The Begum's Millions
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.
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 (see [
1],[
2]), 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. Revier 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" [
3].
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.
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 metalurigical 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 charactyerised many working-class districts of the time, and competence is rewarded with rapid promotoion 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 (a speaker of fluent German, an indispenable condition for entering the throughly Germanised Steel City, he is able to pass himself of as being
Swiss). He quicly 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 tpowards his explicit ambition of establishing Germany's world-wide rule.
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 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 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."
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 [
4]). 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. McDougallcommented with the regard to "The Begum's Millions": "After the Franco-Prussian War, Verne began to invent mad scientists and evil geniuses"[
5].
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 [
6]), Verne's ridiculing of the German's ehtnic sterotyping can be regarded as itself part of an ethnic stereotyping in the oppossit direction.
A more obvious ethnic stereotyping is the repeated references to Schultze eating nothing but sausages and sauerkraut in enormous quantitites, 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 Brukmann heartily loathes the same kind of food, but dutifully ingests it day after day in the patriotic interest of gaining Shultze's confidence.
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.
"The Begum's Millions" shares its main theme with Verne's
Facing the Flag (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.
*
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
