Rereading Barjavel’s Ravage in the Age of AI and the End of the World

ENVIRONMENT & SOCIETY

A dystopian novel published in 1943, set in a 2052 world that has become dependent on machines and electricity. Fascinating to read, or reread, today for Barjavel’s brilliant intuition.

In a recent op-ed titled “Et vous, quelle est votre fin du monde ?” (roughly, “And what is your end of the world?”), philosopher Gaspard Koenig noted in French daily Les Echos that close to 40% of Americans believe the end of the world is near, and that artificial intelligence is far from having a monopoly on apocalyptic thinking.

That piece prompted me to dive back into René Barjavel’s Ravage – published under the title “Ashes, Ashes” in 1967. I’m glad I did. The novel remains strikingly relevant for anyone grappling with our vulnerability, our dependence on machines, and our disconnection from nature.

An ultra-technological world suspended over an abyss

The story is set in 2052. France has reached a hyper-technological, urban civilization. Paris and the other French metropolises are home to 150 million people, among them 80 million living and 70 million dead, preserved in underground vaults or scattered throughout the city. Entirely dependent on electricity, hypersonic transport, and synthetic food distributed through a centralized network, humanity has abandoned traditional farming and craftsmanship.

Then disaster strikes: electricity permanently stops powering the machines. This is not a mere blackout but the instant collapse of the technosphere. Elevators plummet, planes fall from the sky, factories explode. Paris descends immediately into madness, cannibalism, and violence. Amid the chaos, the protagonist, François Deschamps, sets out on a long journey to his native Provence to rescue Blanche, his childhood sweetheart. Along the way, he builds a community of survivors grounded in mutual aid, natural authority, and earthly values. Decades later, the world has settled into a rural, patriarchal society under François, revered as a patriarch, where technology is banned and the memory of the “madness of machines” has become an absolute taboo.

A prophetic intuition...

I’ll admit I had not actually read the original work in full, but the power of the myths Barjavel draws on is hard to miss:

The myth of divine punishment: a humanity that has severed its ties with nature raises the machine to the status of a proud idol and brings destruction upon itself.
The myth of urban decadence: a black-and-white opposition between the deadly city and the purifying countryside.
The myth of eternal return: an unending cycle in which mankind, having destroyed itself through technology, starts again from zero.

It is remarkable how far ahead of his time Barjavel was in 1942, anticipating video calls, high-speed trains, synthetic meat, cryogenics, the all-electric society, and imaginary inventions such as “quintessence” (an energy derived from marine fuel) and “plastec,” a new material replacing glass, wood, steel, and concrete. The “night of the machines” foreshadows our contemporary fears: a massive blackout, major cyberattacks, and collapsing supply chains.

In an age of algorithms and dependence on data centers, “Ashes, Ashes” reads as a parable of our headlong rush forward. The machine is already both prosthesis and substitute: humans have delegated not only their work but their thinking. One can detect, in an anachronistic yet striking way, an early critique of our growing cognitive dependence on digital tools.

...but a reactionary resolution

By contrast, I found the second half of the novel very laborious. It is easy to understand that a story written in 1942 bears the scars of the despair of the military defeat and the ideological influence of the Vichy regime (its “Return to the Land” doctrine). Yet the solution it proposes is troubling.

The authoritarian back-to-the-land vision Barjavel portrays amounts to a flat rejection of science, going so far as to show a patriarch burning books. This is precisely where the work’s appropriation today needs nuance. Modern collapsologists and environmentalists may share Barjavel’s lucid diagnosis of our technological hubris and our rupture with the biosphere, but not all of them embrace his obscurantist cure.

In short, “Ashes, Ashes” remains a brilliant literary intuition and a visionary warning against techno-solutionism, but the remedy it offers is regressive.

By Thomas Husson, independent analyst.

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