Robida weaves the scientific work and technological advances made by the illustrious French scientist Philox Lorris into his plot.

The original French edition included multiple illustrations drawn by the author which are executed in a satirical style reflecting Robida's other occupation as a caricaturist.

Of the three major elements of the series, La Vie électrique is most savagely critical of the way the world appeared to the author to be going, at least partially, and even when it eventually settles more contentedly into blatant and unrepentant farce, it retains a trenchant black edge.

Although patents for electric light bulbs had been granted previously, it was not until the 1880s that Joseph Swan and Thomas Edison developed commercially viable products.

Robida was by no means the only writer to anticipate a glorious future for electric lighting, domestic power supplies, phonographs and telephones—even telephones augmented with visual apparatus — but no one else writing in the nineteenth century took the combination of those devices to the extreme that he did in imagining a future where most communication would take place electrically by means of what he calls “la plaque du télé”, or the Tele screen, which would also serve as significant inputs of home entertainment, relaying music and theatrical performances.

The notion that weapons of war would become increasingly sophisticated was also commonplace in French speculative fiction by 1892 — although it had not yet arrived in English-language fiction to any significant extent—and the idea that common-or-garden explosives might soon be supplemented and partly displaced by poison gases was already familiar, but no one other than Robida described in such detail, and with such sardonic vitriol, the day when the chemical artillery would be in danger of being rendered redundant in its turn by the corps medical offensive medical corps[clarification needed], equipped with all the latest custom-designed microbial weapons.

Even in 1892, French speculative fiction abounded with caricatures of scientific geniuses whose turns of mind were very different from those of everyone else, especially with regard to the sentimental side of life.

Robida's Philox Lorris is not at all unworldly in matters of business and is a relentlessly efficient opportunist, well aware of the power of advertising and the necessity of having friends in parliament; in that sense, he is not merely a symbol of science, but of the close alliance of science with what is nowadays known as the military-industrial complex: the real driving force of technological development and diehard enemy of what may be considered moral progress.

George, a lieutenant of the French army in the corps of chemical engineers, is the only son of the great scientist and inventor Philox Lorris.

George insists on his original intention, and when he and his bride embark on a pre-nuptial journey, Philox Lorris employs his colleague Sulfatin to break the relationship of the couple.

Instead of the tour over the factories and scientific laboratories suggested by Philox Lorris and intended to fatigue the young pair, George takes Estelle and Sulfatin to a quiet village whose inhabitants resist modern technology and live in the traditions of the 19th century.

Sulfatin takes along on a journey his ward and patient, an invalid Adrien La Héronnière who is suffering from the exhaustion of the body due to an intensive mental work during his lifetime.