Robdia, Albert

Albert Robdia (May 14, 1848 - October 11, 1926) was a French novelist, journalist, and illustrator best known as the long-time editor of the satirical magazine La Caricature. Robida was born in Compiègne in the Oise département in northern France. As a youth, Robida had prepared to become a notary but found the work uninteresting and often doodled instead. In 1866, he began working at Journal amusant as an illustrator and in 1879 published his first science fiction (merveilleux scientifique) novel, Voyages très extraordinaires de Saturnin Farandoul, a parody of Jules Verne's Voyages extraordinaires in which a shipwrecked child is raised by monkeys before rejoining the human world. Filled with Robida's lively, colorful illustrations and published serially in installments, the book proved popular, especially in Italy, where it was later made into a 1913 silent film and a comic version starring Donald Duck. In 1880, Robida and Georges Decaux (1845 - 1914) founded La Caricature, which Robida edited for the next twelve years. The weekly illustrated satirical magazine gave an outlet for Robida and several other emerging illustrators of the day who would go on to have prominent careers as satirists, including Caran d'Ache, Ferdinand Bac, and Job (Jacques Marie Gaston Onfroy de Bréville). Between 1883 and 1890, Robida also published his richly-illustrated 'Vingtième Siècle' trilogy of science fiction novels, also similar to and influenced by Jules Verne, though more comical in tone and in some ways more accurate in predicting of future events, including flat-screen televisions, as well as imagining the effects of new technology on society. Aside from his most popular science fiction novels and his work with La Caricature, Robida illustrated dozens of tourist guides, historical works, novels by other writers, reissues of literary classics, and a series of sketches of historical sites in France titled La Vieille France. Robida and his wife Marguerite (née Noiret) had seven children. His son Camille (1880 - 1936) was injured and highly decorated in the Forst World War, and became a well-known architect and urban planner in Nantes. For his work, including designing the city's First World War memorial, he was made an officer of the Légion d'honneur. Another son, Henry, also trained as an architect but was killed in the opening months of war. Albert Robida was easily among the most recognizable and imitated illustrators in France at the turn of the 20th century. A staircase throughfare in the 19th arrondissement of Paris is named for him as the Villa Albert Robida.