such would not have been the case for the subject that gave Travel Scholarships its topicality at the end of the nineteenth century: the tension between nationalism(s) and internationalism. It was the historian Jean Chesneaux, one of the pioneers of Vernian criticism, who noted in 1971 that
Verne’s demonstration of the artificial, ephemeral and unstable character of territorial sovereignty is carried to its extreme in the case of the Lesser Antilles (and all the more forcibly because here it is a question of colonial sovereignty and therefore doubly questionable). This novel, Travelling Scholarships, is normally regarded as one of Verne’s weaker works—at least by those who do not take the trouble to seek the key to his political thinking. In point of fact, the demonstration is both vigorous and unconventional.37
From the outset, the Antillean School extrapolated a united and peaceful Europe, which was still far from being realized, as two disastrous wars would soon testify in the following decades. This utopian vision, represented by an educational institution that ensures an ideal instruction—“a very practical as well as a very complete education in all matters literary, scientific, industrial, and commercial” (Part I, chap. 1)—is neatly summarized by the organizer of the journey to the Antilles, Mrs. Seymour, who declares to the laureates: “I don’t see here any English, French, Dutch, Swedes, or Danes, no! Only Antilleans, my compatriots!” (Part II, chap. 6). In reality, of course, such an “Antillean” community has never existed, as national interests have always gotten the better of diplomatic agreements. The noble aspirations of the director of the Antillean School “to strengthen and fuse the young men’s diverse temperaments and mixed personalities, which such different nationalities present” (Part I, chap. 1) developed into the ingenious idea of imposing different languages on the students in turn and in equal measure, regardless of the relative importance of their respective nations: “One week, English was spoken; the next, French was spoken; then Dutch, Spanish, Danish, and Swedish” (Part I, chap. 1). This impressive notion recalls the linguistic talents of Professor Otto Lidenbrock, about whom the narrator of Journey to the Center of the Earth declared that “he was reputed to be a genuine polyglot: not that he spoke fluently the 2,000 languages and 4,000 dialects employed on the surface of this globe, but he did know his fair share.”38
This plurilingual ideal strikes an obvious contrast with the author’s personal situation: throughout his whole life, Verne never spoke any language other than French. In 1903, in his old age, however, he agreed to become the honorary president of the Esperantists of Amiens and to propagate the idea of a universal language in a future novel. In order to understand this course of action, which went beyond the internationalism espoused in Travel Scholarships, it is essential to recognize the cultural standing that the French have always attributed to their mother tongue, the loss of which—even in part—was seen as a loss of identity. Since 1890, Verne himself had been a very active proponent of the Alliance Française, a patriot organization whose aim was to disseminate, with obvious political intentions, the French language and culture throughout the world in order to confront the expansion of English and German, especially in the colonies. In the summer of 1903, while Travel Scholarships was being published, Verne began his last novel, Study Trip (Voyage d’études), which was supposed to extol the advantages of Esperanto. In the text, he intentionally poked fun at “those good French, perhaps too patriotic, who consider their language to be superior to any other, able to suffice in all circumstances.”39 Study Trip, like his first novel, was intended to take the reader across the breadth of sub-Saharan Africa. But it remained unfinished: after five chapters of drafts, Verne abandoned the project.
Verne’s attitudes toward internationalism are quite complicated and require a more nuanced analysis. In Travel Scholarships, he contrasts the noble and altruistic internationalism of the boys from the Antillean School against the anarchy and selfishness of the pirates led by Harry Markel, ruthless outlaws who do not respect a single human value and who, as the narrator repeatedly suggests, live in a community of criminality without any national attachment. One remembers in this regard the crew of the Nautilus under Captain Nemo in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, whose members cut themselves completely off from their countries and even create their own artificial language, to bind them together and to separate them from the rest of humanity. Even if Captain Nemo justifies his actions in order to avenge and support oppressed peoples, his half-criminal character remains highly ambiguous throughout the novel. No such ambiguity exists in another Verne novel, For the Flag (1896, Face au drapeau), where pirates from many different nations live in the interior of “Back Cup,” a small island in the Bermudas, and force the French chemist Thomas Roch to attack his own country’s ships with a new, powerful weapon of his own invention. When the narrator of For the Flag insists that “patriotic sentiments … are the very essence of the citizen” (chap. 1), he denounces the absence of such feelings among the pirates, who come together only as a power-driven collective: “But, if these inhabitants of Back Cup are not bound by ties of race, they are certainly so tied by bonds of instinct and appetite” (chap. 9). Although the inventor Roch, driven mad, seems to share these purely egotistical instincts, he recoils at the last moment and refuses to destroy a warship flying the French flag in an international squadron of naval vessels. Even though this novel is easily one of the most patriotic of the Extraordinary Voyages, the moral of the story is still that the common good can only be assured by an alliance wrought between rival nations.
In Study Trip, it can be deduced from the narrator’s comments that Esperanto would not be a substitute for existing national languages. Rather, it would serve as a tool, an egalitarian link to enable better communication and, by extension, better understanding between people of different ethnicities. Even while promoting the utopian ideal of the Antillean School, the narrator of Travel Scholarships remains well aware of the factors limiting its plausibility, given that “Sometimes racial instincts, more powerful than good examples and good advice, won the day” (Part I, chap. 1). In line with nineteenth-century beliefs, Verne considered national character to be a natural trait, and he made use of such stereotypes when describing his characters in Travel Scholarships and in other Extraordinary Voyages: the French are imperturbably odd, the English are proud, the Danish cold and reserved, the Americans energetic but impatient, and the Dutch phlegmatic. In A Two Years’ Vacation, Verne was very explicit about wanting to present his readers with “a band of children from eight to thirteen years old, abandoned on an island, fighting for life amidst passions fueled by differences in nationality”40 (especially between French and English, with the American Gordon playing the part of mediator). These conflicts are much more attenuated in Travel Scholarships and, if they do arise from time to time, they are quickly resolved. Patriotism is considered a healthy and natural attitude so long as it respects other nationalities, but it risks becoming ridiculous or arrogant when it exceeds its limits (consider the exorbitant patriotism of the Frenchman Henry Barrand or the Englishman Roger Hinsdale, for example). Or as Doctor Clawbonny so superbly put it in another Verne novel: “You can’t swim 300 miles, even if you’re the best Briton on earth. Even patriotism has its limits.”41
On a more serious note, the numerous changes in nationality of the Lesser Antilles since the seventeenth century (which Verne dutifully details for each island) make the bloody battles fought over them by European powers appear quite absurd. The novelist juxtaposes the egotistical claims and shortsightedness of humans with the slow and unstoppable workings of nature that incessantly transform
