The Begum's Millions
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The Begum's Millions (in the original French Les Cinq cents millions de la Bégum) , is a 1879 novel by Jules Verne , with some elements which could be described as utopian and others which seem clearly dystopian. 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. (Actually, 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 badly-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. Recently, a new translation from the French was made by Stanford L. Luce and published by Wesleyan University.
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 India 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 insanitary conditions of the European cities. He decides to use his share of the inheritance to establish a utopian model city which would be constructed and maintained with public health as the primary concern of its government.
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 completetly 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 considersable "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 subued 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. Verne specifically describes the location as "southern Oregon". However, he then goes on to mention The Red Desert which is actually far more eastwards, in Wyoming - an area whose environment is in the book throughly polluted and destroyed by the intensive mining and industrialisation initiated by Shultze.
As noted briefly by Verne, the houses and public facilities of Sarrasin’s serene "Ville-France" are constructed by a large number of migrant workers, specially imported from China - who are sent away once the city is complete.
Most of the action takes place in Schultze's "Steel City" - 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.
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 stolen 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, rise high in its hierarchy, gain Schultze's personal confidence, spy out some of the tyrant's well-kept secrets and bring a warning to his French friends. It seems that Schultze is not content to produce arms, but fully intends to use them himself - first against the hated Ville-France, and he probably has further unspecified plans.
Two fearsome weapons are being made ready - a super-cannon with a vast destructive power, 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 does not, however, suffocate its victims but rather freezes them. A special projectile is filled with compressed liquid carbon dioxide that, when released, instantly lowers the surrounding temperature to a hundred decrees below Celsius, 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 a weapon. Schultze, however, meets with poetic justice .He sits in his 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. Just as he is signing his name to the decree, a 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. Sarrasin and Bruckmann take it over without a shot being fired. 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."
Influence, commentary, and appraisals
The book was seen as an early premonition of the rise of Nazi Germany, with its main villain being described by critics as "a proto-Hitler" (see [link]). 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.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.
External links
- [Jules Verne: Father of Science Fiction?] - John Derbyshire, "The New Atlantis"
- [Review by Michael Dirda]
- [Review by Cheryl Morgan]
- [Review by Paul Kincaid]
- [Interview with the English translator]
- [Amazon page & several reviewes]
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