The Humanisphere Read online

  The Humanisphere

  and Other Utopian Fantasies

  translated, annotated and introduced by

  Brian Stableford

  A Black Coat Press Book

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Victor Considerant: The Complete News from the Moon

  Joseph Déjacque: The Future World (or, The Humanisphere)

  Fernand Giraudeau: The New City

  Paul Adam: Letters from Malaisie

  FRENCH SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY COLLECTION

  Introduction

  This collection of four “utopian fantasies” first requires some explanation of the evolution of that term and the manner in which it had been further elaborated since its initial adaptation from the title of Thomas More’s Utopia (1516). More intended the coinage as a derivative of the Greek outopos [no place], and his depiction of an imaginary society is primarily satirical, but the image of Utopian society was widely misconstrued as a design for a hypothetical ideal society, comparable to Plato’s Republic (although the latter also contains more sarcasm than is sometimes credited to it). The derivative adjective was thus used by many of those who adopted it as if it were derived from eutopos [better place], and could be used from the very outset either as a label for any non-existent location imagined for literary purposes, or, more specifically, for attempts to design ideal societies. The situation was further complicated in France because the French adaptation utopie permitted the term to be applied to fanciful ideas in general.

  The frequent use of “utopia” to mean, tacitly, “eutopia,” eventually encouraged the invention of an opposite term to refer to worse places: “dystopia.” That word appears to have been first used in English by John Stuart Mill in 1868, but it was not adopted into the critical jargon of historians of imaginative fiction as a necessary distinction until the 1960s. The equivalent French term, dystopie, took even longer to catch on, slightly handicapped by competition from a pre-existent medical term defining a particular defect of eyesight. Long before then, however, French writers had begun to produce satirical images of hypothetical societies worse than our own—utopias in the broad sense, but definitely not eutopias—often in order to mock or contradict eutopian ideas, the most striking ground-breaking work of that kind being Le Monde tel qu’il sera (1846) by Émile Souvestre.

  By the time “dystopia” became commonplace in critical parlance, however, other distinctions had become useful, and perhaps necessary. In his exemplary anthology Utopias and Utopian Thought (1966), Frank Manuel argued that the history of utopian thought had undergone two crucial transitions, the first in the late eighteenth century—primarily and crucially in France—when “eutopian” imagery and thinking had begun to be gradually and largely displaced by “euchronian” imagery and thinking, in which hypothetical ideal societies were located in a hypothetical historical future rather than in an imaginary geographical space. The second shift, he argued, had begun in the twentieth century, when the emphasis of much imagery and thinking in that vein had gradually shifted into a “eupsychian” mode, which sought an existential ideal in a better state of mind instead of a better formula of government and social organization.

  The four works in this collection illustrate not only the ambiguities in the term “utopia” but also the evolution of ideas and methods that encouraged the coinage of the variant terms “dystopia,” “euchronia” and “eupsychia.” The first of them is a utopia in the broad sense, in which the hypothetical society described is only related to existing society in satirical terms, and very subtly. The second and third are both set in future Paris, one being an archetypal euchronia imagining the supposedly ideal society that might result from the thoroughgoing application of the politics of Anarchism, and the other an archetypal dystopia arguing, on the contrary, that a thoroughgoing application of the political principles of Socialism would produce a disastrously vile society. The fourth reverts to the utopian plan, but presents a society that, although founded by eutopians with a firm euchronian agenda, has produced a strangely compromised result, in which eutopian and dystopian elements are fused, thus raising the question of whether any program of eutopian political reform could possibly produce the intended results, given the limited malleability of human nature, and wondering exactly what kinds of psychological adaptation, if any, might really qualify as a recipe for general happiness.

  Each of the four works has virtues of its own—all four were ground-breaking in their day—and also faults of its own, some generated by dubious logic and others by the innate awkwardness of adapting their narrative strategies to their utopian subject-matter, but they become even more fascinating in juxtaposition, illustrating aspects of a spectrum rather than isolated endeavors. One virtue that they all share is that of being relatively short—although I have, admittedly, shorn all four of them of supplementary non-fictional material that increased both the ponderousness and prolixity of their original versions, allowing their narrative components to speak for themselves, as none of the authors quite dared to do, in an era when utopian fiction as still relatively unfamiliar to general readers, and not a genre able to assume any advance sympathy on the part of potential readers. That querulousness was probably unnecessary, as the texts are all, in fact, quite lively in parts as well as thought-provoking, and perfectly readable.

  Publication complète des nouvelles découvertes de sir John Herschel dans le ciel austral et dans la lune by Victor Considerant, here translated as “The Complete News from the Moon” was originally published in Paris by Masson and Dupré in 1836. The story takes the form of a sequel to the text of the New York Sun’s famous “Moon Hoax,” which first appeared in that newspaper as a series of six articles, beginning on 25 August 1835, ostensibly reporting discoveries made by a group of astronomers headed by Sir John Herschel employing a new telescope built at the Cape of God Hope. The story was credited to a fictitious associate of Herschel’s, Andrew Grant, but its actual author was probably the Sun reporter Richard Adams Locke. From modest beginnings, the hoax articles moved on to pile improbability upon improbability in its descriptions of the fauna of the Moon, culminating in descriptions of its winged humanoid inhabitants, beginning with a seemingly-flightless species with bat-like wings, reported on the fourth day and provisionally dubbed Vespertilio-homo, and then a related but taller and seemingly more advanced species of whom a brief glimpse was reported on the sixth and final day.

  The hoax articles caused a sensation, and were rapidly reprinted in other newspapers; the sensation was repeated when translated appeared in various European nations, but had a particular impact in Paris, where it stimulated several responses in kind, including four satirical pieces by Joseph Méry subsequently reprinted as “Les Lunariens” (tr. as “The Lunarians”). Considerant’s sequel was, however, by far the longest and most substantial.

  Although the consensus among astronomers in 1835 was that the Moon had no atmosphere, and was therefore lifeless, there was a stubborn minority view claiming that the satellite did have an atmosphere, and various items of evidence were still occasionally cited in support of that view. A number of astronomers also continued to construe features observed on the lunar surface as evidence of intelligent construction, and thus that the Moon had been inhabited in the past, even if it was not now. The German astronomer Franz Gruithuisen had published an account of observations he considered to be those of relics of a supposed lunar civilization in 1824. The idea also received continuing support from the minority of theologians who clung to the “principle of plenitude”—the argument that God would not have filled the universe with worlds only to leave them barren, and must therefore have populated all of them with beings made, at least approximately, in his image.

  T
he Masson and Dupré book takes some trouble to establish its “credentials,” including an effusive dedication by Herschel and two prefaces by “the editors” and “the translator,” which I have considered to be superfluous and have omitted, only reproducing the account of the supposed further observations of the lunar civilization of the angelically-winged “Séléniens” and their interactions with the bat-winged “Vespertilios,” many of whom have been domesticated and now provide the Séléniens with one of its servant classes, although the “savage” Vespertilios living on the part of the Moon’s surface invisible from the Earth still mount occasional nocturnal raids on the Séléniens, having long since obliged the Séléniens to place their heavily fortified homes on mountain-tops and to maintain a constant vigilance. (At the time it was so widely believed as almost to be taken for granted that the Moon’s many craters were volcanic, and hence qualified as mountains.)

  In Considerant’s version of Herschel’s discoveries, which are not entirely consistent with the allegations of the original hoax, the domesticated Vespertilios only fill the median position in the lunar social hierarchy, the heaviest and dirtiest manual labor being carried out by the wingless Castors [Beavers], thus completing a parallel of sorts to the Earthly social hierarchy of the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, but the resultant element of social satire is only one element of the story’s satirical purpose, and not the more important one. The early sections of the text show the astronomers scrupulously recording and collating their observations, gradually building up an image of the hypothetical “anthropology” of the three alien races, including the effects on their culture of the long cycle of their days and nights. Up to that point, the work is interesting not only as the most elaborate description yet provided of a fictitious alien culture, in terms of its adaptation to its environment, but also as the most elaborate fictional account yet provided of scientific observations made and reported in careful and disciplined fashion. It is, however, a parody, ultimately intended not to praise its hypothetical observers but to demolish them—or, at least, one aspect of their attitude.

  The later sections of Considerant’s text, which deal with the astronomers’ attempt to study the lunar religion and to draw inferences from their observations, take the rhetoric in a different direction, mounting a subtle but devastating attack on a tendency among some contemporary scientists to what was known in England as “natural theology”: the idea that by studying nature one could obtain an insight into the mind and methods of the Creator that would support and confirm religious faith rather than threatening it. While continuing hypocritically to assert their objectivity, Considerant’s astronomers describe a religious ceremony from which the reader might well draw inferences quite different from theirs, and the text concludes with an addendum in which a minor character suggests further inferences that might be drawn from the contemplation of lunar life—a passage that might well owe something to the author’s reflections on Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s posthumously-published and lyrical account of Harmonies de la nature (1815). I shall leave it to the reader to decide what attitude the real author is inviting the reader to take to that conclusion.

  Victor Considerant (1808-1893) was one of the staunchest disciples of the great French utopian writer Charles Fourier, working with Fourier on the propagandizing periodicals La Phalanstère and La Phalange. After Fourier’s death in 1837 he became the effective leader of the movement, and he wrote a good deal of campaigning non-fiction in the cause of democratic socialism, championing a right to work and devising the proportional representation system of democratic election, but he wrote no further fiction. He eventually followed the example of another famous French utopian, Étienne Cabet, in attempting to found a utopian community in Texas, in 1852, but it did not survive the Civil War and he returned to France in time to support the Paris Commune of 1871, although he did not suffer execution or deportation in consequence, perhaps because he still held an American passport.

  The edition of L’Humanisphère, utopia anarchique [The Humanisphere: An Anarchic Utopia] by Joseph Déjacque held by the Bibliothèque Nationale has a title page indicating publication by the Bibliothèque des “Temps Nouveaux” in Brussels, which the library dates 1899, not necessarily correctly, but the edition in question is advertised internally as a reprint, and it is probable that an earlier edition of the text was printed clandestinely in Paris. What is certain, however, is that the material therein had initially been published in serial form in the U.S.A. in Déjacque’s periodical Le Libertaire [Libertarianism], which published twenty-seven issues between June 1858 to February 1861. The section entitled “Le Monde futur,” here translated as “The Future World (of the Humanisphere)” is the penultimate chapter of the book, presenting a vision of the implementation of the anarchist political scheme that Déjacque attempted to develop in the theoretical articles he published in the pages of the periodical.

  Joseph Déjacque (1821-1864) was the most extreme of all the French political radicals of the nineteenth century—a title for which there was certainly no shortage of competition. Like Victor Considerant, he was an enthusiastic supporter of the 1848 Revolution, but he was imprisoned for socialist agitation before the coup d’état of 1851. He seems to have escaped from prison during that upheaval, and then followed Considerant’s example by fleeing the country, initially making his way to England. As with most agitators, imprisonment had only made him more determined to continue the struggle; and while he was resident in Jersey—also Victor Hugo’s place of exile—he published an article that is nowadays regarded as one of the foundation-stones of the French political philosophy of Anarchism, although Déjacque used the term anarchie interchangeably with libertaire.

  In the pages of Le Libertaire Déjacque published a substantial series of related texts, of which L’Humanisphère is a drastically-abridged summary, giving pride of place to his vision of the ideal society that the complete application of the anarchist philosophy ought to produce. Whereas most later writers attempting to design an “anarchist” eutopia compromise to some extent with the principle of total liberty, Déjacque does not; although clearly aware that skeptics might consider his account of the probable consequences of a complete absence of any regulation or restriction in education, labor and matters of amour a trifle over-optimistic, he defends his position robustly. From a literary viewpoint, the narrative of the futuristic vision is relatively uninteresting, containing no characters, no dialogue and little concrete description of the anarchist way of life, but it does contain some plangent rhetoric, and a concise summary of the anarchist ideal that is particularly interesting in comparison to other accounts of the role of science and technology in hypothetical eutopian societies.

  Déjacque’s ideal anarchist society, organized around huge edifices of a kind that would subsequently be dubbed “urban monads” in the late twentieth century, is only feasible because of dramatic improvements in technology, intrinsic to which are abundant power supplied in the form of electricity, elaborate agricultural and industrial machinery, and sophisticated means of transport, including aerial transport. It is a highly mechanized and largely automated world, which inevitably places Science at the very heart of its educational system and central to its atheistic reverence. In Déjacque’s vision, Anarchism and advanced technology are intimately interlinked, and his thesis is, in a sense, the ultimate extrapolation of the eighteenth-century philosophy that saw technological and social progress as different aspects of the same process.

  Other political philosophies, of course, could equally well envisage the future development of science and technology, and would have been foolish not to do so in the years of the Second Empire, but to say the least, Déjacque’s vision of a high-tech society, more elaborately advanced than the vast majority of such visions produced thus far, and his forging of a firm link between the image of an electrically-powered, mechanically elaborate society and the philosophy of anarchism, were not likely to incline diehard opponents of anarchi
sm in favor of such imagery. Nor could the ban on his ideas discriminate between his politics and his technological anticipations, and anyone who contrived to become acquainted with his work in spite of the censors was bound to associate the thrill of the forbidden with all the aspects of the text.

  By virtue of those circumstances, Déjacque’s account of “Le Monde futur” is not only interesting for its reflection of and contribution to the development of political philosophy, but also, and perhaps more so, for its reflection of and contribution to the hopes and expectations of the social transformations that technological progress might facilitate and might perhaps encourage. It is, at any rate, a fascinating experiment in ideas, in spite of its shortcomings as an engaging narrative.

  La Cité nouvelle was originally published anonymously in Paris by Amyot in 1868. It author, Fernand Giraudeau (1835-1904) was located at the opposite end of the spectrum of Second Empire politics from Déjacque, being Napoléon III’s most outspoken apologist; La Cité nouvelle is, in part, an angry reply to the emperor’s critics, and includes a long account by a historian supposedly speaking at the end of the twentieth century, who assesses Napoléon III’s reign as the greatest in the history of European society.

  The nature of the exercise compels that account to extend beyond the date of the book’s publication, which we can now see, with the aid of hindsight, to have been a trifle unfortunate, being only two years ahead of the Franco-Prussian War that brought the reign in question to a catastrophic end. In the “future history” mapped out by Giraudeau—which the passage of time rapidly turned into a an “alternative history”—that does not happen, of course; in a brief military campaign that hardly qualifies as a war, the emperor puts the Prussians in their place and secures Alsace and Lorraine for France permanently, and then goes from strength to strength until he is succeeded by his son, who is compelled to engage in the first genuinely worldwide conflict, when France, England and Germany are allied against Russia and the U.S.A., and from which that alliance emerges triumphant.