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The decline of the old Saint-Étienne coal field, after a period of tremendous growth, fed, at the end of the nineteenth century, a pessimism that translated into somber visions, written by poet laborer Jacques Vacher, journalist Claude Le Marguet, and writer Émile Zola. The collapse of the city, eaten away by the underground working of the mine, illustrates the entropy that, for Michelet, was the inevitable conclusion of the century of the machine. The abyss that engulfed the mining city, which became a ghost town, is the imagery translation of a social, political, and intellectual crisis that gives the three authors a very “fin de siècle” feeling of dereliction. The only vision of the future at the dawn of the twentieth century that reflected any optimism was the utopia of the electric city described by Zola, which hosts pioneers in electrometallurgy.