The Begum's Millions
Encyclopedia
The Begum's Fortune also published as The Begum's Millions, is an 1879
novel by Jules Verne
, with some elements which could be described as utopia
n and others which seem clearly dystopia
n. It is remarkable as the first published book in which Verne was cautionary and to some degree pessimistic about the development of science and technology. (Verne's very first book, Paris in the Twentieth Century, was very pessimistic in this respect - but for that reason it was rejected by the publishers and was only discovered and published many decades after Verne's death.)
As came out long after the book's publication, it is actually based on a manuscript by Paschal Grousset
, a Corsican revolutionary who had participated in the Paris Commune
and was at the time living in exile in the USA and London. It was bought by Pierre-Jules Hetzel
, the publisher of most of Verne’s books. The attribution of plot elements between Grousset's original text and Verne's work on it has not been completely defined. Later, Verne worked similarly on two more books by Grousset and published them under his name, before the revolutionary finally got a pardon and was able to return to France and resume publication in his own name.
The book first appeared in a hasty and poorly done English translation soon after its publication in French - one of the bad translations which are considered to have damaged Verne's reputation in the English-speaking world
. W. H. G. Kingston was near death and deeply in debt at the time. His wife, Mrs. A. K. Kingston, who did the translation for him, was certainly otherwise preoccupied than with the accuracy of the text and may have had to rely on outside help. Recently, a new translation from the French was made by Stanford L. Luce and published by Wesleyan University
.
I. O. Evans in his introduction to his "Fitzroy Edition" of The Begum's Fortune suggested a connection between the creation of artificial satellites in this novel and the publication of The Brick Moon
by Edward Everett Hale
in 1879.
and married the immensely rich widow of one of its native princes - the begum
of the title.
One of the inheritors is a gentle French
physician, Dr. Sarrasin, who has long been concerned with the unsanitary conditions of the European cities. He decides to use his share of the inheritance to establish a utopia
n model city which would be constructed and maintained with public health as the primary concern of its government. (His name is homophonous
with Saracen
, the Muslims
of the time of the Crusades
known for their knowledge of medicine and hygiene.)
The other inheritor is a far from gentle, German
scientist Prof. Schultze - very stereotypically
presented as an arrogant militarist
and racist
, who becomes increasingly power-mad in the course of the book. Though having had himself a French grandmother, (otherwise he would not have gotten the inheritance), he is completely convinced of the innate superiority of the "Saxon" (i.e., German) over the "Latin" (primarily, the French) which would lead to the eventual total destruction of the latter by the former. Immediately when first introduced to the reader he is in the process of composing a supposedly scholarly paper entitled "Why do all French people suffer, to one degree or another, from hereditary degeneration?", to be published in the German "Physiological Annals" (though his official academic specialty is Chemistry). Later it is disclosed that Schultze had done considerable "research" and publication conclusively proving the superiority of the German race over the rest of humanity.
The Utopian plans of his distant French cousin not only seem to Schultze stupid and meaningless, but are positively wrong for the very fact that they issue from a Frenchman and are designed to block "progress" which decreed that the degenerate French are due to be subdued by the Germans. Schultze proposes to use his half of the inheritance for constructing his own kind of utopia - a city devoted to the production of ever more powerful and destructive weapons - and even before the first stone was laid in either city, vows to destroy Sarrasin's creation.
The two (each one separately) quite improbably manage to get the United States
to cede its sovereignty over large parts of the Pacific Northwest
, so as to enable the creation of two competing city-states, located at southern Oregon
at a distance of forty kilometres of each other on either side of the Cascades - a tranquil French city of 100,000 on the western side, and a bustling German city of 50,000 to the east, with its industrial and mining operations extending far eastward, causing extensive pollution and environmental destruction as far as The Red Desert in Wyoming
(see http://www.wyomingoutdoorcouncil.org/programs/reddesert/index.php,http://www.wyomingoutdoorcouncil.org/news/newsletter/docs/2003c/).
Verne gives the precise location of Sarrasin's "Ville-France" (France-Ville or Frankville in English translations) - on the Southern Oregon sea shore, eighty kilometres north of Cape Blanco
, at
43°11'3" North, 124°41'17" West. This would place it at the southern end of Coos County, Oregon
- a county which already existed at the time, though very thinly populated (and remained so, having 62,779 inhabitants as of 2000).
The nearest real-life town seems to be Bandon
with a 2,833 population registered in the same 2000 census, located slightly north-east of the site of Ville-France, (see http://www.el.com/to/bandon/), and which was founded by the Irish peer George Bennet in 1873 - one year after Verne's date for the creation of Ville-France. The Coquille River
, at whose southern bank Bandon is located, is presumably the unnamed "small river of sweet mountain waters" which Verne describes as providing Ville-France's water.
As depicted by Verne, brief negotiations with the Oregon Legislature in December 1871 suffice to secure the grant of a 16 kilometre-wide area extending from the Pacific shore to the peaks of the Cascades, "with a sovereignty similar to that of Monaco
" and the stipulation that after an unspecified number of years it would revert to full US sovereignty (Verne does not mention any United States Department of State
or Congressional
involvement in the deal). Actual construction begins in January 1872, and by April of the same year the first train from New York pulls into the Ville-France Railway Station, a trunk line from Sacramento
having been completed.
The houses and public facilities of "Ville-France" are constructed by a large number of Chinese
migrant workers
- who are sent away once the city is complete, with the payment of their salaries specifically dependent on their signing an obligation never to return. Reviewer Paul Kincaid noted that "The Chinese coolies employed to build the French utopia are then hurriedly dispatched back to San Francisco, since they are not fit to reside in this best of all cities" http://www.sfsite.com/03a/bm219.htm.
The book justifies the exclusion of the Chinese as being a precaution needed in order to avoid in advance the "difficulties created in other places" by the presence of Chinese communities. This might be an oblique reference to the Chinese Massacre of 1871
, when a mob entered Los Angeles
' Chinatown
, indiscriminately burning Chinese-occupied buildings and killing at least 20 Chinese American
residents out of a total of some 200 then living in the city.
Most of the action takes place in Schultze's "Steel City" (Stahlstadt) - a vast industrial and mining complex, where ores are taken out of the earth, made into steel and the steel into ever more deadly arms, of which this has become within a few years the world's biggest producer. The now immensely rich Schultze is Steel City's dictator, whose very word is law and who makes all significant decisions personally. There is no mention of Steel City's precise legal status vis-a-vis the Oregon or US Federal authorities, but clearly Schultze behaves as a completely independent head of state (except that he uses Dollars rather than mint his own currency).
The strongly fortified city is built in concentric circles, each separated from the next by a high wall, with the mysterious "Tower of the Bull" - Schultze's own abode - at its center. The workers are under a semi-military discipline, with complex metallurgical operations carried out with a Teutonic split-second precision. A worker straying into where and what he is not authorised to see and know is punished with immediate expulsion in the outer sectors and with death in the sensitive inner ones. However, the workers' conditions seem rather decent by Nineteenth Century standards: there are none of the hovels which characterised many working-class districts of the time, and competence is rewarded with rapid promotion by the paternalistic Schultze and his underlings.
Dr. Sarrasin, in contrast, is a rather passive figure - a kind of non-hereditary constitutional monarch
who, after the original initiative to found Ville-France, does not take any significant decision in the rest of the book. The book's real protagonist, who offers active resistance to Schultze's dark reign and his increasingly satanic designs, is a younger Frenchman - the Alsatian
Marcel Bruckmann, native of the part of France forcibly annexed by Germany in the recent war.
The dashing Bruckmann - an Alsatian with a German family name and fiercely patriotic French heart - manages to penetrate Steel City. As an Alsatian, he is a fluent speaker of German, an indispensable condition for entering the thoroughly Germanised Steel City, and is able to pass himself off as being Swiss - "Elsässisch", the German dialect spoken in Alsace, being very close to Swiss German. He quickly rises high in its hierarchy, gains Schultze's personal confidence, spies out some of the tyrant's well-kept secrets and brings a warning to his French friends. It turns out that Schultze is not content to produce arms, but fully intends to use them himself - first against the hated Ville-France, as a first step towards his explicit ambition of establishing Germany's worldwide rule.(He casually mentions a plan to seize "some islands off Japan
" in order to further the same.)
Two fearsome weapons are being made ready - a super-cannon capable of firing massive incendiary
charges over a distance of 40 km (just the distance from Steel City to Ville-France), and shells filled with gas. The latter seems to give Verne credit for the very first prediction of chemical warfare
, nearly twenty years before H. G. Wells
's "black smoke
" in The War of the Worlds. Schultze's gas is designed not only to suffocate its victims but at the same time also freeze them. A special projectile is filled with compressed liquid carbon dioxide that, when released, instantly lowers the surrounding temperature to a hundred degrees Celsius below zero, quick-freezing every living thing in the vicinity.
Ville-France prepares as well as it can, but there is not very much to do against such weapons. Schultze, however, meets with poetic justice
. Firstly, the incendiary charge fired by the super-cannon at Ville-France not only renders the cannon unusable, but also misses its mark. The charge flies harmlessly over the city and into space, apparently owing to Shultze's failure to account for the roundness of the globe when firing a projectile over such distances. Secondly, as Schultze sits in his secret office, preparing for the final assault and writing out the order to his men to bring him the frozen bodies of Sarrasin and Bruckmann to be displayed in public, a gas projectile which he kept in the office accidentally explodes and feeds him his own deadly medicine.
The entire edifice of "Steel City" collapses, since Schultze had kept everything in his own hands and never appointed any deputy. It goes bankrupt and becomes a ghost town. Sarrasin and Bruckmann take it over with the only resistance offered being from two rather dimwitted Schultze bodyguards who stayed behind when everybody else left. Schultze would remain forevermore in his self-made tomb, on display as he had planned to do to his foes, while the good Frenchmen take over direction of Steel City in order to let it "serve a good cause from now on." (Arms production would go on, however, so as "to make Ville-France so strong that nobody would dare attack it ever again".)
, with its main villain being described by critics as "a proto-Hitler
" (see http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/02/AR2006030201547.html). It reflects the mindset prevailing in France
following its defeat in the Franco-German War
of 1870-1871, displaying a bitter anti-German
bias completely absent from pre-1871 Verne works such as Journey to the Center of the Earth
where all protagonists (save one Icelander) are Germans, and quite sympathetic ones. In his extensive review of Verne's works, Walter A. McDougall
commented with the regard to The Begum's Millions: "After the Franco-Prussian War, Verne began to invent mad scientists and evil geniuses"http://www.fpri.org/ww/0204.200109.mcdougall.vernes.html.
Throughout the book, Verne repeatedly ridicules Schultze's racist ideas and their author (the word "Vaterland" in German continually occurs within the French rendering of Schultze's diatribes). As reviewer Paul Kincaid points out (see http://www.sfsite.com/03a/bm219.htm), Verne's ridiculing of the German's ethnic stereotyping can be regarded as itself part of an ethnic stereotyping in the opposite direction.
A more obvious ethnic stereotyping is the repeated references to Schultze eating nothing but sausages and sauerkraut
in enormous quantities, washed down by huge mugs of beer - even after becoming one the richest people in the world, who could afford any kind of delicacies. In one scene he is shown commiserating with the benighted nations which are denied the benefits of the above-mentioned foods. For his part, the disguised French spy Bruckmann heartily loathes the same kind of food, but dutifully ingests it day after day in the patriotic interest of gaining Schulze's confidence - somewhat ironic, as both ingredients are quite common in Alsatian cuisine, and in combination as choucroute garnie
now a common dish across France.
The book, in Hebrew
translation, enjoyed some popularity in 1950's Israel
. The depiction of Schultze and the Divine Retribution which eventually overtakes him were very much in tune with prevailing Israeli attitudes at the time. Following the Holocaust
, Israeli Jews had an even stronger reason to be bitter at Germans than French people of the 1870s. However, the Hebrew version omitted a passage in the original (Chapter 11) where Octave Sarrasin, the doctor's dissolute son, is being cheated by "foreigners with long noses" as well as ones belonging to "the black and yellow races".
(Original French title: "Face au drapeau"), published in 1896: French patriotism
faced with the threat of futuristic super-weapons (what would now be called weapons of mass destruction
) and emerging victorious. In both books, a symbolic extension of France (the Utopian community of Ville-France in the one book, a French warship is in the other) is threatened with a fearsome WMD and seems doomed, only to be saved in the very last moment. In the one book the weapon is created by a sworn and fanatic enemy of France, who is destroyed by his own weapon; in the other, it is the creation of a renegade Frenchman, who at the moment of truth returns to his allegiance and destroys his weapon and himself rather than shoot on the Tricolour
. Either way, both books end - and are clearly designed to end - with the material and moral victory of France.
. As Marcel departs into United States and ultimately into Steel City, Octave, deprived of Marcel's guidance, with the newly inherited riches at hand, is allowed to follow his own frivolous ways. However, having wasted much of his father's fortune and finally realizing the absurdity of his existence, Octave arrives at Ville-France (much to the joy of his parents), reunites with Marcel and becomes his courageous and trusted companion.
Versions
Resources
1879 in literature
The year 1879 in literature involved some significant new books.-Events:* The Rabelais Club is founded in London, holding a literary dinner once every two months...
novel by Jules Verne
Jules Verne
Jules Gabriel Verne was a French author who pioneered the science fiction genre. He is best known for his novels Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea , A Journey to the Center of the Earth , and Around the World in Eighty Days...
, with some elements which could be described as utopia
Utopia
Utopia is an ideal community or society possessing a perfect socio-politico-legal system. The word was imported from Greek by Sir Thomas More for his 1516 book Utopia, describing a fictional island in the Atlantic Ocean. The term has been used to describe both intentional communities that attempt...
n and others which seem clearly dystopia
Dystopia
A dystopia is the idea of a society in a repressive and controlled state, often under the guise of being utopian, as characterized in books like Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four...
n. It is remarkable as the first published book in which Verne was cautionary and to some degree pessimistic about the development of science and technology. (Verne's very first book, Paris in the Twentieth Century, was very pessimistic in this respect - but for that reason it was rejected by the publishers and was only discovered and published many decades after Verne's death.)
As came out long after the book's publication, it is actually based on a manuscript by Paschal Grousset
Paschal Grousset
Jean François Paschal Grousset was a French politician, journalist, translator and science fiction writer. Grousset published under the pseudonyms of André Laurie, Philippe Daryl, Tiburce Moray and Léopold Virey.Grousset was born in Corte, Corsica, and studied medicine before commencing a...
, a Corsican revolutionary who had participated in the Paris Commune
Paris Commune
The Paris Commune was a government that briefly ruled Paris from March 18 to May 28, 1871. It existed before the split between anarchists and Marxists had taken place, and it is hailed by both groups as the first assumption of power by the working class during the Industrial Revolution...
and was at the time living in exile in the USA and London. It was bought by Pierre-Jules Hetzel
Hetzel
Hetzel may refer to:*Pierre-Jules Hetzel, a French editor and publisher best known for his illustrated publications of Jules Verne's novels.*Basil Hetzel, an Australian medical researcher who has made a major contribution to combating iodine deficiency...
, the publisher of most of Verne’s books. The attribution of plot elements between Grousset's original text and Verne's work on it has not been completely defined. Later, Verne worked similarly on two more books by Grousset and published them under his name, before the revolutionary finally got a pardon and was able to return to France and resume publication in his own name.
The book first appeared in a hasty and poorly done English translation soon after its publication in French - one of the bad translations which are considered to have damaged Verne's reputation in the English-speaking world
Anglosphere
Anglosphere is a neologism which refers to those nations with English as the most common language. The term can be used more specifically to refer to those nations which share certain characteristics within their cultures based on a linguistic heritage, through being former British colonies...
. W. H. G. Kingston was near death and deeply in debt at the time. His wife, Mrs. A. K. Kingston, who did the translation for him, was certainly otherwise preoccupied than with the accuracy of the text and may have had to rely on outside help. Recently, a new translation from the French was made by Stanford L. Luce and published by Wesleyan University
Wesleyan University
Wesleyan University is a private liberal arts college founded in 1831 and located in Middletown, Connecticut. According to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Wesleyan is the only Baccalaureate College in the nation that emphasizes undergraduate instruction in the arts and...
.
I. O. Evans in his introduction to his "Fitzroy Edition" of The Begum's Fortune suggested a connection between the creation of artificial satellites in this novel and the publication of The Brick Moon
The Brick Moon
"The Brick Moon" is a short story by Edward Everett Hale, published serially in The Atlantic Monthly starting in 1869. It is a work of speculative fiction containing the first known depiction of an artificial satellite.- Synopsis :...
by Edward Everett Hale
Edward Everett Hale
Edward Everett Hale was an American author, historian and Unitarian clergyman. He was a child prodigy who exhibited extraordinary literary skills and at age thirteen was enrolled at Harvard University where he graduated second in his class...
in 1879.
Plot summary
Two men receive the news that they are part-inheritors to a vast fortune due to being the last surviving descendants of a French soldier-of-fortune who many years before settled in IndiaIndia
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...
and married the immensely rich widow of one of its native princes - the begum
Begum
Begum, Begam or Baigum is a Turkic title given to female family members of a Baig or 'Beg', a higher official. The term Begum is derived from the word Beg, and means a female member of the Beg's family.Also used Begzadi, for Ex...
of the title.
One of the inheritors is a gentle French
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
physician, Dr. Sarrasin, who has long been concerned with the unsanitary conditions of the European cities. He decides to use his share of the inheritance to establish a utopia
Utopia
Utopia is an ideal community or society possessing a perfect socio-politico-legal system. The word was imported from Greek by Sir Thomas More for his 1516 book Utopia, describing a fictional island in the Atlantic Ocean. The term has been used to describe both intentional communities that attempt...
n model city which would be constructed and maintained with public health as the primary concern of its government. (His name is homophonous
Homophone
A homophone is a word that is pronounced the same as another word but differs in meaning. The words may be spelled the same, such as rose and rose , or differently, such as carat, caret, and carrot, or to, two, and too. Homophones that are spelled the same are also both homographs and homonyms...
with Saracen
Saracen
Saracen was a term used by the ancient Romans to refer to a people who lived in desert areas in and around the Roman province of Arabia, and who were distinguished from Arabs. In Europe during the Middle Ages the term was expanded to include Arabs, and then all who professed the religion of Islam...
, the Muslims
Islamic Golden Age
During the Islamic Golden Age philosophers, scientists and engineers of the Islamic world contributed enormously to technology and culture, both by preserving earlier traditions and by adding their own inventions and innovations...
of the time of the Crusades
Crusades
The Crusades were a series of religious wars, blessed by the Pope and the Catholic Church with the main goal of restoring Christian access to the holy places in and near Jerusalem...
known for their knowledge of medicine and hygiene.)
The other inheritor is a far from gentle, German
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
scientist Prof. Schultze - very stereotypically
Stereotype
A stereotype is a popular belief about specific social groups or types of individuals. The concepts of "stereotype" and "prejudice" are often confused with many other different meanings...
presented as an arrogant militarist
Militarism
Militarism is defined as: the belief or desire of a government or people that a country should maintain a strong military capability and be prepared to use it aggressively to defend or promote national interests....
and racist
Racism
Racism is the belief that inherent different traits in human racial groups justify discrimination. In the modern English language, the term "racism" is used predominantly as a pejorative epithet. It is applied especially to the practice or advocacy of racial discrimination of a pernicious nature...
, who becomes increasingly power-mad in the course of the book. Though having had himself a French grandmother, (otherwise he would not have gotten the inheritance), he is completely convinced of the innate superiority of the "Saxon" (i.e., German) over the "Latin" (primarily, the French) which would lead to the eventual total destruction of the latter by the former. Immediately when first introduced to the reader he is in the process of composing a supposedly scholarly paper entitled "Why do all French people suffer, to one degree or another, from hereditary degeneration?", to be published in the German "Physiological Annals" (though his official academic specialty is Chemistry). Later it is disclosed that Schultze had done considerable "research" and publication conclusively proving the superiority of the German race over the rest of humanity.
The Utopian plans of his distant French cousin not only seem to Schultze stupid and meaningless, but are positively wrong for the very fact that they issue from a Frenchman and are designed to block "progress" which decreed that the degenerate French are due to be subdued by the Germans. Schultze proposes to use his half of the inheritance for constructing his own kind of utopia - a city devoted to the production of ever more powerful and destructive weapons - and even before the first stone was laid in either city, vows to destroy Sarrasin's creation.
The two (each one separately) quite improbably manage to get the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
to cede its sovereignty over large parts of the Pacific Northwest
Pacific Northwest
The Pacific Northwest is a region in northwestern North America, bounded by the Pacific Ocean to the west and, loosely, by the Rocky Mountains on the east. Definitions of the region vary and there is no commonly agreed upon boundary, even among Pacific Northwesterners. A common concept of the...
, so as to enable the creation of two competing city-states, located at southern Oregon
Oregon
Oregon is a state in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. It is located on the Pacific coast, with Washington to the north, California to the south, Nevada on the southeast and Idaho to the east. The Columbia and Snake rivers delineate much of Oregon's northern and eastern...
at a distance of forty kilometres of each other on either side of the Cascades - a tranquil French city of 100,000 on the western side, and a bustling German city of 50,000 to the east, with its industrial and mining operations extending far eastward, causing extensive pollution and environmental destruction as far as The Red Desert in Wyoming
Wyoming
Wyoming is a state in the mountain region of the Western United States. The western two thirds of the state is covered mostly with the mountain ranges and rangelands in the foothills of the Eastern Rocky Mountains, while the eastern third of the state is high elevation prairie known as the High...
(see http://www.wyomingoutdoorcouncil.org/programs/reddesert/index.php,http://www.wyomingoutdoorcouncil.org/news/newsletter/docs/2003c/).
Verne gives the precise location of Sarrasin's "Ville-France" (France-Ville or Frankville in English translations) - on the Southern Oregon sea shore, eighty kilometres north of Cape Blanco
Cape Blanco (Oregon)
Cape Blanco is a prominent headland on the Pacific Ocean coast of southwestern Oregon in the United States, forming the westernmost point in the state. It contests with Cape Alava in Washington for the title of westernmost point in the contiguous United States...
, at
43°11'3" North, 124°41'17" West. This would place it at the southern end of Coos County, Oregon
Coos County, Oregon
-National protected areas:*Bandon Marsh National Wildlife Refuge*Oregon Islands National Wildlife Refuge *Siskiyou National Forest *Siuslaw National Forest - Incorporated cities:- Unincorporated communities and CDPs:-See also:...
- a county which already existed at the time, though very thinly populated (and remained so, having 62,779 inhabitants as of 2000).
The nearest real-life town seems to be Bandon
Bandon, Oregon
- Economy :Like many communities on the Oregon coast, Bandon had significant fishing and timber industries, which were greatly diminished by the 1980s, though some remnants still exist. Bandon's current economy revolves around wood products, fishing, tourism, and agriculture...
with a 2,833 population registered in the same 2000 census, located slightly north-east of the site of Ville-France, (see http://www.el.com/to/bandon/), and which was founded by the Irish peer George Bennet in 1873 - one year after Verne's date for the creation of Ville-France. The Coquille River
Coquille River
The Coquille River is a stream long, in southwestern Oregon in the United States. It drains a mountainous area of of the Southern Oregon Coast Range into the Pacific Ocean. Its watershed is located between that of the Coos River to the north and the Rogue River to the south.-Geography:The river,...
, at whose southern bank Bandon is located, is presumably the unnamed "small river of sweet mountain waters" which Verne describes as providing Ville-France's water.
As depicted by Verne, brief negotiations with the Oregon Legislature in December 1871 suffice to secure the grant of a 16 kilometre-wide area extending from the Pacific shore to the peaks of the Cascades, "with a sovereignty similar to that of Monaco
Monaco
Monaco , officially the Principality of Monaco , is a sovereign city state on the French Riviera. It is bordered on three sides by its neighbour, France, and its centre is about from Italy. Its area is with a population of 35,986 as of 2011 and is the most densely populated country in the...
" and the stipulation that after an unspecified number of years it would revert to full US sovereignty (Verne does not mention any United States Department of State
United States Department of State
The United States Department of State , is the United States federal executive department responsible for international relations of the United States, equivalent to the foreign ministries of other countries...
or Congressional
United States Congress
The United States Congress is the bicameral legislature of the federal government of the United States, consisting of the Senate and the House of Representatives. The Congress meets in the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C....
involvement in the deal). Actual construction begins in January 1872, and by April of the same year the first train from New York pulls into the Ville-France Railway Station, a trunk line from Sacramento
Sacramento
Sacramento is the capital of the state of California, in the United States of America.Sacramento may also refer to:- United States :*Sacramento County, California*Sacramento, Kentucky*Sacramento – San Joaquin River Delta...
having been completed.
The houses and public facilities of "Ville-France" are constructed by a large number of Chinese
Chinese people
The term Chinese people may refer to any of the following:*People with Han Chinese ethnicity ....
migrant workers
Foreign worker
A foreign worker is a person who works in a country other than the one of which he or she is a citizen. The term migrant worker as discussed in the migrant worker page is used in a particular UN resolution as a synonym for "foreign worker"...
- who are sent away once the city is complete, with the payment of their salaries specifically dependent on their signing an obligation never to return. Reviewer Paul Kincaid noted that "The Chinese coolies employed to build the French utopia are then hurriedly dispatched back to San Francisco, since they are not fit to reside in this best of all cities" http://www.sfsite.com/03a/bm219.htm.
The book justifies the exclusion of the Chinese as being a precaution needed in order to avoid in advance the "difficulties created in other places" by the presence of Chinese communities. This might be an oblique reference to the Chinese Massacre of 1871
Chinese Massacre of 1871
The Chinese massacre of 1871 was a racially motivated riot on October 24, 1871, when a mob of over 500 white men entered Los Angeles' Chinatown to attack, rob and brutally murder Chinese residents of the city...
, when a mob entered Los Angeles
Los Ángeles
Los Ángeles is the capital of the province of Biobío, in the commune of the same name, in Region VIII , in the center-south of Chile. It is located between the Laja and Biobío rivers. The population is 123,445 inhabitants...
' Chinatown
Chinatown
A Chinatown is an ethnic enclave of overseas Chinese people, although it is often generalized to include various Southeast Asian people. Chinatowns exist throughout the world, including East Asia, Southeast Asia, the Americas, Australasia, and Europe. Binondo's Chinatown located in Manila,...
, indiscriminately burning Chinese-occupied buildings and killing at least 20 Chinese American
Chinese American
Chinese Americans represent Americans of Chinese descent. Chinese Americans constitute one group of overseas Chinese and also a subgroup of East Asian Americans, which is further a subgroup of Asian Americans...
residents out of a total of some 200 then living in the city.
Most of the action takes place in Schultze's "Steel City" (Stahlstadt) - a vast industrial and mining complex, where ores are taken out of the earth, made into steel and the steel into ever more deadly arms, of which this has become within a few years the world's biggest producer. The now immensely rich Schultze is Steel City's dictator, whose very word is law and who makes all significant decisions personally. There is no mention of Steel City's precise legal status vis-a-vis the Oregon or US Federal authorities, but clearly Schultze behaves as a completely independent head of state (except that he uses Dollars rather than mint his own currency).
The strongly fortified city is built in concentric circles, each separated from the next by a high wall, with the mysterious "Tower of the Bull" - Schultze's own abode - at its center. The workers are under a semi-military discipline, with complex metallurgical operations carried out with a Teutonic split-second precision. A worker straying into where and what he is not authorised to see and know is punished with immediate expulsion in the outer sectors and with death in the sensitive inner ones. However, the workers' conditions seem rather decent by Nineteenth Century standards: there are none of the hovels which characterised many working-class districts of the time, and competence is rewarded with rapid promotion by the paternalistic Schultze and his underlings.
Dr. Sarrasin, in contrast, is a rather passive figure - a kind of non-hereditary constitutional monarch
Constitutional monarchy
Constitutional monarchy is a form of government in which a monarch acts as head of state within the parameters of a constitution, whether it be a written, uncodified or blended constitution...
who, after the original initiative to found Ville-France, does not take any significant decision in the rest of the book. The book's real protagonist, who offers active resistance to Schultze's dark reign and his increasingly satanic designs, is a younger Frenchman - the Alsatian
Alsace
Alsace is the fifth-smallest of the 27 regions of France in land area , and the smallest in metropolitan France. It is also the seventh-most densely populated region in France and third most densely populated region in metropolitan France, with ca. 220 inhabitants per km²...
Marcel Bruckmann, native of the part of France forcibly annexed by Germany in the recent war.
The dashing Bruckmann - an Alsatian with a German family name and fiercely patriotic French heart - manages to penetrate Steel City. As an Alsatian, he is a fluent speaker of German, an indispensable condition for entering the thoroughly Germanised Steel City, and is able to pass himself off as being Swiss - "Elsässisch", the German dialect spoken in Alsace, being very close to Swiss German. He quickly rises high in its hierarchy, gains Schultze's personal confidence, spies out some of the tyrant's well-kept secrets and brings a warning to his French friends. It turns out that Schultze is not content to produce arms, but fully intends to use them himself - first against the hated Ville-France, as a first step towards his explicit ambition of establishing Germany's worldwide rule.(He casually mentions a plan to seize "some islands off Japan
Japan
Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...
" in order to further the same.)
Two fearsome weapons are being made ready - a super-cannon capable of firing massive incendiary
Incendiary device
Incendiary weapons, incendiary devices or incendiary bombs are bombs designed to start fires or destroy sensitive equipment using materials such as napalm, thermite, chlorine trifluoride, or white phosphorus....
charges over a distance of 40 km (just the distance from Steel City to Ville-France), and shells filled with gas. The latter seems to give Verne credit for the very first prediction of chemical warfare
Chemical warfare
Chemical warfare involves using the toxic properties of chemical substances as weapons. This type of warfare is distinct from Nuclear warfare and Biological warfare, which together make up NBC, the military acronym for Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical...
, nearly twenty years before H. G. Wells
H. G. Wells
Herbert George Wells was an English author, now best known for his work in the science fiction genre. He was also a prolific writer in many other genres, including contemporary novels, history, politics and social commentary, even writing text books and rules for war games...
's "black smoke
Black smoke
The black smoke, or black powder is a fictional poisonous gas in H. G. Wells' science fiction novel The War of the Worlds, used by the Martians to eliminate groups of humans remotely, especially artillery crews, before they could fire. The rockets from which they explode are fired from a "black...
" in The War of the Worlds. Schultze's gas is designed not only to suffocate its victims but at the same time also freeze them. A special projectile is filled with compressed liquid carbon dioxide that, when released, instantly lowers the surrounding temperature to a hundred degrees Celsius below zero, quick-freezing every living thing in the vicinity.
Ville-France prepares as well as it can, but there is not very much to do against such weapons. Schultze, however, meets with poetic justice
Poetic justice
Poetic justice is a literary device in which virtue is ultimately rewarded or vice punished, often in modern literature by an ironic twist of fate intimately related to the character's own conduct.- Origin of the term :...
. Firstly, the incendiary charge fired by the super-cannon at Ville-France not only renders the cannon unusable, but also misses its mark. The charge flies harmlessly over the city and into space, apparently owing to Shultze's failure to account for the roundness of the globe when firing a projectile over such distances. Secondly, as Schultze sits in his secret office, preparing for the final assault and writing out the order to his men to bring him the frozen bodies of Sarrasin and Bruckmann to be displayed in public, a gas projectile which he kept in the office accidentally explodes and feeds him his own deadly medicine.
The entire edifice of "Steel City" collapses, since Schultze had kept everything in his own hands and never appointed any deputy. It goes bankrupt and becomes a ghost town. Sarrasin and Bruckmann take it over with the only resistance offered being from two rather dimwitted Schultze bodyguards who stayed behind when everybody else left. Schultze would remain forevermore in his self-made tomb, on display as he had planned to do to his foes, while the good Frenchmen take over direction of Steel City in order to let it "serve a good cause from now on." (Arms production would go on, however, so as "to make Ville-France so strong that nobody would dare attack it ever again".)
Influence, commentary, and appraisals
The book was seen as an early premonition of the rise of Nazi GermanyNazi Germany
Nazi Germany , also known as the Third Reich , but officially called German Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Greater German Reich from 26 June 1943 onward, is the name commonly used to refer to the state of Germany from 1933 to 1945, when it was a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by...
, with its main villain being described by critics as "a proto-Hitler
Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party , commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and head of state from 1934 to 1945...
" (see http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/02/AR2006030201547.html). It reflects the mindset prevailing in France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
following its defeat in the Franco-German War
Franco-Prussian War
The Franco-Prussian War or Franco-German War, often referred to in France as the 1870 War was a conflict between the Second French Empire and the Kingdom of Prussia. Prussia was aided by the North German Confederation, of which it was a member, and the South German states of Baden, Württemberg and...
of 1870-1871, displaying a bitter anti-German
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
bias completely absent from pre-1871 Verne works such as Journey to the Center of the Earth
Journey to the Center of the Earth
A Journey to the Center of the Earth is a classic 1864 science fiction novel by Jules Verne. The story involves a German professor who believes there are volcanic tubes going toward the center of the Earth...
where all protagonists (save one Icelander) are Germans, and quite sympathetic ones. In his extensive review of Verne's works, Walter A. McDougall
commented with the regard to The Begum's Millions: "After the Franco-Prussian War, Verne began to invent mad scientists and evil geniuses"http://www.fpri.org/ww/0204.200109.mcdougall.vernes.html.
Throughout the book, Verne repeatedly ridicules Schultze's racist ideas and their author (the word "Vaterland" in German continually occurs within the French rendering of Schultze's diatribes). As reviewer Paul Kincaid points out (see http://www.sfsite.com/03a/bm219.htm), Verne's ridiculing of the German's ethnic stereotyping can be regarded as itself part of an ethnic stereotyping in the opposite direction.
A more obvious ethnic stereotyping is the repeated references to Schultze eating nothing but sausages and sauerkraut
Sauerkraut
Sauerkraut , directly translated from German: "sour cabbage", is finely shredded cabbage that has been fermented by various lactic acid bacteria, including Leuconostoc, Lactobacillus, and Pediococcus. It has a long shelf-life and a distinctive sour flavor, both of which result from the lactic acid...
in enormous quantities, washed down by huge mugs of beer - even after becoming one the richest people in the world, who could afford any kind of delicacies. In one scene he is shown commiserating with the benighted nations which are denied the benefits of the above-mentioned foods. For his part, the disguised French spy Bruckmann heartily loathes the same kind of food, but dutifully ingests it day after day in the patriotic interest of gaining Schulze's confidence - somewhat ironic, as both ingredients are quite common in Alsatian cuisine, and in combination as choucroute garnie
Choucroute garnie
Choucroute garnie is a famous Alsacian recipe for preparing sauerkraut with sausages and other salted meats and charcuterie, and often potatoes.Although sauerkraut is a traditionally German and Eastern European dish, the French annexation of...
now a common dish across France.
The book, in Hebrew
Hebrew language
Hebrew is a Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Culturally, is it considered by Jews and other religious groups as the language of the Jewish people, though other Jewish languages had originated among diaspora Jews, and the Hebrew language is also used by non-Jewish groups, such...
translation, enjoyed some popularity in 1950's Israel
Israel
The State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea...
. The depiction of Schultze and the Divine Retribution which eventually overtakes him were very much in tune with prevailing Israeli attitudes at the time. Following the Holocaust
The Holocaust
The Holocaust , also known as the Shoah , was the genocide of approximately six million European Jews and millions of others during World War II, a programme of systematic state-sponsored murder by Nazi...
, Israeli Jews had an even stronger reason to be bitter at Germans than French people of the 1870s. However, the Hebrew version omitted a passage in the original (Chapter 11) where Octave Sarrasin, the doctor's dissolute son, is being cheated by "foreigners with long noses" as well as ones belonging to "the black and yellow races".
- A passage in the book is clearly intended as satire of the already formidable American advertisingAdvertisingAdvertising is a form of communication used to persuade an audience to take some action with respect to products, ideas, or services. Most commonly, the desired result is to drive consumer behavior with respect to a commercial offering, although political and ideological advertising is also common...
industry. When looking for manpower to build their Utopian new city, the founders of Ville-France find it sufficient "to publish daily ads in all of San Francisco's 23 daily papers, and to have a special wagon completely covered with advertisements attached to the Transcontinental trainsTranscontinental railroadA transcontinental railroad is a contiguous network of railroad trackage that crosses a continental land mass with terminals at different oceans or continental borders. Such networks can be via the tracks of either a single railroad, or over those owned or controlled by multiple railway companies...
" and they "find unnecessary" the "quite cheap offer of an advertising agency to inscribe advertisements into the flanks of the Rocky MountainsRocky MountainsThe Rocky Mountains are a major mountain range in western North America. The Rocky Mountains stretch more than from the northernmost part of British Columbia, in western Canada, to New Mexico, in the southwestern United States...
". Verne's idea here anticipates Robert A. HeinleinRobert A. HeinleinRobert Anson Heinlein was an American science fiction writer. Often called the "dean of science fiction writers", he was one of the most influential and controversial authors of the genre. He set a standard for science and engineering plausibility and helped to raise the genre's standards of...
's own in "The Man Who Sold the MoonThe Man Who Sold the MoonThe Man Who Sold the Moon is a science fiction novella by Robert A. Heinlein written in 1949 and published in 1950. A part of his Future History and prequel to "Requiem", it covers events around a fictional first Moon landing, in 1978, and the schemes of Delos D...
" to use the surface of the Moon as "a billboard for Coca Cola which would be visible from everywhere on Earth". - At the time of writing, public opinion in France was moved by the liberal subscriptions made by the citizens of San Francisco to a relief fund for the sick and wounded soldiers of France during the Franco-Prussian war. In acknowledgement, the French government donated to the newly established San Francisco Art AssociationSan Francisco Art AssociationThe San Francisco Art Association was an organization that promoted California artists, held art exhibitions, published a periodical, and established an art school. Over its lifetime, the association helped establish a Northern California regional flavor of California Tonalism as differentiated...
a collection of copies from original marbles in the LouvreLouvreThe Musée du Louvre – in English, the Louvre Museum or simply the Louvre – is one of the world's largest museums, the most visited art museum in the world and a historic monument. A central landmark of Paris, it is located on the Right Bank of the Seine in the 1st arrondissement...
, including twenty-five pieces of the ParthenonParthenonThe Parthenon is a temple on the Athenian Acropolis, Greece, dedicated to the Greek goddess Athena, whom the people of Athens considered their virgin patron. Its construction began in 447 BC when the Athenian Empire was at the height of its power. It was completed in 438 BC, although...
frieze http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/uchistory/archives_exhibits/online_exhibits/1899/document_texts/markhopkins1902.html. This may have affected Verne's choice of the US Pacific Coast as a congenial setting for his ideal French city.
Common themes with "Facing the Flag"
The Begum's Fortune shares its main theme with Verne's Facing the FlagFacing the Flag
Facing the Flag or For the Flag is an 1896 patriotic novel by Jules Verne. The book is part of the Voyages Extraordinaires series....
(Original French title: "Face au drapeau"), published in 1896: French patriotism
Patriotism
Patriotism is a devotion to one's country, excluding differences caused by the dependencies of the term's meaning upon context, geography and philosophy...
faced with the threat of futuristic super-weapons (what would now be called weapons of mass destruction
Weapons of mass destruction
A weapon of mass destruction is a weapon that can kill and bring significant harm to a large number of humans and/or cause great damage to man-made structures , natural structures , or the biosphere in general...
) and emerging victorious. In both books, a symbolic extension of France (the Utopian community of Ville-France in the one book, a French warship is in the other) is threatened with a fearsome WMD and seems doomed, only to be saved in the very last moment. In the one book the weapon is created by a sworn and fanatic enemy of France, who is destroyed by his own weapon; in the other, it is the creation of a renegade Frenchman, who at the moment of truth returns to his allegiance and destroys his weapon and himself rather than shoot on the Tricolour
Flag of France
The national flag of France is a tricolour featuring three vertical bands coloured royal blue , white, and red...
. Either way, both books end - and are clearly designed to end - with the material and moral victory of France.
Autobiographical influence
Verne's depiction of Dr. Sarrasin's "prodigal son," Octave Sarrasin (initially a weak character who is kept from moral degradation only by the leadership of his friend Marcel) is reminiscent of the writer's own strained relationship with his son MichelMichel Verne
Michel Jean Pierre Verne was a writer and the son of Jules Verne.Because of his wayward behaviour, Michel was sent by his father to Mettray Penal Colony for six months in 1876. By the age of 19, he caused a scandal by eloping with an actress despite his famous father's objections...
. As Marcel departs into United States and ultimately into Steel City, Octave, deprived of Marcel's guidance, with the newly inherited riches at hand, is allowed to follow his own frivolous ways. However, having wasted much of his father's fortune and finally realizing the absurdity of his existence, Octave arrives at Ville-France (much to the joy of his parents), reunites with Marcel and becomes his courageous and trusted companion.
See also
- "Sultana's DreamSultana's dream"Sultana's Dream" is a classic work of Bengali science fiction and one of the first examples of feminist science fiction. This short story was written in 1905 by Rokeya Sakhawat Hussain, a Muslim feminist, writer and social reformer who lived in British India, in what is now Bangladesh. The word...
", a 1905 utopian feministFeminist science fictionFeminist science fiction is a sub-genre of science fiction which tends to deal with women's roles in society. Feminist science fiction poses questions about social issues such as how society constructs gender roles, the role reproduction plays in defining gender and the unequal political and...
Bangla science fictionBangla Science FictionBengali science fiction is a rich part of Bengali literature. Although it is not as established as other genres in the Bengali language, it is gaining popularity among Bengali readers, especially in Bangladesh.-Earliest writers:...
short story by Begum Rokeya Sakhawat HussainRokeya Sakhawat HussainRoquia Sakhawat Hussain, Bangla: , was a prolific writer and a social worker in undivided Bengal in the early 20th century. She is most famous for her efforts on behalf of gender equality and other social issues. She established the first school aimed primarily at Muslim girls, which still exists...
External links
Versions
- The Begum's Fortune, scanned book via Internet ArchiveInternet ArchiveThe Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It offers permanent storage and access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, music, moving images, and nearly 3 million public domain books. The Internet Archive...
, illustrated. Translated by W. H. G. KingstonWilliam Henry Giles KingstonWilliam Henry Giles Kingston , writer of tales for boys, was born in London, but spent much of his youth in Oporto, where his father was a merchant.-Popularity:His first book, The Circassian Chief, appeared in 1844...
Considered a poor translation.
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