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. […] The uproar of the machines was deafening. Pierced by thousands of windows, these gray buildings seemed more living than inert things. But the newcomer was no doubt used to the spectacle, for he paid not the slightest attention to it. (chap. 5)
As Chesneaux has observed, Stahlstadt, far from being the unreal vision of the future dismissed by Hetzel in Paris in the Twentieth Century, is extremely realistic for the late nineteenth century, when steel cities in England, France, and America were generating inhuman working conditions and industrial slums: “[T]he description of Stahlstadt is powerful and glaring with truth. This steel city of the future already foreshadows Le Creusot, the Ruhr, Pittsburgh.”22 As Verne understands it, Stahlstadt is an environmental disaster, hysterically driven by money, greed, and industrial might:
Black macadamized roads, surfaced with cinders and coke, wind along the mountains’ flanks. […] The air is heavy with smoke; it hangs like a somber cloak upon the earth. No birds fly through this area; even the insects appear to avoid it; and, within the memory of man, not a single butterfly has ever been seen. […] Thanks to the power of an enormous capital, this immense establishment, this veritable city which is at the same time a model factory, has arisen from the earth as though from a stroke of a wand. (chap. 5)
Uniform rows of apartments house uniform workers all hired to serve an invisible Baal, whose presence is felt through the roaring of fuming volcano-like smoke stacks: “Here and there, an abandoned mine shaft, worn by the rains, overrun by briars, opens its gaping mouth, a bottomless abyss, like some crater of an extinct volcano” (chap. 5). As Marcel gradually moves up the ladder of the Stahlstadt hierarchy, even earning medals for his efficiency, he finally comes face to face with the nefarious Herr Schultze himself, (who considers him a “find” and “a pearl” [chap. 8]) in a chapter titled “The Dragon’s Lair,” which Simone Vierne views as a type of initiation ritual for the hero.23 Yet it is truly a nekya rather than an initiation as Marcel performs an “Orphic” descent toward Hades, which Dr. Sarrasin describes to him in terms of Manichean peril: “the project would be not only difficult but also perhaps bristling with danger, […] he was risking a sort of descent into hell where hidden abysses might be lurking under his every step” (chap. 16). Yet Marcel’s (and the reader’s) plunge is essentially an economic one during which Marcel, by making a bridge between France and Germany, or rather France-Ville and Stahlstadt, aims to create what might be considered a kind of ideal unified Europe rather than a jingoistic nation-state. Ross Chambers, for example, has pointed out that
Marcel becomes not an individual hero but a figure of his society; and by virtue of his dual, Franco-German identity, the society he figures cannot be either France or Germany but must be something like Europe (a Europe reduced through the ideological limitation of Verne’s vision, to its two major Continental powers). In this reading, the trauma of the French defeat in 1870 would combine with the inhuman conditions brought about by the Industrial Revolution, under the broad aegis of Germany as a figure of death, to form Europe’s own initiatory ordeal — a descent into hell from which a new Europe is destined to emerge.24
It is during Marcel’s tête-à-tête with Herr Schultze that the latter reveals his secret weapons, various crypto-“dirty bombs” that will break up into a myriad of deadly pieces once his gigantic cannon fires them off into France-Ville. Schultze boasts about his invention in terms that are chillingly modern. His claim that “with my system, there are no wounded, just the dead” is preceded by another one, “Every living being within a radius of thirty meters from the center of the explosion is both frozen and asphyxiated!,” and, later, yet another one, “It’s like a battery that I can throw into space and which can carry fire and death to a whole city by covering it with a shower of inextinguishable flames!” (chap. 8). By courageously facing his enemy, Marcel stands up to the rampant French wave of fear regarding Germany’s threat to Europe, which had been propagated through literary and popular political pieces throughout the fin de siècle. With great prescience, Verne touched on a general collective anxiety that would progressively intensify as tensions between Germany and France eventually ballooned into World War I and, later, into World War II.
As Schultze brags about his weapon system, he is also delineating the modus operandi of Stahlstadt itself, which might be seen as more “thanatopia” than dystopia. It is a city pushed toward a kind of nuclear winter avant la lettre rather than world domination. Verne’s worst fears about 1960 Paris are magnified into a diabolical empire firmly based in the realities of the day. Technology is no longer a toy for questing heroes to leap from adventure to adventure; it is rather a direct result of the death drive Freud so accurately pinpointed in Civilization and Its Discontents. As Schultze understands it, Stahlstadt represents the direct opposite of France-Ville’s health
