Science Fantasy in the Trente Glorieuses: Maurice Limat’s Chevalier Coqdor Cycle

During the years of the so-called Trente Glorieuses (1945–1975), with its economic recovery after World War II, France witnessed the development of a technologized consumer society and a technocratic approach to public planning, which fostered a futuristic outlook and a boom in paperback publishing. A major success story of this era was the Éditions Fleuve Noir science-fiction series, Anticipation, to which popular genre author Maurice Limat contributed numerous novels. Although marketed as science fiction and set far in the future and in outer space, Limat’s novels featuring the Chevalier Bruno Coqdor resemble more often those of a knight-errant from medieval romance. These works of space fantasy express medieval nostalgia but also engage the massive social changes occurring in France during this period while extrapolating France’s survival in the distant future.