Paris in the 20th Century

Book Review: "Paris in the Twentieth Century," by Jules Verne, Random
House, NY, 1996

By John Taylor; 7 March, 2006

Reading this novel now is a surreal time capsule of a reading
experience. It is Verne's second novel, which was rejected by his
publisher and left in manuscript form on the shelf until his literary
executors twisted the truth, staged a publicity campaign calling it a
"lost manuscript," and finally had it published in French in 1994, in
English in 1996. It was written in the early 1860's, around the time
of the Kitab-i-Iqan, so it is of interest to Baha'is from a futurist
perspective. The Iqan argues that religion in pure form will never
lose its relevance, that it will be a help to humanity if we can see
it as the origin of relativism, not as a huddling refugee from it.
Verne stands in the opposing enlightenment tradition, regarding faith
as irrelevant, outmoded, as quite literally out of the question. His
view of the future in this novel is a product of that.

Verne envisions an expansion of the public school system until in 1960
the novel predicts that it would shelter about 155,000 students in a
single "Academic Union," in effect one vast university; the editor in
the introduction explains that this is pretty close to the actual
figure for France in 1960. Coincidentally, I had just read that right
now the largest university in the world is the University of Mexico
City, with well over three hundred thousand students. There are half a
dozen bigger schools now than Verne pictured oppressing the soul of
France.

Surprisingly to a Baha'i, Verne sees war as no longer a problem a
century into the future. A character comments,

"Courage was outdated, like the cannons. Machines fought, not men;
hence the impulse to put an end to wars, which had become ridiculous."
(Paris In the Twentieth Century, Jules Verne, Random House, NY, 1996,
p. 134)

While he is right (and agrees with Baha'u'llah) about the increasing
folly of war when super efficient killing machines do all the
fighting, at heart this is not a profound analysis of the human
condition. Generally speaking, soldiers do not fight and countries
have never gone to war to prove their manliness or valor. Their
motives are not that noble, if you can call that noble. Kant, for one,
agreed with Baha'u'llah that you either have perpetual peace or you
have war and continual preparation for war. War and peace is hell or
heaven, with nothing in between; it is a coin that does not stand on
its edge. If anybody doubted it, the fall of the Berlin Wall proved
that you do not even have to have superpower rivals to have arms
buildups and massive waste of money on security and preparation for
war. All that is needed is an excuse, a threat, any kind of threat,
even the possibility of a threat suffices.

Not that Verne is optimistic, he just sees the problem coming from a
slightly different direction. His dystopia is a huge exaggeration of
the rivalry that you see in every university between the nerds and the
jocks, between artsie-fartsies and the practical guys in disciplines
like engineering and science. He sees business exploding in influence
(he is right about that, to say the least) and then jumping onto the
side of the jocks, and by their influence suppressing literature in
favor of non-fiction.

Not that anybody is forced. He sees the change as a wholly democratic
thing, the long, proud tradition of French literature and music dies
not because it is illegal or officially discouraged but simply from
lack of interest. A central character in the story gets his precious
library on the cheap, from the bargain bin, like, well, my little
library. He cannot protest against a tyrannical government forbidding
reading, as in Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, but simply foresees a
universal boredom with fiction, as opposed to non-fiction. People
prefer to sit down and read tables of shipping statistics rather than
a good novel.

Verne's own spectacular literary career, which took off months later,
must have come as great a surprise to him as it did to everybody who
knew him, and it helped to dispel his own dire prediction of the death
of literature. People, like Jules Verne himself, were and are
passionately interested in both fiction and science, and even more in
the marriage of the two; hence the growth of a new genre that Verne
called scientific novels and we now call science fiction. When he did
what his heart was telling him, to combine his own fascination with
science (which, as a lover of literature, worried him) with a ripping
melodramatic tale, his books sold like hotcakes.

That is probably why even in old age Verne never made any effort to
have this novel published, in spite of the accuracy of its
predictions, most of which are startlingly precise. The reason his son
and literary executor, Michel Verne, did not try to have "Paris in the
20th Century" published is even more amusing. The protagonist of the
novel is named Michel and Verne clearly was imagining what his newborn
son would be like when he grew up. Unfortunately the fictional Michel
is very much a klutz, a dreamer and a ninny. Who can blame the real
Michel for keeping the manuscript Sub Rosa, especially when he had
been such a ninny, practically a delinquent, in his real-life young
years? Verne himself was to blame for being so accurate in predicting,
since, like most fathers of the time, he was completely distant and
uninvolved in Michel's early upbringing, even though they lived under
the same roof. Early childhood education was an exclusive province of
wives, not husbands.

On the whole Verne's big mistake is to vastly overestimate the
intelligence of the human race. For example, he sees Paris running on
a transit system based upon elevated commuter trains, like the "El" in
Chicago. They run on a wierd but apparently practicable combination of
magnetic levitation and pneumatic tubes. That is, an ordinary train
track has a narrow tube running between the rails, like the electric
"third rail." It pushes metal disks through the semi-evacuated tube by
means of atmospheric air pressure. The train gains locomotion from
this tube underneath by simply turning on an encircling electromagnet,
which latches onto the disk in the tube, which pulls it all forward.
To stop, you just shut down the air pressure. Even simpler, why not
just turn off the power of your electromagnet and let the train grind
to a halt? Anyway, Verne attributes this "Williams system" to a 19th
Century Belgian engineer called Jobard. (p. 22) If only this guy got
the credit he deserves.

These trains run in what he calls a "viaduct," which may mean that
water lubricates them, I do not know. Being of lightweight
construction the trains do not need heavy supports or a separate
locomotive; they run every ten minutes, each holding a thousand
passengers. Best of all, the energy for these pneumatic tubes comes
directly from wind farms in the countryside. No problems with the
inefficiency of energy conversion, the air is pumped directly by the
wind. No problems with global warming! Just amazing.

Naturally Verne does not guess that petroleum and the automobile would
become addictive substances sucking the life out of the whole planet.
If people have an adequate transit system, why choke everybody to
death? There would be no point. Still, he accurately predicts
horseless carriages using internal combustion engines running on
hydrogen, no less. He just sees them as a supplement, not an
obsession. Their great advantage, he points out, is that they do not
eat fuel when they are not running, like those stupid, wasteful horses
do. Still, "these gas cabs were responsible for a tremendous
consumption of hydrogen, as were those enormous trucks loaded with
stones and paving materials, which deployed some twenty to thirty
horsepower." (p. 25) What sort of whacko would predict a public
macho-dumb enough to buy a sports horseless carriage with a 500
horsepower engine? That would be just insane.

As far as the feeling of the age, I do not thing Verne was far off
either. The death of literature is just a symbol for him of a deeper
spiritual loss that he knew would not get better without something
big, even as the Revelation of Baha'u'llah was beginning to shine
forth. I think it is summed up in a song that Canadians have been
hearing a lot lately on radio and television, with its induction into
the Music Songwriter's Hall of Fame. It was new to me, and it seems to
have been written around the time when this novel takes place, 1961 or
so; it sums up what both Verne and I worry about, the nameless
impotence, a lack inside that sucks the life out of common knowledge,
that divorces imagination and planning, a personal void of ignorance
and lack of love that renders the public thing into a corrupt nullity.

Everybody Knows

By Leonard Cohen

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows that the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That's how it goes

Everybody knows

Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows that the captain lied
Everybody got this broken feeling
Like their father or their dog just died

Everybody talking to their pockets
Everybody wants a box of chocolates
And a long stem rose
Everybody knows

Everybody knows that you love me baby
Everybody knows that you really do
Everybody knows that you've been faithful
Ah give or take a night or two
Everybody knows you've been discreet
But there were so many people you just had to meet
Without your clothes
And everybody knows

Everybody knows, everybody knows
That's how it goes
Everybody knows
Everybody knows, everybody knows
That's how it goes
Everybody knows

And everybody knows that its now or never
Everybody knows that its me or you
And everybody knows that you live forever
Ah when you've done a line or two
Everybody knows the deal is rotten
Old black Joe's still pickin' cotton
For your ribbons and bows
And everybody knows

And everybody knows that the plague is coming
Everybody knows that its moving fast
Everybody knows that the naked man and woman
Are just a shining artifact of the past
Everybody knows the scene is dead
But there's gonna be a meter on your bed
That will disclose
What everybody knows

And everybody knows that you're in trouble
Everybody knows what you've been through
From the bloody cross on top of Calvary
To the beach of Malibu
Everybody knows its coming apart
Take one last look at this sacred heart
Before it blows

And everybody knows
Everybody knows, everybody knows
That's how it goes
Everybody knows

Oh everybody knows, everybody knows
That's how it goes
Everybody knows
Everybody knows

--
John Taylor

badijet@gmail.com