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In his theses on the concept of history, Walter Benjamin created a famous allegory influenced by Klee's Angelus Novus. From the point of view of the Angel of history, progress is seen as an non-ending catastrophe and an ever-growing pile of ruins. In order to grasp its cultural genesis and its political signification, it is necessary to place back this allegory into Benjamin's archeological analysis of French 19th century and to recognize its main literary sources. In light of the prospective ruins motif that is encountered in Mercier's L'An 2440 et Grainville's Le Dernier Homme and of the bergsonian philosophy through which Benjamin reflected on the modern crisis of experience, the ruins of progress mean more than the well-known mixture of marxism and messianism. What is at stake is a critic of the pathological mnemonic effects of futuristic anticipation. In fact, Benjamin's allegory outlines a politics of the present that is the exact opposite of the melancholy induced, according to him, by the progressist thought.