Paris in the Twentieth Century (2 page)

Under
Napoleon III, the great emperor's nephew who ruled France between 1848 and
1870, the country's industrial production doubled, and its communications
network tripled. Business and government enterprise, notably, transformed
Paris: wide straight streets, green parks and squares, new apartment buildings,
monumental railway stations, and workers' housing on the outskirts for people
displaced from the center of town. Verne noted the ferocious materialism of
his time and anticipated the fallout of progress with anxious fascination:
overpopulation, pollution, lodgings hard to find in a city center where offices
and public buildings crowded out private dwellings, and everywhere
"machines advantageously replacing human hands. "

So many
aspects of Jules Verne's imaginary twentieth century apply to the real one in
which we live! The French language is in dire straits: specialists create their
own jargon, scientists adopt English,
Franglais
is about to pounce. As with speech, so with social institutions: the family
tends to self-destruction, marriage looks like heroic futility, the number of
legitimate children diminishes, illegitimacy soars, bastards "form an
impressive majority. " Books still exist; indeed, since the invention of
paper made of wood pulp (1851), there are more of them. More books but fewer
readers: literature has been marginalized, and "knowledge is imparted by
mechanical means. " Mechanics have also invaded the arts. Music knows no
more melody, painting no form, poetry sings
Electric
Harmonies
and
Decarbonated Odes,
truly popular literature deals with practical matters like
Stress Theory
or
The Lubrication
of Driveshafts.
Even Jules Verne failed to imagine that ideal
warehouse for modern art, the Beaubourg museum, let alone the beau-bourgeoisie
that worships at art's altars; nor had anyone yet coined words like
"technocracy" and "technocrats. " But the government of the
Second Empire was heavily involved in intellectual and cultural life,
patronage and administrative manipulation subsidized and suggested,
"joining the useful to the disagreeable" even more perhaps than they
do today.

The
Great Dramatic Warehouse (Chapter XIV), where Michel finds a job, houses teams
of scribblers writing to order, or rewriting past successes as in Hollywood, to
amuse "docile audiences by harmless works. " "Abandon
originality all ye who enter here!" could easily be engraved above its
gate. What had begun as private enterprise had passed under control of the
State and of its bureaucrats. Théâtre managers (Verne had been one in his
youth) became civil servants, authors state employees, and the stern censorship
of nineteenth century administrations waned because self-censorship left no
need for it.

Jules
Verne's irony is sometimes heavy-handed. It can also be hard to discern for
readers unaware of issues that concerned his times. Thus, unlike Britain,
Belgium, or Prussia, the France of the first half of the nineteenth century had
no national banking system; and this created problems in raising capital,
obtaining credit, or even paying bills over a distance. In 1852, France joined
the modern age when two visionary believers in industrial development and
technocratic planning, the brothers Pereire, founded a national bank, the Crédit
Mobilier, soon imitated by other joint stock clearing banks founded over the
next ten years or so: Crédit Industriel, Crédit Foncier, Crédit Lyonnais....
The Academic Credit Union that appears in Chapter I transposes this financial
revolution to the educational field: centralization, investment, profit, on a
new mass scale. Verne's story begins on the Union's prize-giving day, a
ceremony as familiar to the French of the 1860s as to their present-day
descendants, and as commencement is to us. An educational system founded as the
economy was, on competition, stimulated ambition by official recognition:
prizes, medals, certificates of excellence, without which children were not
expected to exert themselves. The struggle to win school prizes prepared for
more serious struggles after graduation, hence for success in life. So the
annual prize-giving day was a great occasion, and the speeches that marked it reflected
values that society sought to inculcate: in this case, respect for foreign languages
and for applied science.

In the
1860s, educated Frenchmen (few women had access to secondary education till
later in the century) learnt to write good French by imitating models found in
Latin and in the great authors of seventeenth and eighteenth century
literature. That was the basis of rhetoric, whose models drawn from Greek and
Roman antiquity taught good taste, elegant discourse, nobility of thought and
of expression. Democratic opponents of rhetoric rejected it as pedantic,
pompous, boring, and elitist. Victor Hugo, much admired by Michel as by
Michel's creator, had recently denounced

Merchants of Greek! Merchants of
Latin! pedants! dogs!

Philistines! magisters! I hate you
pedagogs.

But Hugo was in exile for opposition to the Empire, and the
respectable classes respected the classical curriculum that he criticized.

More
dangerous for rhetoric's fortunes, its teachings were out of tune with the
times. "Fine words do not produce beet sugar, Alexandrine verse does not
help extract sodium from sea salt, " the physicist François Arago
contended, attacking scholastic insistence on the classics and other useless
knowledge. Michel Dufrénoy's prize for Latin verse brands him as an anachronism
condemned to the same uselessness and rejection as his beloved teacher of
rhetoric; and Verne's opening chapter joins in a debate that would not be
resolved until 1902, when rhetoric was dropped from the curriculum.

Science,
too, stood at the center of educational debates under a Second Empire which
sought to encourage studies that would orient the young towards careers in
useful industry. A degree in letters was more prestigious; but scientific
training, the Emperor's Minister of Education asserted, would provide the
non-commissioned officers of the industrial army. "Honor the
concrete!" Let modern languages replace dead ones, let geography and
modern history prepare young minds for contemporary living. Imperial lycées
introduced "industrial classes" that did not call for Latin, offered
commercial courses, installed laboratories and "electromagnetic
apparatus. " By the beginning of the twentieth century more students
preferred "modern humanities" to the classics; by 1962 twice as much
time was spent on the sciences, three times as much on modern languages, as in
the century past. For a long time, however, the numbers involved remained
pitifully small. In 1860 the national secondary system taught 35, 000 students;
in 1930, 67, 000. Nevertheless, in the end Jules Verne proved right. By 1960
their number had risen to 343, 000—more than double the Academic Credit Union's
awesome 157, 000; and only a few years later they passed the half million mark.

Extrapolating
from the present can lead to error or to oversight. Fictional Parisians of the
1960s use copiers, calculators, and fax machines, but know no typewriters or
even steel-nibbed pens. The bankers Michel hates write with quills, and keep
accounts in a

Great
Ledger inscribed in a fine hand by a calligrapher. Even Jules Verne's
imagination needed a starting point; and typewriters, invented in 1867,
patented in 1868—in the United States, of course—were simply not envisaged when
he wrote. In the same vein, our author conceives garments of spun metal, but
not the polyesters that chemical industry developed later; a bookstore like a
warehouse, but no access to merchandise, stacks, or shelves; a multipurpose
piano that can be used as bed, dresser, and commode, but not a world where servants
do not serve at table.

All
nations would be brothers, Hugo had predicted, and Verne agreed because the
world had become one market and the links of commerce drew nations ever closer
(Chapter VII). "No more events, " meant no more sensational or discomforting
happenings; no more wars, revolutions, crises; no more of what Verne called
infernal politics. "All will be happy, " Hugo had concluded. One has
to doubt whether Verne agreed. Still, some of his forecasts brought grist to
Hugo's mill. In Jules Verne's 1960s politics have withered and, since gazettes
were about politics, not news, nobody bothers to read the press:
"journalism has had its day. " So have medicine which ran out of
diseases, and lawyers who, now, would rather settle than go to court. Worst of
the book's errors, war has vanished, armies are no more, armies of businessmen
have replaced them. "When soldiers become mechanics, wars become
ridiculous. " Would it were so. Jules Verne could not know that, by the
time he died, the budget of industry and commerce accounted for 1. 7 percent of
national expenses, the Army for 23. 4 percent. He could not know but, surely,
might have guessed.

When
Jules Verne died in 1904, at seventy-seven, his world fame was a little worn,
his name on a title page no longer sold books like hot cakes. But for two or
three decades after his first triumph in 1863 with
Five Weeks in a
Balloon,
few French novelists, if any, enjoyed comparable world
success. A bestseller in his lifetime, with 1. 6 million copies of his French
editions sold by 1904 and still more after his death, he remains the most
translated of French authors: 224 translations in twenty-three countries.

Son of a
comfortable provincial family, the lad grew up in Nantes, the great port on the
Loire, studied law as his lawyer father wanted, but soon followed his literary
inclinations into the théâtre, writing comedies and operettas (one with music
by Offenbach), then helping to manage the théâtre founded by his friend and
patron, Alexandre Dumas. Married in 1857, he bought into a financial agency,
worked as a broker on the Stock Exchange, but continued to write poems, stories,
lyrics, and plays until Dumas introduced him to his own publisher, Pierre-Jules
Hetzel, editor of Balzac, Hugo, Baudelaire, and George Sand, who was to serialize
and edit the sixty-four-volume series of Verne's "Extraordinary
Voyages" over some forty years.

After
the triumph of
Five Weeks,
Hetzel offered Jules Verne a
contract for three books a year, paid roughly at the same rate that he paid
George Sand, and also hired him as a regular contributor to a young people's
magazine, the
Review of Education and Recreation,
where
many of Verne's novels would be published in serial form. The theatrical
experience was not wasted either, for the storyteller adapted many of his
novels for the stage, notably
Around the World in Eighty Days
(1874),
The Children of Captain Grant
(1878),
Michel Stro
goff (
1880),
and a number of others. Since théâtre was the cinema of those days, the success
of his plays increased both fame and revenues; whilst, unsurprisingly, one of
the first French films made, in 1902, took as its subject an 1865 adventure,
From the Earth to the Moon,
whose original
subtitle read: "A direct crossing in 97 hours and 20 minutes. "

With a
steady income assured, the family moved to Madame Verne's home town, Amiens in
Picardy, to the northwest of Paris, where Jules Verne could pursue his
research in comfort (by 1895 he had accumulated 20, 000 filing cards), attend
the Literary Academy, stroll, and sail. Work never ceased. Like Georges
Simenon, another tireless artisan of letters, the successful author used his
successive boats as floating studies where much of his writing was done. He
traveled. He had always dreamed of discovering faraway lands. Now he could
afford even a voyage to America. But most of his traveling, as before, was done
on the printed page.

In the
generation before Verne's birth a great Revolution, or rather a string of
revolutions going off like firecrackers, had introduced the politics of the impossible.
In his own lifetime, a similar string of technological and scientific
revolutions introduced the impossible into everyday life. Mankind's experience
of space, time, speed, mass, movement, was radically altered. It fell to Jules
Verne to bring this home to millions of readers, explain it, illustrate it,
and suggest what it might mean for generations to come. Fascinated by the new
world transformed by railroads and great steamers, Verne stood at the
crossroads of present and future, a poet of technology, of science, of the
power and the menace that they hold. In 1869, he imagined a mission to the moon
that prefigured the flight of
Apollo
9 one century
later. "Our space vehicle," Frank Borman, the astronaut, wrote to
Verne's grandson, "was launched from Florida, like [Verne's]; it had the
same weight and the same height, and it splashed down in the Pacific a mere two
and a half miles from the point mentioned in the novel. " In 1879 he
evoked the first artificial satellite; in 1882 he wrote about the sort of
cosmic rays that physicists pursued between the two world wars.

The
visionary writes about balloons, helicopters, heavier-than-air machines of
every sort, about the earth (1864) and its geology, about lunar travel (1865,
1870), about polar exploration (1866), about underwater travel (1869), about
electricity which powers the submarine
Nautilus
or produces a
telephote
enabling people to see each other
at a distance; and, of course, he writes about travel and exploration. All his
stories are full of wonders, all a bit ominous, and few are more curious than
the unpublished manuscript that Verne's great-grandson discovered in 1989, when
the sale of a family home forced him to dispense with a great bronze safe long
believed to be empty. The keys to the safe had been lost; it had to be opened
with a blowtorch.