After all, what could not have been done with a man such as Dr. Sarrasin, a Celt, careless, flighty, and most certainly a visionary! […] It was every Saxon’s responsibility, in the interest of general order and obeying an ineluctable law, to annihilate if he could such a foolish enterprise. And in the present circumstances, it was clear to him, Schultze, M.D., Privatdocent of chemistry at the University of Iéna, known for his numerous comparative works about the different human races — works where it was proved that the Germanic race would absorb all the others — it was clear indeed that he was especially designated by the constantly creative and destructive force of Nature to wipe out the pygmies rebelling against it. (chap. 4)
Given that their respective inheritances were brought about by a union between their French mother and German father, they are doomed, almost like Cain and Abel, to violence and war that only the young hero, Marcel Bruckmann, an Alsatian orphan, whose name “bridge-man” implies a link between the two warring nations, can stop. Yet, while Schultze is obsessed with racial purity, Sarrasin is propelled by a fear of microbial contamination — or, rather, germs and science instead of germ-ans and empires. In each case, however, financial capital leads to a lack of freedom rather than an abundance of it. Whether it be Schultze’s death-driven military-industrial complex or Sarrasin’s hygienic but obsessive-compulsive one, Verne seems to suggest that the only choices available to each country would be either a mad and brutal dictatorship or a neurotic one. While seemingly at opposite poles, the fact that both men’s names begin with “S” implies that their roots are fundamentally the same, and that they are nonetheless connected. Moreover, if that “S” could also stand for serpent (snake), as in the Garden of Eden’s biblical snake who leads Adam and Eve into temptation, Verne’s modern “apple” might well be in the form of Capital that Schultze and Sarrasin eat from rather than Knowledge, which they both seem to abuse through Science. As Schultze understands it, finance capital is the most potent secret ingredient for the destruction he envisages:
For all eternity, it had been ordained that Thérèse Langévol would marry Martin Schultze, that one day the two nationalities, represented by the person of the French doctor and the German professor, would clash and that the latter would crush the former. He had already half of the doctor’s fortune in his hands. That was the instrument he needed. […] Moreover, this project was for Herr Schultze quite secondary; it was to be added on to much larger ones he had had in mind for the destruction of all nations refusing to blend themselves with the German people and reunite with the Fatherland. (chap. 4)
If Schultze represents the cliché of a totalitarian Teuton bent on expanding his Reich, his portrayal is also a giant leap for Verne in a growing anti-Germanism that will culminate in Le Secret de Wilhelm Storitz (1910, The Secret of Wilhelm Storitz), one of his last books (published posthumously), in which an evil German satanically invents a chemical with which he can become invisible and with which he kidnaps the woman he loves unrequitedly. Although chunks of Storitz were rewritten by his son Michel (who placed it in the eighteenth century, instead of the nineteenth, and gave it a bit of a happier ending), Verne, throughout the novel, never ceases to equate Germans with brutality and evil, and the subjugation of the innocent and brave Hungarians. It is a far cry from the endearingly befuddled Dr. Lidenbrock, Axel’s uncle in Journey to the Center of the Earth, who leads his nephew through an initiation to the center of the Earth with all its treasure trove of discoveries. With The Begum’s Millions, childish yet innocent national rivalries, which had been mitigated by peaceful reconciliations and handshakes in Verne’s previous adventure novels such as the Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hatteras, give way to weapons of mass destruction, potential nuclear annihilation, and economic collapse when rumors of Schultze’s disappearance and death at the end of the novel lead to a flight of capital, unemployment, and rapid decay in Stahlstadt. As Verne describes it, Stahlstadt’s Wall Street–linked financial ruin prefigures the worldwide depression caused by the 1929 crash: “There were assemblies, meetings, discussions, and debate. But no set plans could be agreed to, for none were possible. Rising unemployment soon brought with it a host of ills: poverty, despair, and vice. The workshop empty, the bars filled up. For each chimney which ceased to smoke, a cabaret was born in the surrounding villages” (chap. 15). Once the capitalist strings that kept Schultze’s war machine going are removed, there are no pretenses of production or conquest to keep the workers going, just human suffering, hopelessness, and destitution: “They stayed behind, selling their poor garments to that flock of prey with human faces that instinctively swoops down on great disasters. In a few days they were reduced to the most dire of circumstances. They were soon deprived of credit as they had been of salary, of hope as of work, and now saw stretched out before them, as dark as the coming winter, nothing but a future of despair!” (chap. 15).
Although he managed to suppress the glum and dystopian Paris in the Twentieth Century by not publishing it, and, most importantly, by exercising an almost tyrannical control over Verne’s works in his role as well-meaning but intrusive mentor, Hetzel focused on keeping Verne’s works cheerful enough to continue to attract throngs of young readers. But the city of Stahlstadt — ironically echoing Hetzel’s own nom de plume, “Stahl” — allowed Verne the opportunity to recycle much of his dismal vision of Paris in 1960 that Hetzel had disapproved of. While Verne’s future Paris is dystopian because monolithic banks are obsessed with financial control and perpetually expanding profits at the expense of “useless” romantic individualism, Stahlstadt is a pure industrial machine that exists exclusively for the sake of war and war production. Paris in the Twentieth Century opens with four concentric circles of a vast new commuter rail system that seems to snake around the city in a stranglehold, and the technological innovations that Verne describes in minute detail hold no enchantment for its citizens: “In this feverish century, where the multiplicity of businesses left no room for rest and allowed for no lateness whatsoever […] the people in 1960 were hardly in admiration of these wonders; they quietly took advantage of them, without being any happier, because to see their rushed pace, their frenetic demeanor, their American fire, one could feel that the fortune demon was pushing them on unrelentingly, and without mercy.”21 Similarly, Schultze’s Stahlstadt is also laid out in concentric circles consisting of a stranglehold of walls, gates, security checks, departments and doors:
In this remote corner of North America, five hundred miles from the smallest neighboring town, surrounded by wilderness and isolated from the world by a rampart of mountains, one could search in vain for the smallest vestige of that liberty which formed the strength of the republic of the United States.
When you arrive by the very walls of Stahlstadt, do not attempt to break through the massive gates which cut through the lines of trenches and fortifications. The most merciless of guards would deter you, and you would be required to return to the outskirts. You cannot enter the City of Steel unless you possess the magic formula, the password, or at least an authorization duly stamped, signed and initialed. (chap. 5)
In The Begum’s Millions, the future Paris’s light rail system is replaced by a subterranean railroad meant to transport workers and raw materials toward an industrialized Virgil-like trip to the underworld, a nekya, or descent into hell, for Marcel, the hero who will infiltrate Stahlstadt to save France-Ville:
To his left, between the wide circular route and the jumble of buildings, the double rails of a circling train stood out first. Then a second wall rose up, paralleling the exterior wall, which indicated the overall configuration of Steel City.
It was in the shape of a circle whose sectors, divided into departments by a line of fortifications, were quite independent of each other, though wrapped by a common wall and trench.