to condense into one. The only other point of contention between Hetzel and Verne revolved around the novel’s title, which Verne thought “said nothing” about the story. Verne juggled several titles in his mind, in fact, in order to arrive at the best “philosophical” definition of the novel: “Parisius or another title like that would work well, but it would have to be in contrast to Berlingotte or another — which is hardly possible. I would like a title along these lines: Golden City and Steel City, A Tale of Two Model Cities” (301). Hetzel, for his part, suggested Steel City (as Verne thought it was more interesting than Good City), but was not convinced that the title could stand on its own. He finally arrived at The Begum’s Inheritance but not without reiterating that the fundamental thesis of the novel had to be grounded on the idea that “steel, force, do not lead to happiness” (302). In the end, what counted the most for Hetzel was that the novel be true to the Vernian spirit and that no one should suspect that another had written it. “Finally, my dear friend,” Hetzel wrote, “it all rests on the idea of not publishing a book that would appear to the public as a book that you could have written but in fact didn’t” (296).
Although The Begum’s Millions did not turn out to be one of Verne’s most successful novels financially, it nonetheless proved to be one his most potent. But did the majority of Verne’s readership consider it to be sufficiently Vernian? According to Charles-Noël Martin, The Begum’s Millions sold only 17,000 copies as compared with most of his previous novels, which averaged around 35,000 and 50,000 in first-run sales.14 Hetzel himself sensed this novel represented something new in Verne’s writing — a new “taste” that he felt confident would add some spice to Verne’s corpus, saying: “My Dear Verne, everything that you have sent me from Begum’s Millions seems to work very well and I believe that it will become a good book, as it has a particular little taste that will do no harm to your (literary) landscape as a whole” (303). What kind of “particular little taste” did Hetzel have in mind? Now with Stanford Luce’s accurate twenty-first-century translation, a new generation of English-speaking readers will be able to judge for themselves how unique and riveting Verne’s complete overhaul of Laurie’s idea truly was. As the old saying goes, a genius can rewrite a lesser writer, but no one can rewrite a genius.
Verne’s “Thanatopia”
“We are sick, that is absolutely certain, we are sick from too much progress,” Emile Zola wrote in Mes haines (1866, My Hatreds). “This victory of nerves over blood has decided our mores, our literature, our whole era.” 15 Can Zola’s famous statement be applied to Jules Verne’s vision of the nineteenth century as well? Although Verne’s most famous works, such as Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours (1874, Around the World in Eighty Days) or Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (1870, Twenty Thousand 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
