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INTRODUCTION

When Jules Verne takes to the air, we have every reason to anticipate something special. Robur-le-conquérant (Robur the Conqueror, 1886) is one of the phenomenally influential French novelist’s most iconic works, with its enigmatic central figure and especially its magnificent imaginary aircraft, the Albatross. Though the novel took its impetus from a now-obscure debate that pitted lighter-against heavier-than-air flight technology, it still thrills and perplexes in equal measure. Much ink has been spilled over the book’s faults, merits, and multiple themes, but this much is immediately clear: it is a playful, argumentative, often compellingly ambiguous exploration—from the distant past to what was then the near future—of humankind’s quest to conquer the sky.

France had been deeply interested in flight since 1783, when aeronautical history was made twice: the brothers Joseph-Michel (1740–1810) and Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier (1745–1799) developed the hot-air balloon or Montgolfière, and Jacques Charles (1746–1823) invented the gas balloon or Charlière. Balloon mania swept France, continuing unabated through the mid-nineteenth century.¹ The so-called conquest of the air, the discovery of a practical way to steer balloons, seemed imminent and technologically vital. As Henri Zukowski has pointed out, the dream of controlling a balloon became synonymous with controlling space itself.²

But could a balloon be controlled? Verne, then an unknown twenty-three-year-old writer, implied doubts about that possibility in his second published story, “Un Voyage en ballon” (“A Voyage in a Balloon,” 1851), where a character who claims to have invented a steering mechanism is quickly revealed to be insane.³ By 1863, Verne was emphatic: “I don’t believe … that we’ll manage to steer a balloon. I’m acquainted with all the methods attempted or proposed; not one of them works, not one of them is feasible…. We’d need to come up with a motor that’s both amazingly strong and unbelievably light! And if we did, we wouldn’t be able to withstand air currents of any significance!”⁴ So speaks Samuel Fergusson, hero of Verne’s first published novel, Cinq semaines en ballon (Five Weeks in a Balloon). With this book’s publication in January 1863, Verne began his legendary collaboration with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel (1814–1886), launching a series of grippingly plotted and abundantly well-researched novels that would soon be collectively titled the Voyages extraordinaires (Extraordinary Voyages).

As both the short story and the novel suggest, Verne’s interest in balloons was complex. On the one hand, his fascination with the mysterious and the wondrous—his Romantic side, with a capital R—made him as excited as anybody about the possibilities of flight. On the other, his equally strong pull toward the rational and the scientific led him to realize that balloons could not, and probably would never be able to, live up to the idealized expectations being set for them.⁵

Verne was not alone. Just a few months after Five Weeks was published, three people equally excited about the boundless potential of flight, and equally convinced about the impracticality of balloons, joined forces to advocate for other means to the sky. The viscount Gustave de Ponton d’Amécourt (1825–1888) and the writer Gabriel de La Landelle (1812–1886) believed the future belonged to heavier-than-air flying machines driven by propellers; the two of them coined the words hélicoptère and aviation, respectively. On July 6, 1863, they teamed up officially with the polymathic photographer-journalist-balloonist-showman Gaspard-Félix Tournachon (1820–1910), known as Nadar, to launch a Société d’encouragement pour la locomotion aérienne au moyen d’appareils plus lourds que l’air (Society for the Encouragement of Aerial Locomotion by Means of Heavier-Than-Air Machines). Verne, one of the earliest to join, was made one of the finance directors. He fulfilled the post diligently and came regularly to meetings.⁶

Nadar, a dyed-in-the-wool rabblerouser, went into high gear to promote the Society and popularize his colleagues’ plans for proto-helicopters. First he published an iconoclastic “Manifeste de l’Auto-locomotion aérienne” (“Manifesto of Aerial Autolocomotion,” La Presse, August 7, 1863), casting heavier-than-air researchers as underdog heroes fighting a pompous, pretentious establishment obsessed with balloons. The battle imagery caught on; soon, inspired by a joke from the “Manifesto,” journalists were referring to Nadar and his colleagues as les chevaliers de La Sainte Hélice (the Knights of the Holy Propeller). Nadar continued the publicity blitz by launching the illustrated magazine L’Aéronaute, complete with cover art by the eminent Gustave Doré. In the most memorable publicity stunt of all, Nadar raised funds for aircraft experimentation by commissioning the largest balloon ever built, the Géant, and gathering audiences to watch his ascensions in it, just as professional aeronauts were doing all over Europe. The Society was soon swarming with scientists, researchers, writers, and musicians, everyone from George Sand to Jacques Offenbach. In December 1863, Verne did his own part to raise publicity for the work, pointing out the advantages of helicopters and the drawbacks of balloons in the short essay “À propos du Géant” (“About the Géant”).

But the Society produced no workable results in its few years of activity, and after a brief flare of interest, flying machines faded from the popular imagination. Balloons served heroically during the Siege of Paris in 1870–71, carrying mail and people over the entrapped city walls. Nadar himself was a leading player in the heroics.⁷

But Verne was not finished with the heavier-than-air aspirations of the 1860s. He nearly wrote an aircraft into the Extraordinary Voyages in 1875, when he planned to gather the heroes of his previous books—Samuel Fergusson, Pierre Aronnax, Phileas Fogg, and so forth—and send them on an aerial trip around the world.⁸ Before he could develop the project further, he was beaten to the punch by another novel on a similar theme, Alphonse Brown’s La Conquête de l’air (The Conquest of the Air [Paris: Glady, 1875]). Verne concluded reluctantly that he would have to postpone the concept for the moment.⁹ Indeed, by 1882 he had apparently given up the idea, for that year he extracted the concept of gathering past heroes and used it for quite a different work: a stage spectacular, Voyage à travers l’impossible (Journey through the Impossible), written with Adolphe d’Ennery.¹⁰

Two years later, flight returned to the news. On August 9, 1884, the French captains Charles Renard (1847–1905) and Arthur Krebs (1850–1935) flew twenty-three minutes in an electric dirigible, La France. The flight was an obvious and celebrated success—so much so that the polymathic aeronautical brothers Gaston (1843–1899) and Albert Tissandier (1839–1906), who had been tinkering with their own electric aerostat since 1881 and flown in it in 1883, decided to abandon their work completely. Flight historian Richard Hallion sums up La France’s journey as “the first completely controlled, powered flight of any sort … in all of human history.”¹¹ All previous problems with lighter-than-air designs seemed solvable using electricity; accumulators and dynamos promised lighter sources of power than any invention involving steam. In the popular imagination, experiments with heavier-than-air flying machines now seemed both outmoded and unnecessary.¹²

Verne—now fifty-six, a frequent yachter, and a very busy writer—thought otherwise. Though in the thick of working on one of his longest novels, Mathias Sandorf, he whipped up a fresh plot involving heavier-than-air flight and pitched it to Hetzel. By February 2, 1885, he had completed the outline for the book and written the first chapter of a manuscript he titled simply Robur.¹³

With his characteristic panache for research, Verne plunged into every possible source. “My actual experience for [Robur] was one balloon ascent,” he later claimed with a touch of exaggeration to Sadakichi Hartmann, “while I had to look over about five hundred books on aeronautic inventions.”¹⁴ Written sources are indeed abundant in the novel; many of its facts and figures, as well as numerous incidental details, can be traced back to the helicopter propaganda published by Nadar and his colleagues at the Heavier-Than-Air Society.¹⁵ Further written inspiration came from Charles Baudelaire, whose poetry collection Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil, 1857) calls the albatross the “prince of the clouds” and makes it a symbol for both flight and poetic imagination. Verne paid Baudelaire tribute not only by writing a few passages of Robur as allusions to his poems, but also by naming his own fictional aircraft Albatross.¹⁶

At the same time, Verne’s debt to personal experience was larger than he claimed. In addition to his 1873 ascent, described the same year in the essay “24 Minutes en ballon” (“24 Minutes in a Balloon”), Verne drew freely on his experiences at Nadar’s Society, whose chaotic meetings likely influenced the portrayal of the Weldon Institute.¹⁷ He also added at least one allusion to his own childhood, naming the novel’s Uncle Prudent after his great-uncle Prudent Allotte de la Fuÿe.¹⁸ It is even possible that the Albatross was modeled in part on Verne’s own beloved yacht, the Saint-Michel III.¹⁹

Verne’s aim was to combine all these inspirations to create a memorable, multilayered tribute to the unpopular concept of heavier-than-air flying machines. As he wrote to Hetzel on March 18: “I hope to bring in everything there is to say on the subject. In any case, it’s great fun to do. But just wait until we hear the outcry from everyone who supports balloons!”²⁰ His enthusiasm was unabated a month later: “I’ve never attacked a book with such energy and pleasure!” he reported on April 12. “May the buyers feel the same way!”²¹ In early May, he sent Hetzel the completed manuscript, now fortunately preserved at the Bibliothèque municipale de Nantes.²²

The ensuing correspondence reveals that Verne, who had begun the Extraordinary Voyages as an unknown writer happy to accept Hetzel’s advice, had developed twenty years later into a poised professional ready to reject any suggestions he disliked. Many of Hetzel’s ideas for revising Robur, ranging from major character changes to specific plot points, went unused.²³

Verne did, however, take several important suggestions to heart. He condensed the book markedly by cutting out irrelevant statistics and other superfluities; he modified the manuscript’s tone somewhat (more on this later); he added several dramatic incidents and passages of dialogue to the middle of the book; and, seizing one of Hetzel’s ideas with unusual enthusiasm, he traded his original abrupt ending for a gentler and more thematically provocative one.²⁴ In general, the published text is less rough-edged, more tightly focused, more sophisticated, and more satisfying to read. As Verne summed up:

I’ve gone back over the characters, dramatized the scenes, imagined new episodes, made the journey more interesting, I hope, chased away all the altitudes, latitudes, longitudes, etc., which weren’t necessary, modified the ending as agreed…. And despite all of that, the volume, which was long, is now a good fifth shorter.²⁵

Verne and Hetzel also finalized the title of the book during the revision process. Verne’s preferred title, The Conquest of the Air, was un available, as it had already been used by Brown and Ponton d’Amé-court.²⁶ Robur and His Albatross (Verne: “Albatross in italics, of course”) seemed a possibility, but Hetzel pointed out that they would have to add “The Captain or The Commander of the Albatross, so people don’t think we’re talking about a bird.”²⁷ Finally Verne, wanting the conquest of the air to be alluded to somehow, hit upon Robur the Conqueror. “That recalls William the Conqueror, Robert the Conqueror … [and] has the advantage of piquing curiosity and not saying what the book is about …”²⁸

To illustrate the book, Hetzel called on Léon Benett (1839–1917), a prolific artist who worked on almost half the Extraordinary Voyages.²⁹ Surviving letters reveal that both Verne and Hetzel coached Benett for the book;³⁰ Verne even sketched the Albatross’s front elevation as a rough guide. “As for the general effect, which is fantastical and cloudy, I think it’s excellent,” Verne wrote about one of the illustrations. “You’re right to show [the Albatross] only in those conditions, so it can’t be examined too closely.”³¹ Verne similarly warned Hetzel of the aircraft’s implausibility: “This kind of novel cries out to be read in one sitting, for—between ourselves—I advise you never to get into such a machine.”³²

Verne intended Robur to be published in book form immediately, without the usual serialization, so as to join the flight debate while it was still fresh in the public mind. Hetzel, in much less of a hurry, toyed with the idea of serializing the book in a newspaper.³³

Before he could do so, Verne’s life turned upside down. On March 9, 1886, a beloved but mentally disturbed nephew shot him in the leg, laming him permanently. Verne was still recovering when, on March 17, Pierre-Jules Hetzel died. It was the end of an era for the Extraordinary Voyages, and the beginning of a new one in which Verne’s novels would slide into pessimism about humankind and its use of scientific discoveries. One such novel is Robur’s own sequel, Maître du monde (Master of the World, 1904), but a detailed discussion of its dark themes belongs in an edition of that work rather than this one.

Robur-le-conquérant was finally serialized in the Journal des débats, June 29 to August 18, 1886—more than a year after Verne finished his first draft, and fully two years after Krebs and Renard hit the headlines.³⁴ Early reception was lukewarm, with the first book-format edition selling a meager twelve thousand copies.³⁵

Since then, the novel’s fortunes have improved somewhat. As airplanes developed in the first half of the twentieth century, Verne’s advocacy of heavier-than-air machines seemed more and more pre-scient—a good example of the phenomenon by which Verne became stereotyped as a Father of Science Fiction, a scientific prophet.³⁶ In reality, the prophecy was partly self-fulfilling, as the inventors of the era had grown up reading Verne’s books; for example, the aviation pioneer Charles Richet praised Robur, saying he was “proud to be a student of Jules Verne.”³⁷ Since then, the novel and especially its aircraft have gradually taken on legendary dimensions in Verne’s oeuvre. A 1961 film version, incorporating elements from Master of the World and named after that book, featured Vincent Price, Charles Bronson, a Richard Matheson screenplay, and a delightful model Albatross.³⁸

Best of all, it was Robur that inspired Igor Sikorsky to fulfill Nadar’s original dream and design the first practical helicopter in 1939.³⁹ Thanks to the novel, the whole modern history of helicopters can be traced in an unbroken line from the present, through Sikorsky and Verne, back to Nadar and his propeller-devoted colleagues at the Heavier-Than-Air Society.⁴⁰

Even as it has become iconic and quasi-prophetic, the novel has also garnered criticism. Readers of the book have repeatedly echoed many of Hetzel’s first reactions to the manuscript: the characters are too boorish to sustain interest, the plot sags in the middle and is dull in general, the tone of the whole thing confuses more than it engages.⁴¹ Many of these criticisms can be parried with reasonable counterargument, as indeed Verne attempted to do in his letters to Hetzel, but the fact remains that a reader can expect an uneven experience from a first encounter with the text. Rarely has Robur been counted among Verne’s best books.⁴²

Most distressing of all is the novel’s racism, which plunges the novel into depths of low comedy rarely present in the Extraordinary Voyages. The character of Frycollin demonstrates that Verne, despite his strong antislavery stance, could not escape his era’s assumptions about racial superiority, in which pseudoscientific classifications and popular prejudices worked hand-in-hand to depict nonwhites as inherently inferior.⁴³ Hardly ever in Verne’s oeuvre does he so freely draw on these cultural biases to play, as one critic put it, “to the seamier side of his implied reader’s tastes in comedy.”⁴⁴

The racism continues when the Albatross reaches Dahomey. Though it begins well-meaningly, with the intention of saving hundreds of lives, Robur’s violent intervention in local affairs quickly takes on overtones of imperialistic supremacism. For a modern reader, Robur’s ideology is chillingly reminiscent of the attitudes that have driven, and still drive, so many real-life aerial bombings.⁴⁵

Other overarching imperialist themes may also give a modern reader pause. On the one hand, the aloof Robur seems to act contrary to existing political systems; he appears to threaten the colonial status quo by his private possession of game-changing technology.⁴⁶ On the other, as the book’s very title underscores, Robur is above all else a conqueror who views the sky as a realm to be ruled, a new empire to be dominated. In that sense, his “conquest of the air,” complete with flag planting, is nineteenth-century positivist politics as usual.⁴⁷

For all those problems, though, there are multiple reasons why Robur remains worth reading. Verne himself sums up three of those reasons remarkably well in a single word, when, in chapter 6, he has Robur give the sky a name: Icaria.

First and foremost, Icaria suggests Icarus, the mythological icon for the dream of flight. It could hardly be clearer that the novel’s main impetus is to explore that dream. Like his colleagues at the Heavier-Than-Air Society, Verne sings the praises of propeller-based aircraft because they allow him to embrace the joys of ballooning (the sightseeing, the travel possibilities, the technological achievement, the sheer sense of wonder) while leaving the drawbacks behind in the opposing camp. The end effect, in Robur as in all the Society’s propaganda, is to imply the complete obsolescence of aerostats in favor of a less overrated, more hypothetically reliable alternative—or at least to encourage disdain for balloons, so as to win aircraft experimenters the time and money they needed for results.⁴⁸

Indeed, on first reading, Robur’s plot makes the most sense when viewed as two opposing ideas battling it out in a series of circumstances, rather than as a naturalistic development of character and action. With his economically drawn characters and shamelessly theoretical arguments, Verne calls to mind Chesterton’s characteristically fanciful idea of a novel with “ideas or notions wrestling naked, as it were, and not dressed up in a masquerade as men and women.”⁴⁹ As Volker Dehs has noted, Robur in fact represents Verne’s final public discarding of balloons.⁵⁰ Just as Nadar’s Géant, as Verne had said back in 1863, was to be “the last balloon,”⁵¹ so the aerostat Go Ahead in the present novel is Verne’s last balloon.

Second, Icaria suggests jeux icariens—literally “Icarian games,” but more accurately translated “carnival acrobatics.” The novel is full of literary versions of such acrobatics: word games, thematic games, and even references to actual games.⁵² Better still is the novel’s acrobatically playful style, in which dramatic incidents are surrounded or even undercut by a self-deflating, almost Monty Python–like silliness. Hetzel complained about this tone, which he felt robbed the book of its conviction, but Verne was adamant: “It wasn’t without reason that I gave the novel that feeling, as much by the chapter headings as by the way I wrote. You see the thing from a heroic and lyrical side; I see it from a whimsical, joking, not very serious one. Without it, I wouldn’t have written the book.”⁵³ The tone is even more jocular and self-reflexive in the manuscript, in which the narrator often addresses the reader directly with phrases such as “I believe ‥,” “We ought to add ‥,” and “our readers.” The manuscript also features additional touches of humor, such as the elegant and punning neologism “circumnaviation” (circumnavigation + aviation).⁵⁴ On Hetzel’s entreaty, Verne modified this tone to something a shade more poker-faced and tongue-in-cheek, rather reminiscent of the narration in Le Tour du monde en quatrevingts jours (Around the World in Eighty Days, 1873). But the bigger-picture sense that the novel is a series of jeux icariens, acrobatic games played for the enjoyment of the writer and the reader, happily remains.

Third and finally, Icaria recalls the imaginary utopia of that name, conceived by the French philosopher Étienne Cabet in the bestselling tract Voyage en Icarie (Travels in Icaria, 1840). In 1848, Cabet attempted to launch a real-life Icaria in Texas, but the project slowly fizzled out, drifting around the country and folding for good in Iowa in 1894.⁵⁵ Befitting the utopian name, the novel undoubtedly exudes hope and excitement about the sublimity of the sky and the possibilities inherent in a practical flying machine. More than a century later, and despite everything that has occurred in the meantime, the theme still has the power to inspire wonder and delight.

However, Robur’s treatment of utopia is far from clear-cut. Robur himself is not an idealized utopian figure out to save society, but rather a brusque exhibitionist whose heroic dimensions, like those of Captain Nemo and several other Verne characters, come largely from his societal revolt.⁵⁶ For that matter, the overarching ideal behind most utopian schemes—that of a perfectly regulated, ideologically homogenous society—could hardly be expected to sit well in a series so teeming with rebels, eccentrics, free spirits, and individualists as the Extraordinary Voyages. Small wonder that Robur’s only direct references to utopia, in chapters 2 and 17, are scornful ones.

The theme of revolt may also explain why Robur’s opponents, Uncle Prudent and Phil Evans, are not described in detail or even much differentiated. Their main function is not to play separate parts, but to represent the Weldon Institute and society in general. Like Nadar’s propaganda for the Heavier-Than-Air Society, the novel’s central conflict is not confined to aircraft versus aerostats, but also takes on human terms: Robur versus institute, man versus society, underdog versus establishment. This is a book that has it both ways, dreaming with utopian bravado even as it thumbs its nose at the societal conformity that utopias imply.

Like most of Verne’s novels, Robur was grievously mistreated by English translators.⁵⁷ Two versions were rushed into print in 1887, but both are unsigned, embarrassing hack jobs. The Clipper of the Clouds (London: Sampson Low) is littered with cuts, mistranslations, new chapter divisions, and other pointless changes; the Walton Watch Company, apparently in a heavy-handed attempt at wordplay, becomes the “Wheelem” in one chapter and the “Wheelton” in another. Robur the Conqueror (New York: Munro, also known as A Trip Round the World in a Flying Machine) is even worse, axing descriptive details mercilessly and importing piles of unauthorized changes and additions; the Weldon Institute is demoted to the Weldon Club, and new un-Vernian character names (J. O. Tombler, George Kerns) appear out of nowhere. For a typical example of how these translations misrepresented Robur’s content and tone, consider the following brief passage from chapter 8 in a close rendering of Verne’s text:

The next day, June 15, at about five a.m., Phil Evans left his cabin. Perhaps that day he would come face to face with the engineer Robur?

In any case, wanting to know why he had not appeared the previous day, he addressed the quartermaster, Tom Turner.

Tom Turner, of English origin, about forty-five years old, barrel-chested, stocky, built of iron, had one of those enormous and distinctive heads in Hogarth style, such as that painter of every kind of Saxon ugliness plotted out with the tip of his brush. If one cares to examine the fourth plate of A Harlot’s Progress, one will find Tom Turner’s head on the shoulders of the prison guard, and one will recognize that his physiognomy has nothing welcoming about it.

“Will we see the engineer Robur today?” said Phil Evans.

“I don’t know,” replied Tom Turner.

The equivalent passage in The Clipper of the Clouds (chapter 10, because of Sampson Low’s restructuring) is markedly abridged:

The next day, the 15th of June, about five o’clock in the morning, Phil Evans left his cabin. Perhaps he would today have a chance of speaking to Robur? Desirous of knowing why he had not appeared the day before, Evans addressed himself to the mate, Tom Turner.

Tom Turner was an Englishman of about forty-five, broad in the shoulders and short in the legs, a man of iron, with one of those enormous characteristic heads that Hogarth rejoiced in.

“Shall we see Mr. Robur to-day?” asked Phil Evans.

“I don’t know,” said Turner.

Munro’s Robur correctly puts the passage in chapter 8, but that version is even worse:

The next morning, the 15th of June, Phil Evans left his cabin at about five o’clock, thinking he might probably meet Robur, but he was unable to see the captain either on the deck or in the dining-room. He resolved to discover, at all events, why Robur had not appeared during the day, and he addressed himself to the foreman, George Kerns. George Kerns was of English origin, about forty-five years of age, with a large and characteristic head surmounting a powerfully built body. A man of a practical turn of mind and of a mechanical knowledge that rendered him invaluable to his captain.

“Shall we see Captain Robur to-day?” inquired Phil Evans.

“I do not know.”

Later English-language editions have merely reprinted one of these two old translations or abridged them still more, producing texts even further away from Verne’s intentions.⁵⁸ The new from-the-ground-up translation that follows, based directly on the illustrated grand-in-8° Hetzel edition, is the first complete and faithful rendering of the novel into English.

My heartfelt thanks go to all those who generously lent help and advice to the project, including Jean-Michel Margot, Arthur B. Evans, J. Randolph Cox, Frédéric Jaccaud of the Maison d’Ailleurs, and the editorial board of Verniana. They and others have done much to shed light on a truly remarkable book: Robur the Conqueror, Jules Verne’s seminal ode to the possibilities of heavier-than-air flight. The Albatross is waiting for us. Let’s get aboard.

—Alex Kirstukas