There are no monks, priests, prostitutes, beggars, dancing masters (i.e., dance teachers), pastry chefs, standing armies, slavery, arbitrary arrest, taxes, guilds, foreign trade, coffee, tea, or tobacco: such occupations, institutions, and products have been adjudged to be useless and immoral – as has much previously written literature, which has been willingly destroyed by the future librarians, who proudly display their library, reduced to a single room of only the most valuable works.

Wilkie concludes that the only fact that Mercier was consistent about is that the first edition was published in Amsterdam by E. van Harrevelt, and existing evidence strongly favors 1771 – probably the summer – as the correct date of publication.

[7] Due to its controversial criticism of the Ancien Régime and portrayal of a secular future, the novel was at first published illicitly, appearing anonymously, smuggled into France, and sold by underground booksellers.

[1][11][12][8][7] It has been described as "one of the eighteenth century's most successful books" and "one of the most controversial", with an estimated 60,000 copies in several languages printed during that time, provoking a gamut of contemporary evaluations.

[7] It was first translated to English 1772 by William Hooper, and was the first utopia published in the United States: Thomas Jefferson and George Washington owned the first edition.

The Year Two Thousand Four Hundred and Forty, Followed by The Iron Man: Dream, with L'Homme de Fer: Songe being a new, separate short story[1]) was in turn partially translated to English by Harriot Augusta Freeman under another liberally changed title, Astraea's Return, or The Halcyon Days of France in the Year 2440: A Dream (according to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, as of 2019, no official English translation of the revised 1786 version exists).

Histoire du siècle futur (1659), Samuel Madden's The Memoirs of the Twentieth Century (1733), and the anonymously written The Reign of George VI, 1900–1925 (1763).

[3] Mercier's novel has been described as having been inspired by the Enlightenment philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau[4][8] and by earlier utopian fiction such as Francis Bacon's New Atlantis (1626).

[1] Another theme concerns gender equality, about which Mercier has again been described as both progressive and conservative: in his future world, marriages are based on love, divorce is legal, and dowries are abolished; but ideal women are "free" to devote themselves to life at home as "good wives and mothers".

[9][13] The Year 2440 has been described as an important example of French pre-Revolutionary literary dissidence, and even as a veiled call to action – something made more explicit in the preface to later editions, in which Mercier urges the coming of an "age of progress and universal happiness", claiming his novel as prophetic (drawing much derision from contemporaries).