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. (Verne's very first book, Paris in the 20th 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.) Jules Verne. ... Utopian fiction is the creation of an ideal world as the setting for a novel. ... Utopian fiction is the creation of an ideal world as the setting for a novel. ... 1879 (MDCCCLXXIX) was a common year starting on Wednesday (see link for calendar). ... Jules Verne. ... Left panel (The Earthly Paradise, Garden of Eden), from Hieronymus Boschs The Garden of Earthly Delights. ... A dystopia (alternatively, cacotopia[1], kakotopia or anti-utopia) is a fictional society that is the antithesis of utopia. ... Paris in the 20th Century (Paris au XXème siècle) is a science fiction novel by Jules Verne. ...

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. Jean François Paschal Grousset (1844 - 1909) was a French politician and journalist. ... Le Père Duchesne looking at the statue of Napoleon I on top of the Vendome column: Eh ben ! bougre de canaille, on va donc te foutre en bas comme ta crapule de neveu !… (Here! savage rascal, we will put you down just like your crook of a nephew!…) The... Categories: Stub ...

The book first appeared in a hasty and poorly-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. Wesleyan University, founded in 1831, is a private, liberal arts university in Middletown, Connecticut. ...

Plot summary

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. Begum is a title given to women of rank in South Asia. ...

One of the inheritors is a gentle French physician, Dr. Sarrasin, who has long been concerned with the unsanitary 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. Left panel (The Earthly Paradise, Garden of Eden), from Hieronymus Boschs The Garden of Earthly Delights. ...

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 completely 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 considerable "research" and publication conclusively proving the superiority of the German race over the rest of humanity. For the term used in its original printing sense, see etymology below. ... Militarism or militarist ideology is the doctrinal view of a society as being best served (or more efficient) when it is governed or guided by concepts embodied in the culture, doctrine, system, or people of the military. ... Manifestations Slavery · Racial profiling · Lynching Hate speech · Hate crime · Hate groups Genocide · Holocaust · Pogrom Ethnocide · Ethnic cleansing · Race war Religious persecution · Gay bashing Movements Discriminatory Aryanism · Neo-Nazism · Supremacism Fundamentalism · Kahanism Anti-discriminatory Abolitionism · Civil rights · Gay rights Womens/Universal suffrage · Mens rights Childrens rights · Youth rights...

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 subdued 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, located at southern Oregon at a distance of forty kilometres of each other on either side of the Cascades - a tranquil French city of 100,000 on the western side, and a bustling German city of 50,000 to the east, with its industrial and mining operations extending far eastward, causing extensive pollution and environmental destruction as far as The Red Desert in Wyoming (see [1],[2]). The Pacific Northwest from space This page is about the region that includes parts of Canada and the US. For the US only region, see Northwestern United States The Pacific Northwest, abbreviated PNW, or PacNW is a region in the northwest of North America. ... Official language(s) None Capital Salem Largest city Portland Area  Ranked 9th  - Total 98,466 sq mi (255,026 km²)  - Width 260 miles (420 km)  - Length 360 miles (580 km)  - % water 2. ... Mount Adams in Washington state The Cascade Range is a mountainous region famous for its chain of tall volcanos called the High Cascades that run north-south along the west coast of North America from British Columbia to the Shasta Cascade area of northern California. ... Official language(s) English Capital Cheyenne Largest city Cheyenne Area  Ranked 10th  - Total 97,818 sq mi (253,348 km²)  - Width 280 miles (450 km)  - Length 360 miles (580 km)  - % water 0. ...

Verne gives the precise location of Sarrasin's "Ville-France" - on the Southern Oregon sea shore, eighty kilometres north of Cape Blanco, at 43°11'3" North, 124°41'17" West. This would place it at the southern end of Coos County, Oregon - a county which already existed at the time, though very thinly populated (and remained so, having 62,779 inhabitants as of 2000). Cape Blanco from space, October 1994 Cape Blanco () is a prominent headland on the Pacific Ocean coast of southwestern Oregon in the United States, forming the westernmost point in the state. ... Coos County is a county located in the U.S. state of Oregon. ... This article is about the year 2000. ...

The nearest real-life town seems to be Bandon with a 2,833 population registered in the same 2000 census, located slightly north-east of the site of Ville-France, (see [3]), and which was founded by the Irish peer George Bennet in 1873 - one year after Verne's date for the creation of Ville-France. The Coquille River, at whose southern bank Bandon is located, is presumably the unnamed "small river of sweet mountain waters" which Verne describes as providing Ville-France's water. Bandon (IPA: ) is a city in Coos County, Oregon, United States, on the south side of the mouth of the Coquille River. ... 1873 (MDCCCLXXIII) was a common year starting on Wednesday (see link for calendar). ... The Coquille River is a river, 35 mi (56 km) long, in southwestern Oregon in the United States. ...

As depicted by Verne, brief negotiations with the Oregon Legislature in December 1871 suffice to secure the grant of a 16 kilometre-wide area extending from the Pacific shore to the peaks of the Cascades, "with a sovereignty similar to that of Monaco" and the stipulation that after an unspecified number of years it would revert to full US sovereignty (Verne does not mention any State Department or Congressional involvement in the deal). Actual construction begins in January 1872, and by April of the same year the first train from New York pulls into the Ville-France Railway Station, a trunk line from Sacramento having been completed. The Oregon Legislative Assembly is the legislature for the U.S. state of Oregon. ... 1871 (MDCCCLXXI) was a common year starting on Sunday (see link for calendar). ... Mount Adams in Washington state The Cascade Range is a mountainous region famous for its chain of tall volcanos called the High Cascades that run north-south along the west coast of North America from British Columbia to the Shasta Cascade area of northern California. ... The United States Department of State, often referred to as the State Department, is the Cabinet-level foreign affairs agency of the United States government, equivalent to foreign ministries in other countries. ... A congress is a gathering of people, especially a gathering for a political purpose. ... Sacramento is a Spanish- and Portuguese-language word meaning sacrament; it is a common toponym in parts of the world where those tongues were or are spoken. ...

The houses and public facilities of "Ville-France" are constructed by a large number of Chinese migrant workers- who are sent away once the city is complete, with the payment of their salaries specifically dependent on their signing an obligation never to return. Reviewer 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" [4]. Foreign farm worker, New York A foreign worker (also: guest worker or economic migrant), is a person who works in a country other than the one of which he or she is a citizen. ...

The book justifies the exclusion of the Chinese as being a precaution needed in order to avoid in advance the "difficulties created in other places" by the presence of Chinese communities. This might be an oblique reference to the Chinese Massacre of 1871, when a mob entered Los Angeles' Chinatown, indiscriminately burning Chinese-occupied buildings and killing at least 20 Chinese American residents out of a total of some 200 then living in the city. Chinese Massacre of 1871 refers to a racially motivated riot on October 24, 1871, when a mob of over 500 whites or Caucasians entered Los Angeles Chinatown to attack and eventually murder Chinese-American residents of the city. ... Flag Seal Nickname: City of Angels Location Location within Los Angeles County in the state of California Coordinates , Government State County California Los Angeles County Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa (D) Geographical characteristics Area     City 1,290. ... This article is about sections of an urban area associated with a large number of Chinese residents or commercial activities. ... A Chinese American is an American who is of ethnic Chinese descent. ...

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. There is no mention of Steel City's precise legal status vis-a-vis the Oregon or US Federal authorities, but clearly Schultze behaves as a completely independent head of state (except that he uses Dollars rather than mint his own currency). Alternate uses: Dollar (disambiguation) The dollar is the name of the official currency in several countries, dependencies and other regions (see list below). ...

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 metallurgical 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 characterised many working-class districts of the time, and competence is rewarded with rapid promotion 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. This does not cite its references or sources. ... Location Administration Capital Strasbourg Regional President Adrien Zeller (UMP) (since 1996) Départements Bas-Rhin Haut-Rhin Arrondissements 13 Cantons 75 Communes 903 Statistics Land area1 8,280 km² Population (Ranked 14th)  - January 1, 2005 est. ...

The dashing Bruckmann - an Alsatian with a German family name and fiercely patriotic French heart - manages to penetrate Steel City. As an Alsatian, he is a fluent speaker of German, an indispensable condition for entering the thoroughly Germanised Steel City, and is able to pass himself of as being Swiss - "Elsässisch", the German dialect spoken in Alsace, being very close to Swiss German. He quickly 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 towards his explicit ambition of establishing Germany's world-wide rule.(He casually mentions a plan to seize "some islands off Japan" in order to further the same.) Elsässich is a West Germanic language spoken in Alsace. ...

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 degrees Celsius below zero, quick-freezing every living thing in the vicinity. Chemical warfare is warfare (and associated military operations) using the toxic properties of chemical substances to kill, injure or incapacitate an enemy. ... Herbert George Wells (September 21, 1866 – August 13, 1946), better known as H. G. Wells, was an English writer best known for such science fiction novels as The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man and The Island of Doctor Moreau. ... The term Black Smoke is also sometimes used to refer to The Monster from the television series Lost. ... The War of the Worlds (1898), by H. G. Wells, is an early science fiction novel (or novella) which describes an invasion of England by aliens from Mars. ...

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. DVD cover Poetic Justice is a 1993 drama/romance film starring Tupac Shakur and Janet Jackson and directed by John Singleton. ...

The entire edifice of "Steel City" collapses, since Schultze had kept everything in his own hands and never appointed any deputy. It goes bankrupt and becomes a ghost town. Sarrasin and Bruckmann take it over with the only resistance offered being from two rather dimwitted Schultze bodyguards who stayed behind when everybody else left. 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." (Arms production would go on, however, so as "to make Ville-France so strong that nobody would dare attack it ever again"

Influence, commentary, and appraisals

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 [5]). 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. McDougall commented with the regard to The Begum's Millions: "After the Franco-Prussian War, Verne began to invent mad scientists and evil geniuses"[6]. Nazi Germany, or the Third Reich, commonly refers to Germany in the years 1933–1945, when it was under the firm control of the totalitarian and fascist ideology of the Nazi Party, with the Führer Adolf Hitler as dictator. ... Hitler redirects here. ... Combatants Second French Empire North German Confederation allied with south German states (later German Empire) Commanders Napoleon III # Otto Von Bismarck Helmuth von Moltke the Elder Strength 400,000[] 1,200,000[] Casualties 150,000 dead or wounded 284,000 captured 350,000 civilian [] 70,000 dead or wounded 200... For other uses, see Journey to the Center of the Earth (disambiguation). ...

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 [7]), Verne's ridiculing of the German's ethnic stereotyping can be regarded as itself part of an ethnic stereotyping in the opposite direction.

A more obvious ethnic stereotyping is the repeated references to Schultze eating nothing but sausages and sauerkraut in enormous quantities, 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 Bruckmann heartily loathes the same kind of food, but dutifully ingests it day after day in the patriotic interest of gaining Schulze's confidence. Sauerkraut and sausage on a plate Percentages are relative to US recommendations for adults. ...

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. However, the Hebrew version omitted a passage in the original (Chapter 11) where Octave Sarrasin, the doctor's dissolute son, is being cheated by "foreigners with long noses" as well as ones belonging to "the black and yellow races". Hebrew redirects here. ... This article is becoming very long. ...

• A passage in the book is clearly intended as satire of the already formidable American advertising industry. When looking for manpower to build their Utopian new city, the founders of Ville-France find it sufficient "to publish daily ads in all of San Francisco's 23 daily papers, and to have a special wagon completely covered with advertisements attached to the Transcontinental trains" and they "find unnecessary" the "quite cheap offer of an advertising agency to inscribe advertisements into the flanks of the Rocky Mountains". Verne's idea here anticipates Robert A. Heinlein's own in "The Man Who Sold the Moon" to use the surface of the Moon as "a billboard for Coca Cola which would be visible from everywhere on Earth".
• At the time of writing, public opinion in France was moved by the liberal subscriptions made by the citizens of San Francisco to a relief fund for the sick and wounded soldiers of France during the Franco-Prussian war. In acknowledgement, the French government donated to the newly-established San Francisco Art Association a collection of copies from original marbles in the Louvre, including twenty-five pieces of the Parthenon frieze [8]. This may have effected Verne's choice of the US Pacific Coast as a congenial setting for his ideal French city.

Wikibooks has more about this subject: Marketing Billboards and street advertising in Shinjuku, Tokyo, Japan, (2005) Advertising is paid communication through a non-personal medium in which the sponsor is identified and the message is controlled. ... This page is a candidate for speedy deletion. ... The transcontinental railroad is a railway that crosses a continent, typically from sea to sea. Terminals are at or connected to different oceans. ... Rockies may also refer to the National League Baseball team, the Colorado Rockies. ... Robert Anson Heinlein (July 7, 1907 – May 8, 1988) was one of the most popular, influential, and controversial authors of hard science fiction. ... Cover of Shasta edition collection The Man Who Sold the Moon is a science fiction novella by Robert A. Heinlein written in 1949 and first published on February 23,1951, part of his Future History of stories sharing a common background from Life-Line to Da Capo. This story, which... Coca-Cola (also known as Coke, a name that was trademarked by The Coca-Cola Company after it was discovered many people called it by that particular name) is a cola (a carbonated soft drink) sold in stores, restaurants and vending machines in more than 200 countries. ... This page is a candidate for speedy deletion. ... This article is about the museum: for building history, see Palais du Louvre. ... The Parthenon seen from the hill of the Pnyx to the west. ...

Common themes with "Facing the Flag"

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. Facing the Flag is an 1896 novel by Jules Verne. ... Year 1896 (MDCCCXCVI) was a leap year starting on Wednesday (link will display calendar). ... This article or section may contain original research or unverified claims. ... For the album, see Weapons of Mass Destruction (album). ... Flag Ratio: 2:3 The national flag of France (Vexillological symbol: , known in French as drapeau tricolore, drapeau bleu-blanc-rouge, drapeau français, rarely, le tricolore and, in military parlance, les couleurs) is a tricolour featuring three vertical bands coloured blue (hoist side), white, and red. ...

External links

Versions

• The begum's fortune, scanned book via Internet Archive, illustrated. Considered a poor translation.

Resources Internet Archive headquarters. ...

• Review by Michael Dirda
• Review by Cheryl Morgan
• Review by Paul Kincaid
• Interview with the English translator