תקצירים:

Jules Verne and the Millenarianism
Dr. Sam W. Bloom
sambloom@research.haifa.ac.il

Dept. of French Language and Literature, Haifa University

As others have already noted, more than a few of the technological achievements and inventions that Jules Verne imagines were to be realized during the 20th century. In using the term "millenarianism," I wish not only to highlight the Verne's prophetic accuracy in predicting the future in terms of technological advances, but also to call attention to how accurately he foresaw how the world would develop geopolitically at the end of the second millennium. While Verne chooses a year designating for him a very distant future for the title of his short story, "La journ?e d'un journaliste am?ricain en 2890," written in 1891, his depiction of the United States as the sole commercial superpower can arguably find its mirror image in how much of the world perceives the U.S.A. today. As Jean Chesnaux has previously remarked, the United States plays a major role in over a third of Verne's novels. In most of these, the United States is the breeding ground for innovation and new ideas. Though, this is not to say that Verne did not see the pitfalls of what modernization was bringing in his own time. For Verne, this New World is at times just as much a utopia as it is a dystopia. In a text that was most probably influenced by Verne's short story mentioned above, Anatole France similarly envisions an imperialist United States empowered in part by its technological advances. Even in his more flattering descriptions of the U.S.A., Verne humorously, if not mockingly, treats what he sees an American penchant for excess and belligerence. In De la terre ? la lune, both of these qualities account for the Gun Club's success in their venture. Verne is equally prescient in his account of a lunar mission as he is in his description of American technological advances originating and finding their impetus in military circles.

Lest there be any confusion, Verne was hardly anti-American in typical French tradition. Like Baudelaire, Verne very much admired Edgar Allen Poe and wrote an extremely positive critical essay on some of this "American writer's" works. Rather, Verne's wariness regarding technological progress and an overemphasis on the sciences is equally present in the posthumously published Paris au vingti?me si?cle. Again, Verne is unfortunately prophetic (especially regarding the European model of higher education) in the literally laughable role that humanities will play in the curriculum of the twenty-first century. Furthermore, Verne's pessimism regarding progress is particularly noteworthy in comparison to the optimism of his contemporary Emile Zola whose later cycles Les Trois Villes et Les Quatre Evangiles paint an idyllic picture of the century to come. For both authors, as for others, having lived into the twentieth century roughly one hundred years before the end of the second millennium—Zola died in 1902—seems to have had no minor influence on a authorial tendency to prophesize.

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