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The Begum’s Millions
SCIENCE FICTION
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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:
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