The Begum's Millions. Jules Verne

Leagues under the Sea), seem to endorse the virtues of technology and progress, the recently rediscovered manuscript of Verne’s dystopian vision of Paris in the 1960s, Paris in the Twentieth Century, speaks out so unsparingly against the dehumanizing aspect of modernity that it also draws attention to his ambivalence toward his own century, which would resurface in The Begum’s Millions. Indeed, the historical context of The Begum’s Millions presents a dour nationalistic picture of two scientists, a benevolent Frenchman and an evil, despotic German, who each inherit millions from a long-lost relative. Whereas the Frenchman, Dr. Sarrasin, creates a utopia on the west coast of the United States called France-Ville, the German, Herr Schultze, builds Stahlstadt, a dystopian factory village bearing an uncanny resemblance to Verne’s hegemonic 1960 Paris. Verne’s descriptions of the “City of Steel” make it clear that “freedom and air were lacking in this narrow milieu” (chap. 7). Stahlstadt is essentially a slave camp similar to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.¹⁶ While France-Ville is a peaceful socialist society appropriately situated along the Pacific Ocean, Stahlstadt is a warmongering hegemony, an environmental disaster of a city that manufactures cannons to sell to bellicose nations in general and to Germany in particular: “The general opinion, moreover, was that Herr Schultze was working on the construction of a dreadful engine of war, without precedent and destined to assure Germany worldwide domination” (chap. 7).

      While Paris in the Twentieth Century was dismissed by Hetzel as an unpublishable “youthful error,” The Begum’s Millions responded to a general postwar, anti-German sentiment in France. But Verne’s dystopian vision persists as a fulfillment of a general dread of global annihilation that he had to tone down after Paris in the Twentieth Century’s failure. As Arthur B. Evans has explained, the nationalistic, thanatos-driven microcosm depicted by Verne in works like The Begum’s Millions mirrored a more general trend in post–Industrial Revolution France in which the “utopian focus of the French bourgeoisie of the Second Empire and the Troisième République began to shift with the times. The traditional utopian ‘nowhere’ was soon replaced by a potential ‘anywhere’; the pastoral setting by the industrial; personal ethics by competitive expansionism.” ¹⁷ As such, The Begum’s Millions can be seen as more than a simple warning of what can happen when science and technology fall into the hands of an evil leader — a warning that would be repeated in Face au drapeau (1896, For the Flag), in which the French scientist Thomas Roch also invents an incredibly deadly weapon of mass destruction, which, after the inventor goes mad, falls into the hands of criminals who seek to use it for piracy rather than geopolitical conquest. In many ways, Verne’s philosophical shift went hand in hand with France’s as well, as Hetzel writes in his famous preface to the first edition of the Voyages et aventures du capitaine Hatteras (1866, Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hatteras): “When one sees the hurried public rushing to lectures that have spread out through a thousand points in France, and when one sees that, next to the art and theater critics, a spot has to be made in our newspapers for reports from the Academy of Sciences, it is time to admit that art for art’s sake is no longer sufficient for our era, and that the time has come for Science to have its place in literature.” Of course, although Hetzel’s reference to science in this instance is meant to be an enthusiastic one, it is clear from a reading of The Begum’s Millions that science can and should never replace the arts. Verne certainly tended to support Rabelais’s maxim: “Science without conscience leads to the ruin of one’s soul.”

      “Every time someone dies, it is Jules Verne’s fault,” Salvador Dali wrote in Dali by Dali. “He is responsible for the desire for interplanetary voyages, good only for boy scouts or for amateur underwater fishermen. If the fabulous sums wasted on these conquests were spent on biological research, nobody on our planet would die anymore. Therefore I repeat, each time someone dies it is Jules Verne’s fault.” ¹⁸ Ironically, Dali’s mock accusation against Verne could have been written by Verne himself in the sense that a part of his happier and more hopeful writings may have died a little bit by the time he began to pen the nightmarish visions in The Begum’s Millions. That Verne felt compelled to adjust the tone of his adventures is not surprising when one takes into consideration the shifts in paradigms from the early to the late nineteenth century. While the most optimistic of Verne’s early novels endeavored to portray such characters as the young Axel in Journey to the Center of the Earth or the balloonists in Five Weeks in a Balloon as enthusiastic seekers of new geographies and discoveries for the sake of world edification, the realities of the mid- to late nineteenth century were hardly as sunny. More often than not, dreams of global social and political harmony resulted in their opposites, as general disillusionment and skepticism became the norm. Verne too was deeply affected by the changes in the European political landscape. The anxieties he tried to communicate through the aborted Paris in the Twentieth Century soon became realities as financial behemoths led by monopolistic banks and industrialists grew in strength and power. Growing imperialist ambitions led to escalating arms races, which in turn helped to fuel colonialist expansion and the wars needed to either find new colonies or defend newly acquired interests. Cynical treaties such as the Berlin Accords of 1885, which divided Africa among the European colonial empire builders, led to further power brokering rather than idealistic republics. Domestically, workers movements were repeatedly crushed while unpredictable attacks by anarchists and nihilists terrorized the home front. After France’s bitter defeat at the hands of the Germans in the Franco-Prussian war, Verne could only wistfully shake his head as he wrote to a friend: “Yes, this is what the Empire has to show for itself after eighteen years in power: a billion to the bank, no more commerce, no more industry. Eighty stocks that are worth nothing, and that’s without counting those that will collapse any minute. A military government that brings us back to the days of the Huns and the Visigoths. Stupid wars in hindsight.” ¹⁹ As Jean Chesnaux has pointed out, the latter part of the nineteenth century was a period during which the wondrous dreams of the early part of the century had to be translated into social responsibility rather than carefree fantasy; shifts in world order created new social demands and needs: “Between about 1880 and 1890, the Known and Unknown Worlds alter their character. Man’s efforts, his Promethean challenge to nature, are from then on expressed through well-defined social entities, clearly analyzed as such. Verne comes face to face with social realities. His scientific forecasts now give place to the problems of social organization, social conditions and the responsibility of scientists towards society; in each case, as we shall see, he reaches a pessimistic conclusion.”²⁰

      As a “bridge” novel linking Verne’s positivist and most popular works of the 1860s and 1870s and his more often pessimistic works of the 1880s and 1890s, it is quite appropriate that The Begum’s Millions offers a two-fold vision of society. But the two visions are not polar opposites; even the utopian one has its dark underside. A gigantic inheritance leads to the creation of two states governed by excessively tight restrictions rather than a freedom from constraints and needs that a sudden windfall of cash might be expected to provide. While the peaceful Dr. Sarrasin, designer of France-Ville, benignly declares, “Do I need to tell you that I do not consider myself, in these circumstances, other than a trustee of science? […] It is not to me that this capital lawfully belongs, it is to Humanity, it is to Progress!” (chap. 3), he — like Schultze — creates a centralized and strict state bent on controlling its citizens and destroying its enemies. For Schultze, the enemy is France, whom he sees (in what Chesneaux considers “proto-Hitlerean” terms) as a weak nation of Untermenschen, who must be conquered and then annexed into a greater German Volk; for Sarrasin, the enemy consists of germs, idleness, and uncleanliness, as he founds his city on the principles of Hygiene above all. One city will be driven by thanatos, the other by hypersanitization, or, rather, a thanato-sanitization. On hearing that Sarrasin’s proposed utopia would be founded on “conditions of moral and physical hygiene that could successfully develop all the qualities of that race and educate generations that were strong and valiant,” Schultze counters with a racially charged diatribe suggesting that France-Ville is opposed “to the law of progress which decreed the collapse of the Latin race, its subservience