The Begum's Millions. Jules Verne
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 mission in its sociopathic goals: “You see! […] We’re doing the opposite of what the founders of France-Ville do! We’re finding the secret ways of shortening lives while they seek to lengthen them. But their work is doomed, for it is from death — sown by us — that life is to be born” (chap. 8). For Schultze, the death drive is a narcotic that fuels his quasi-Nietzchean outlook:
Right, good, and evil are purely relative things, and all a matter of convention. There is no absolute except the great laws of nature. The law of living competitively is just as natural as the law of gravity. Resisting it is utter inanity; to accept it and act according to its precepts is both reasonable and wise — which is why I shall destroy Dr. Sarrasin’s city. Thanks to my cannon, my fifty thousand Germans will easily make an end of the hundred thousand dreamers over there who constitute a group condemned to perish! (102)
Yet, as Yves Chevrel has pointed out, despite all of Schultze’s wickedness, Verne in fact gives him a uniquely grandiose death in which, “mummified like a pharaoh and wildly enlarged in the eyes of his observers, he remains a master of evil even in death. He is the only one of Verne’s heroes — malevolent or benevolent — to survive in this manner.”25 When Verne first read the original version of The Begum’s Millions, he remarked that “the Steel City, because it is described in detail and the hero walks around its streets and brings us with him, is more interesting than the Good City, a city that […] we do not get to visit” (Correspondance, 294). Verne even suggests that Schultze should resemble Captain Nemo, who is also driven by a thanatosian desire in his hatred for civilization above ground, and for a love of the freedom found beneath the seas: “The head of the canon factory should have been a Nemo, and not this fellow who is ridiculous” (184). If Nemo could proclaim his aquatic battle cry: “Only here is there independence, here I do not recognize any master, here I am free!,” there is little doubt that the monstrous Schultze, created ten years later, incarnated the lack of freedom to be found in many late-nineteenth-century industrialized cities.
When Marcel finds Schultze’s frozen, magnified body in his laboratory after the latter’s chemical explosion backfires on him, Verne seems to be warning us of the road to destruction that technology might be leading humanity toward. As Marcel looks upon the frozen Schultze in stunned silence, he notices that he was frozen in the act of writing. While the abandoned Stahlstadt resembles a “cemetery” where “Death alone seemed to float over the city, whose tall chimneys reared above the horizon like so many skeletons” (chap. 16), Schultze’s last words once again irrationally call for the total destruction of France-Ville: “I want France-Ville to be a dead city within two weeks, that no inhabitant survive. A modern Pompeii is what I must have, and at the same time it must provoke the fear and astonishment of the whole world” (chap. 18). Although Schultze’s nuclear-bomb-like missile is spun into space, and provokes a collective sigh of relief from the whole world as it is doomed to orbit the earth forever, Verne seems to warn us that, while the world was spared this time, we must be vigilant in the future, lest new evil scientists try to continue where Schultze left off.
If France-Ville appears more unrealistic in its utopian vision than Stahlstadt in its dystopian one, perhaps