Mao president of the U.S. in 'Le Monde'

Exactly one year ago, French newspaper Le Monde reformed its weekly economic and business supplements into a daily eight page delivered with its printed edition (noon in the major cities, on the printed date everywhere else). The act conforms with Le Figaro's traditional pink pages.

Advertisment announcing the event (Le Monde of April 30th, 2013).

 Advertising company Publicis Conseil proposed a campaign with a striking portrait of Chinese leader Máo Zédōng into a one dollar banknote instead of George Washington, the first President of the United States.

Motto was "Because the economy is changing the world, Le Monde's changing too", playing with the French meaning of "monde/world", and the fashion of thinking the emerging capacities of the Peopl's Republic of China on our capitalist and market economy, including the U.S. debts.

Or is it an uchronic banknote of the world as would be if? What's the anglo-saxon literaries called alternate history.

New French translation of Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle, published in 2012.

Uchronic or alternate historic banknotes can be find on book covers or sometimes described in the novel.

Here is an example on the 2012 cover of the new translation in French of Philip K. Dick's masterpiece The Man in the High Castle. Adolf Hitler on a one hundred U.S. dollar banknote... or, in fact, of the Pacific States of America...

The story tells how characters react after reading an alternate history novel inside an alternate history universe: after World War 2, the Axis powers occupied each one coast of the United States and let live a puppet State in the Rocky Mountains.

As no one really knows what is happening (or fears to know) in the Nazi America or even in Africa, troubled business and geopolitical relations take place in San Francisco, capital city of the Pacific States, where Japanese are struggling between cultural identity evolutions with the Americans and difficult diplomacy with the imperialist Nazis.

In this context, an author, at peace in the Rockies, published a book that imagine a world where the war ended differently... and is not our History, and written with the help of the I Ching, a Chinese book containing a system of divination.

Yes, more mind storming than a commercial for an economic newspaper.