Paris in the Twentieth Century (3 page)

Temporarily
tucked under a pile of linen, the pages discovered in 1989 were examined later,
authenticated, and identified as a text that Hetzel had rejected late in
1863: "It's a hundred feet below
Five Weeks in a
Balloon.
.. Your Michel is a real goose with his verses. Can't he
carry parcels and remain a poet?" And the clincher: "No one today
will believe your prophecy. " Verne appears to have accepted Hetzel's verdict.
Not so our generation. Published in 1994,
Paris in the
Twentieth Century
proved an unexpected success, with two hundred
thousand copies sold in its first year and thirty translations under way,
including this one.

From the
perspective of our century's end the future that Hetzel found unconvincing
appears more plausible. The young stockbroker who hated the Stock Exchange
warns against capitalism running riot, the young playwright whose plays had not
quite made it warns against a society where culture is at low ebb. Michel is
harnessed to his bank's Great Ledger as Orwell's Winston Smith is to the
Disinformation Office; Michel's bookish uncle sounds like one of the Book
People barely surviving in Ray Bradbury's
Fahrenheit 45L
And yet this arch-critic (and Radical city councillor of Amiens) is also an
arch-conservative, especially in artistic tastes. To Berlioz, Verdi, Wagner, he
prefers Gounod and Offenbach. Contemporary painting, for him, is nonexistent,
Courbet is a gross peasant, painting lost its soul when it abandoned form
(also the literary, poetic, thematic subjects of Romanticism). Let's not
forget that 1863 was the year of the
Salon des refus
é
s,
where Édouard Manet
showed his
D
é
jeuner sur I'herbe:
bad vintage for a Romantic palate.

As for
poetry, if T. S. Eliot could work in a bank, one doesn't see why poor Michel
can't manage. His taste in poetry, at any rate, is odd even for mid- nineteenth
century. When his friend admonishes "Your verses must celebrate the
wonders of industry, " Michel is firm: "Never. " Yet industry's
wonders and its commonplaces inspired Walt Whitman to sing snow shoes,
rainproof coats, and the Brooklyn Bridge, "the latest dates, discoveries,
inventions, societies, authors old and new... " Before too long, Carl
Sandburg praised (ah, woe!) Chicago: "grocer of the world, maker of tools,
champion of railroads, carrier of the nation's freight. " What can one
expect of Americans when even Parisiennes, Verne ruefully admits, are becoming
Americanized? Yet everything can fuel the inspiration of an artist. The
writings of Jules Verne are proof of this. Michel seems to ignore it.

Perhaps
Verne's fascination with science was only secondhand. We know that at Amiens,
where the university today bears his name, one of his own prize- giving
speeches was devoted to a ringing denunciation of the bicycle; and that when,
in 1894, Hetzel telephoned him at his club (his Amiens home lacked the
newfangled contraption), Jules Verne, by now an elderly gentleman, took some
time before he found which end of the receiver to put to his ear. He would be
shocked to learn that in Chiapas, Mexico, the rebel Zapatista leader,
Sub-Commandant Marcos, whom many French intellectuals admire, behaves like a
high tech Robin Hood connected to the Internet and accessible by dialing 3615
Zapata
(Le Monde,
June 29, 1996). Captain Nemo,
take note.

Paris,
1996

On
August 13, 1960, a portion of the Parisian populace headed for the many Metro
stations from which various local trains would take them to what had once been
the Champ-de-Mars. It was Prize Day at the Academic Credit Union, the vast
institution of public education, and over this solemn ceremony His Excellency
the Minister of Improvements of the City of Paris was to preside.

The
Academic Credit Union and the age's industrial aims were in perfect harmony:
what the previous century called Progress had undergone enormous developments.
Monopoly, that ne plus ultra of perfection, held the entire country within its
talons; unions were founded, organized, the unexpected results of their
proliferation would certainly have amazed our fathers.

Money
had never been in short supply, though it was briefly frozen when the State
nationalized the railroads; indeed there was an abundance of capital, and of
capitalists as well, all seeking financial enterprises or industrial deals.

Hence,
we shall not be surprised by what would have astonished a nineteenth-century
Parisian and, among other wonders, by the creation of the Academic Credit
Union, which had functioned successfully for over thirty years, under the
financial leadership of Baron de Vercampin.

By dint
of multiplying university branches, lycées, primary and secondary schools,
Christian seminaries, cramming establishments, as well as the various asylums
and orphanages, some sort of instruction had filtered down to the lowest
layers of the social order. If no one read any longer, at least everyone could
read, could even write. There was no ambitious artisan's son, no alienated
farm boy, who failed to lay claim to an administrative position; the civil service
developed in every possible way, shape, and form; we shall see, later on, what
legions of employees the government controlled, and with what military
precision.

For now,
we need merely report how the means of education necessarily increased with the
number of those to be educated. During the nineteenth century, had not
construction firms, investment companies, and government-controlled corporations
been devised when it became desirable to remake a new France, and a new Paris?

Now,
construction and instruction are one and the same for businessmen, education
being merely a somewhat less solid form of edification.

Such was
the scheme, in 1937, of Baron de Vercampin, notorious for his far-flung
financial dealings: it was his notion to establish a single vast institution,
in which every branch of the tree of knowledge might flourish, it being the
State's responsibility, moreover, to pollard, prune, and patrol such growth to
the best of its ability.

The
Baron merged the lycées of Paris and of the provinces, Sainte-Barbe and Rollin,
as well as the various private institutions, into a single establishment,
thereby centralizing the education of all France; investors responded to his
appeal, for he presented the enterprise as an industrial operation. The Baron's
skill was a guarantee in financial matters. Money flowed in. The Union was
founded.

It was
in 1937, during the reign of Napoleon V, that he had launched the enterprise;
forty million copies of its prospectus were printed, on stationery that read:

ACADEMIC CREDIT UNION

Incorporated by law and testified to
by Maître Mocquart and Colleague, Notaries in Paris, on April 6, 1937, and approved
by the Imperial Decree of May 19, 1937. Capitalized at one hundred million
francs divided into one hundred thousand shares of one thousand francs each

Board
of Directors:

Baron de Vercampin, C., President

De Montaut, O., Manager of the
Orleans Railroad

Vice Presidents

Garassu, Banker

Marquis d'Amphisbon, G. O., Senator

Roquamon, Colonel, Police Corps, G.
C.

Dermangent, Deputy

Frappeloup, General Manager of the
Academic Credit Union

The
Union statutes followed, carefully expressed in financial terms. As is apparent,
no scholar's or professor's name appeared on the Board of Directors, a matter
of some reassurance with regard to the commercial prospects of the enterprise.

A
Government Inspector supervised the Union's operations and reported on them to
the Minister of Improvements of the City of Paris.

The
Baron's notion was a good one, and singularly practical, hence it succeeded
above and beyond all expectations. In 1960, the Academic Union included no
fewer than 157, 342 students, to whom knowledge was imparted by mechanical
means.

It must
be confessed that the study of belles lettres and of ancient languages
(including French) was at this time virtually obsolete; Latin and Greek were
not only dead languages but buried as well; for form's sake, some classes in
literature were still taught, though these were sparsely attended and
inappreciable—indeed anything but appreciated. Dictionaries, manuals,
grammars, study guides and topic notes, classical authors and the entire book
trade in
de Viris,
Quintus-Curtius, Sallust, and Livy
peacefully crumbled to dust on the shelves of the old Hachette publishing
house; but introductions to mathematics, textbooks on civil engineering,
mechanics, physics, chemistry, astronomy, courses in commerce, finance,
industrial arts—whatever concerned the market tendencies of the day—sold by
the millions of copies.

In
short, shares in the Union, which had multiplied tenfold in twenty-two years,
were now worth ten thousand francs apiece.

We shall
insist no further upon the flourishing condition of the Academic Union; the
figures, as an old banking proverb has it, say it all.

Toward
the end of the last century, the École Normale was in evident decline; few
among those young people whose vocation inclined them toward a literary career
sought instruction here; the best among these had already discarded their
academic gowns and flung themselves into the free-for-all of authorship and
journalism; but even this distressing spectacle was no longer in evidence, for
in the last ten years only scientific studies had posted candidates for the
entrance examinations.

Yet if
the last pedagogues of Greek and Latin were vanishing from their deserted
classrooms, what splendid kudos, on the contrary, were awarded the science
professors—and what eminence was theirs when it came to drawing a salary!

The
sciences were now divided into six branches: under the main Division of
Mathematics were ranged subdivisions of arithmetic, geometry, and algebra;
there followed the main Divisions of Astronomy, Mechanics, Chemistry, and, most
important of all, the Applied Sciences, with subdivisions of metallurgy,
factory construction, mechanics, and chemistry adapted to the arts.

The
living languages, except French, were in high favor; they were granted special
consideration; in these disciplines an enthusiastic philologist might learn the
two thousand languages and four thousand dialects spoken the world over. The
Department of Chinese, for example, had included a great number of students
ever since the colonization of Cochin China.

The
Academic Credit Union possessed enormous buildings, constructed on the former
Champs-de-Mars, now useless since there was no budgetary appropriation for
martial undertakings. The site was a city in itself, a veritable metropolis
with its different neighborhoods, its squares, streets, palaces, churches, and
barracks, something like Nantes or Bordeaux, capable of accommodating one
hundred and eighty thousand souls, including those of the professors and
instructors.

A
monumental arch opened onto the enormous main courtyard, known as the Study
Field and surrounded by the Science Docks. Refectories, dormitories, the
general study halls, where three thousand students could be accommodated, were
well worth visiting, though they no longer astonished people accustomed, in
the last fifty years, to similar wonders.

Hence
the crowd eagerly made its way to this prize-giving ceremony, an invariably
interesting observance which managed to attract, whether as friends,
relatives, or merely observers, some five hundred thousand persons. The bulk of
the crowd flowed in through the Grenelle station, then located at the end of
the Rue de l'Universit
é
.

Yet
despite the influx of this enormous public, everything proceeded in an orderly
fashion; government employees, less zealous and consequently less intolerable
than the agents of the old companies, deliberately left all the gates open; it
had taken a hundred and fifty years to acknowledge this truth, that in dealing
with crowds, it is wiser to multiply exits than to limit them.

The
Study Field was sumptuously prepared for the Ceremony; but there is no space so
great that it cannot eventually be filled, and the main courtyard soon reached
its capacity.

At three
o'clock the Minister of Improvements of the City of Paris made his formal
entrance, accompanied by Baron de Vercampin and the members of the Board of
Directors, the baron at His Excellency's right, Monsieur Frappeloup at his
left; from the dais, a sea of heads as far as the eye could see. Then the
various Establishment bands began playing their many selections, their tones
and rhythms frequently unreconcilable. This obligatory cacophony seemed to have
no ill effect upon the half million pairs of ears which absorbed it.

The
Ceremony began. A murmurous silence fell— this was the moment of the speeches.

In the
preceding century, a certain humorist by the name of Karr
[2]
treated these prize-giving
orations, more official jargon than actual Latin, as they deserved; at