`titrebMillenarian fears and futuristic visions in front of decline of an old industrial area: Saint-Étienne at the end of the 19th century`/titrebThe decline of the old coal field of Saint-Étienne, in the term of a prodigious growth, fed at the end of the 19th century a pessimism which translate, under the feather of a labor poet, Jacques Vacher, a journalist Claude Le Marguet, and a writer, Émile Zola, somber visions. The collapse of the city, eaten away by the underground working of the mine, illustrates the entropy which, for Michelet, was the inevitable term of the century of the machine. The abyss where is engulfed the mining city, become a city-ghost, is the full of imagery translation of a social, political and intellectual crisis which feeds at three author’s a feeling of dereliction very “fin de siècle”. The only vision of future at the dawn of the 20th century is the utopia of the electric city which describes Zola, host of pioneers of the electrometallurgy, which reflects certain optimism.