From phantasmagoria to quantum physics. A ghost from Remi Tremblay

Nineteenth-century French Canadian literature includes several works relating to utopia and science fiction. Remi Tremblay, a Franco-American returned to Canada, presents a unique work with his novel Un revenant (1884). Eight years before Jules Verne's Chateau des Carpathes (1892), Tremblay introduced the phenomenon of the fantasmagoria into fiction. The discourse of science allows for the dissemination of liberal ideas influenced by American democratic ideology. The originality of the text shows clearly in its fictional treatment of the magic lantern, which features the confrontation of two twentieth-century scientific philosophies, Einstein's theory of relativity and quantum theory.