You are a uchronia (and so am I)

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The term uchronia , from the Greek u –prefix of negation– and chronos –time–, responds according to the Royal Academy of Language to the “reconstruction of history based on hypothetical data.” And although the “What would have happened if…?” They are as old as man's imagination is old, and their application to historical speculation is as old as the ability to think in historical terms - Titus Livy already fantasized about a confrontation between Alexander the Great and Rome in the ninth book of his first decade. (IX.18)–, this term was coined for the first time in 1857 by the French philosopher Charles Renouvier in a series of articles later collected in his work Uchronie (L'utopie dans l'histoire). Esquisse historique apocryphe du développement de la civilization européenne tel qu'il n'a pas été, tel qu'il aurait pu être (1876).

For Renouvier, uchronia was “utopia applied to history ,” that is, “history logically remade as it could have been.” His work, formulated as an apocryphal manuscript transmitted by generations of heterodox between the 16th and 18th centuries, rewrites the history of Europe from the reign of Emperor Marcus Aurelius to the 9th century, when he BTC Users Number Data conceives of the continent organized in a manner similar to republics. medieval Italians, but emancipated in religious matters and advanced in science and literature, an ideal model of French republicanism nine centuries ahead of the lettre . The work only confirmed the displacement of utopian speculations from space to time that had been taking shape since the Age of Enlightenment. If before, utopia was fundamentally located in a fictitious or mythical geographical space – from the Pancaya of Evémero to the kingdom of Prester Juan –, modernity, which with geographical explorations will gradually exhaust the world, takes utopia to the future, in a longing of perfectibility of society and of man that will also be transmitted to political doctrines: given that the “righteous will inhabit the Earth” (Proverbs 2:21), why wait for the day of Judgment? The Earth will be paradise et cetera .



Uchrony , like modern utopias, also plays with time, but with what has already passed and not with what is to come, imagining alternative developments of history - hence its name in English, alternate history -, starting from what Renouvier calls “points of divergence” or “knot of history”, specific events that occurred (or did not occur) in a different way than they did. It is what is known in science fiction as “Jonbar point”, after John Barr, protagonist of the novel The Legion of Time (1938), which based on a trivial decision will cause the world to slide either towards a civilized utopia or well towards a dystopian tyranny. It is those events – those “what would have happened if…” – that mark the moment from which history will take a divergent course. Uchrony is therefore counterfactual history, although the first term is frequently reserved for works in the field of science fiction that develop alternative historical scenarios, while counterfactual history would raise its speculation based on a rigorous analysis of a historical process , eliminating or modifying one of its determining causes to consider what the subsequent future would have been.