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The Rationalist Attack Against Utopias of the Classical Age. The philosophers of the Classical Age vehemently criticised the imagination. They thought it was the source of all errors and illusions in human cognition. Their attack lead to the depreciation of all literary genres which were based on the marvels and miracles, on the fantastic tradition of the Middle Age and the Renaissance, such as the extraordinary and the utopian voyages. If at its beginning the utopian genre was conceived as a witty fiction nourished by a pleasant fantasy, after the attack of the Cartesian rationalist philosophers, it acquired the meaning of impossible project, faked fiction, forgery.

Keywords: Fantasy, Imagination, Utopia, Rationalism, Cartesian philosophy, illusion.