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 to the Saxon race, and, as a consequence, its total disappearance from the surface of the globe” (chap. 4). A chemist and the author of a treatise titled Why Are All Frenchman Stricken in Different Degrees with Hereditary Degeneration?, Schultze feels compelled to erect his military-industrial dystopia as a countermeasure to Sarrasin’s racial inferiority and dangerously visionary aspirations:
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
