single letter that changes the course of history. Not the most common, but the most radical: the letter “u”. It forms an impassable bridge between real and imaginary. Utopia is a compound of the Greek ou (not) and topos (place). The “place that is not”, i.e. nowhere. Thomas More knew that his island of Utopia did not exist. Uchronia (ou plus chronos, time) follows the same principle. It is the “time that is not”, the thing that never happened. Thomas More invented utopia in 1516. The French philosopher Charles Renouvier invented uchronia three centuries later.

It’s an appealing concept. A pure thought exercise. The philosopher appreciates its eminently speculative nature. The journalist balks at the absence of facts, of sources, the impossibility of analysing something that never took place. The historian rejects the notion point blank – to paraphrase Kellyanne Conway, there are no more alternative facts than there is an alternate history. Uchronia is, at best, a novelist’s fancy.

Still, there’s a lot to be said for transdisciplinarity. Crossing that bridge between real and imaginary can make fresh space for thinking that will shed light on the present. Albert Einstein, Gaston Bachelard and Étienne Klein have all looked to philosophy to explain concepts such as Time and Void that slip through the net of their equations. Max Weber even advanced that the only way to grasp the causes of a past event was to imagine what would have happened had those causes never existed. The underlying objective is clear: to demonstrate that whatever happened was not inevitable.

What may seem harmless enough is, on the contrary, of the utmost radicality because it challenges one of the motors of ancient history: “it had to happen”. It’s what we call determinism, which is also the foundation for just about every religion. To consider what might have been, to imagine uchronias, is therefore an act of resistance, a reappropriation of one’s history, the negation of “it had to happen”. Uchronia may not have the rigour of science or the demands of history; it is no less essential to understanding the past and, therefore, constructing the future. Uchronia is a fertile exercise that merges chance and necessity, possible and impossible, and which ultimately gives us back our freedom. Uchronia is a counterfactual narrative, a recomposed past that shows our present in the light of an often unexpected but always relevant non-present. It frees the past from teleological fatalism: if nothing was meant to be, then anything can be.