, strong social cohesion, and genuine political ambition; after all, they were founding a new State. This is the key point to keep in mind: the challenge of colonization isn't the journey, it's achieving autonomy as quickly as possible with a small number of men and women.

How Earth Can Become a Metroplanet

The conquest of Mars isn't actually so far removed from these Greek adventures. The difficulty has of course grown along with our technological capabilities and ambition. But if we think about it, the human stakes are the same. Just as the sea wasn't accessible in all seasons, likewise Mars and Earth's orbits leave us only short launch windows, a few weeks every two years. The journey's duration makes the human investment particularly heavy: about 6 months to go from Earth to Mars (Handmer, who is Australian, actually notes that this isn't far from the time it took to come from England to Australia in the 19th century). This requires "ships" of large capacity; this is precisely the purpose of building SpaceX's Starship rocket, which can transport 100 tons of cargo per trip. The constraint of short launch windows means we'll probably see every two years an quite incredible period where 2,000 Starship rockets, previously placed in Earth orbit and refueled, will depart hourly from the sky toward the red planet.

Once there, like the Greek colonists, they'll need to try to become as self-sufficient as possible, since rapid and continuous round trips between the “metroplanet,” if we may use the expression, and the colony won't be possible. First, they must ensure a livable space, and while on Mars we don't fear attacks from local barbarians (at least, we hope not), we'll need to protect against radiation and the lack of breathable air. This is why it's proposed to deploy transparent domes covering dozens of square kilometers, to shelter a kind of atmosphere. They'll also need to be autonomous for food production, with automated and robotized farms, for energy production, thanks to solar panels and nuclear power plants, and for fuel production, using locally available components, even if some will be supplied by Starship cargo round trips.

As with Greek colonists, achieving this economic autonomy constitutes the real challenge of colonization. Handmer estimates that this will require Martian colonists to have productivity a hundred times higher than humans on Earth, under much more difficult conditions. But this isn't unattainable by carefully selecting the first members, finding the right social organization, and accelerating technological progress. Moreover, the more rockets we build, the more we facilitate the task for future colonists by offering them more resources.

The Ideal City, but on Mars

The importance of the political conception of the colonization project is immense. This is first the case, as we've seen, to enable the Martian city not to perish and to not only survive but live pleasantly enough that hundreds of thousands of human beings would want to move there. For SpaceX's project, discussed in the article, is to eventually install more than a million colonists on Mars. It's hard to imagine coercive measures like the one mentioned earlier from the city of Thera: forcing one son per human family to make the journey. Yet the prospect of going to settle on another planet is still not very desirable. Furthermore, and unlike the Greek situation for once, Earth today is not at all in demographic surplus, quite the contrary. To embark on adventure requires young people, and we lack them, which makes the demographic crisis even more sensitive. It will therefore be necessary to appeal to the spirit of conquest and exploration of the most motivated, and succeed as quickly as possible in making it a pleasant territory to live in for others. It's not enough to make Mars autonomous; it must be made desirable.

With such brief transit moments between the Terran and Martian cities, it's obvious that the colony's political organization must be decentralized. Everything can't be administered from Earth. The Martian political system must also resist any risk of disunion or conflict which, in such a hostile environment, would almost certainly be fatal.

But the subsequent political relations will be even more interesting. In the Greek world, colonies weren't territories dependent on the metropolis, as modern European colonies would be. They were absolutely independent states, and even if they might have family, cultural, or affectionate ties with the metropolis, and shared common myths or customs, the two cities could take divergent paths. Some colonies even became more prosperous and famous than the metropolis - such as Phocaea and its daughter Marseille.

What will happen tomorrow on Mars? In our case, there's the added difficulty that it's not planet Earth as a single city that will send colonists to Mars, but one Terran state among others (the United States), or even private companies, which will make things even more complicated. Perhaps Martian territories will be considered American at first. But isn't it inevitable, as was the case in Greece, that Martian territories will eventually gain independence and give birth to a new nation on par with those that exist today on Earth?

Can We Still Get On Board?

It's certainly clear that the difficulty of the enterprise and the immensity of necessary resources won't allow for multiple Martian bases and thus constitute from the outset an American enclave, a Chinese enclave, or even (let's be crazy) a European enclave. It's more likely at this stage that there will be one common enclave on Mars which, much later, might itself create colonies elsewhere on the planet.

This means that any contemporary state wanting to participate in Martian colonization must get involved today in one way or another. They must be part of the oikists, the founding team. But the entry ticket is becoming rare. As Handmer indicates, at SpaceX, launch capacity will be multiplied by 1000 while costs plummet. No other historical company or organization is capable of this, neither today nor in the short or medium term. Ariane 6 isn't reusable and is qualified as obsolete years before even being delivered. In fact, Starship is alone in its category, and already well advanced on the path to regular use. We'll therefore need to find ways to progressively catch up, but especially identify other areas where we could make ourselves indispensable in the Martian supply chain. Given the immense difficulty of the enterprise, there will necessarily be opportunities; we just need to give ourselves the means to seize them.

But Why, After All?

It's not that we have a material need to conquer Mars - neither for demographic reasons, nor even for economic ones. If some seek to found a city there, it's driven by the same passion as that of the mythical founders of Greek colonies. It's the desire to discover new hostile land and make it welcoming to humans. It's the desire to found a political community from nothing. It's the challenge of self-sufficiency.

And it's, perhaps even more fundamentally, the desire to prove that humanity isn't destined to remain stationary. That far from shrinking, it can still multiply, including on other shores. If this makes you at least curious, and at the risk of repeating myself, go read Casey Handmer's article; it's the most up-to-date picture of the problem and its solutions. Starship brings us back to a kind of childhood of civilization, to a time when the expansion of a human community consisted of putting a few ships to sea to found a new city. At heart, for anyone interested in politics, nothing more exciting has ever been invented.

While researching the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns for a book project, I discovered an aspect of Charles Perrault's tales (Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, etc.) I had never considered. Perrault was the main advocate for the Moderns in this dispute among Louis XIV's court intellectuals; he defended the idea that modern civilization, particularly its literature, was superior to that of the Greeks and Romans. Perrault's tales - Mother Goose Tales - were directly part of this quarrel. For Perrault, these tales were a weapon meant to show that modern society could exist without constantly referencing Greco-Roman examples, contrary to what his opponents, the Ancients, believed.

For a 17th-century person, there were two kinds of marvelous stories where supernatural powers intervened in human affairs. On one side were the fables of ancient mythology, told by Homer, Virgil, Ovid, and Apuleius, with their gods, demigods, and heroes. On the other were grandmother's tales, passed down orally through generations or, for some of them, written in what were called romances - medieval vernacular narratives. "Mother Goose," which titled the collection, embodied this tradition. Anatole France said of her:

What is Mother Goose but our ancestor and the ancestor of our ancestors - women of simple hearts and strong arms who completed their daily tasks with humble grandeur and who, dried by age, having like cicadas neither flesh nor blood, still conversed by the hearth, under the smoky beam, telling long tales that made children see a thousand things?1

These traditional fairy tales had an almost national dimension, rooted in French territory, whereas ancient mythology was an external import. Marie-Jeanne L'Héritier de Villandon, Perrault's niece, praised these rooted narratives:

Tale for tale, it seems to me that those of Gallic antiquity are worth about as much as those of Greek antiquity; and fairies are no less entitled to perform wonders than the gods of Fable.

However, this wasn't the common opinion; it was generally accepted that great literature should draw inspiration from ancient myths rather than grandmother's tales, which is why an Ancient like Racine wrote Andromaque or Phedre, not Sleeping Beauty. Fairy tales were relegated to shameful entertainment. Marc Fumaroli notes that in the 17th century, "young boys receiving a humanist Latin education in college would read French chivalric romances in secret from their teachers."2

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Perrault's entire ambition, committed to destroying the preeminence of Greeks and Romans and freeing his contemporaries from their inferiority complex, was to prove that the fairy tradition was superior to mythology. Beyond the "Gallic" dimension highlighted by Marie-Jeanne L'Héritier, Perrault emphasized the morality of traditional tales, contrasting it with the indecency of ancient fables:

The Milesian fables so celebrated among the Greeks, which were the delight of Athens and Rome, were no different from the tales in this collection. The story of the Matron of Ephesus is of the same nature as that of Griselda: both are nouvelles, meaning stories of things that could have happened, with nothing that absolutely violates plausibility. Psyche's tale, written by Lucian and Apuleius, is pure fiction and an old wives' tale like that of Donkeyskin. [...] I even maintain that my tales are better told than most ancient stories, [...] if one considers them from the moral perspective.3

Or furthermore:

These Milesian fables are so childish that it does them too much honor to compare them to our tales of Donkeyskin and Mother Goose, or they are so full of filth, like The Golden Ass by Lucian or Apuleius, The Adventures of Leucippe and Clitophon, and several others that they don't deserve any attention.4

He drew inspiration from both oral tradition and written romances. “Not only was there more invention and wit in our romances than in Homer's, but [...] manners and propriety were much better observed.”5 While morality - Christian morality, of course, for Perrault - had to be defended, it needed to be done elegantly and discreetly: “If one examines these tales well, [...] they all contain very sensible morals, which reveal themselves more or less according to the reader's degree of penetration.”6

Perrault sought to construct a replacement for the mythological source that obsessed the Ancients by demonstrating both the invention that reigned in French oral tradition and its superior morality. But he also sought to improve this tradition. His version of the tales was more structured and grounded in reality. The marvelous appeared only in small touches; it had its own internal coherence and didn't serve solely as a deus ex machina. The tales weren't pure fantasies but "parallel" worlds, as specialist Pierre-Emmanuel Moog indicates: "the marvelous in Perrault's tales isn't synonymous with license to chain together wonders." If there were monsters, they weren't simple frightening beasts: ogres, for example, were "complex and cruel humans, dissimulators, such that they pass relatively unnoticed."7

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All of this strongly recalls another literary work inspired by fairy tales - that of J.R.R. Tolkien. The author of The Lord of the Rings, in a completely different context, pursued similar goals to Perrault in creating the tales of Middle-earth:

1. Recreating tales of national rather than foreign inspiration;

2. Giving more coherence to the fantastic than traditional tales and turning it into good literature;

3. Introducing Christian morality without making it too visible.

His most important text in this regard is Letter 131 to Milton Waldman, written in 1951, where Tolkien writes:

But an equally basic passion of mine ab initio was for myth (not allegory!) and for fairy-story, and above all for heroic legend on the brink of fairy-tale and history […]. I was from early days grieved by the poverty of my own beloved country: it had no stories of its own (bound up with its tongue and soil), not of the quality that I sought, and found (as an ingredient) in legends of other lands. […] Of course there was and is all the Arthurian world, but powerful as it is, it is imperfectly naturalized, associated with the soil of Britain but not with English; and does not replace what I felt to be missing.8

Unlike Perrault and L'Héritier, Tolkien wasn't content with reviving an underestimated tradition, precisely because he found this tradition too poor. But he drew from various sources and his own imagination to recreate this tradition from scratch to meet the same ambition: valorizing local mythology rather than ancient or foreign ones.

For one thing its 'faerie' is too lavish, and fantastical, incoherent and repetitive. For another and more important thing: it is involved in, and explicitly contains the Christian religion. For reasons which I will not elaborate, that seems to me fatal. Myth and fairy-story must, as all art, reflect and contain in solution elements of moral and religious truth (or error), but not explicit, not in the known form of the primary 'real' world.

As with Perrault, Christian morality is present in the background. Tolkien insists more than the French author on the necessity of not making this inspiration apparent, but it is indeed present; in Letter 142 to Robert Murray, he writes that "The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision."9 For both writers, it was important that this framework remain hidden, discrete, non-obvious.

Lastly, we see that his ambition was to avoid extravagance and incoherent fantasy. Tolkien's fantasy is not realistic, but muted, low-key. The wizard Gandalf rarely casts spells; we don't even really know what the famous powers of the One Ring are. Above all, his stories rest on a world whose languages, geography, and history were built with consistency and attention to detail; it's an architecture of unshakeable solidity. The smallest character, the smallest place name in The Lord of the Rings has a logical and justified place in Tolkien's imagined universe.

Of course, this goes much further than what Perrault could achieve with his tales. This is why we can see Tolkien as a successful Perrault. Not that Perrault failed; while he didn't convince his fellow Ancients at the Academy, the tales were very successful and experienced several vogues, notably during the Romantic period, before inspiring the most famous animated films. But he didn't manage to create a true French mythology that would have inspired new authors with the seriousness he expected. Tolkien, on the other hand, created a genre in itself - fantasy - and adaptations of his works have known staggering success. Perrault gave a better showcase to tales, but they remained just tales, without reaching the scope of classical epics and tragedies. Tolkien, undoubtedly because he infused his work with all his own sensibility, seems today to have reached that stage.

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