The Aerial Valley Read online

  The Aerial Valley

  and Other French Utopian Fantasies

  translated, annotated and introduced by

  Brian Stableford

  A Black Coat Press Book

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Introduction 4

  Baron Jean-Baptiste Mosneron de Launay: The Aerial Valley 11

  Turrault de Rochecorbon: The Year 2800, or, The Dream of Recluse 167

  Jacques Fabien: Paris in Dream 186

  Victor Hugo: The Future 237

  Gustave Marx: Love A Thousand Years Hence 243

  FRENCH SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY COLLECTION 278

  Introduction

  Le Vallon aérien ou Relation du voyage d’un aéronaute dans un pays inconnu jusqu’à présent; suivie de l’histoire de ses habitants et de la description de leurs mœurs, signed “J. Mosneron, ex-Législateur,” here translated as “The Aerial Valley,” was originally published in 1810 by J. Chaumerot.

  The author, whose full name was Jean-Baptiste Mosneron, Baron de Launay, was born in 1738 in Nantes, the son of a ship-owner who made his money in the slave trade. After studying law in Paris he returned to Nantes to practice, and did a good deal of work for the family firm, while pursuing his literary interests as a sideline, albeit with a considerable degree of interest and intensity. His early work was mostly done for the theater, and remains unpublished, but he also published a French translation of Paradise Lost, a biography of John Milton and several other items of non-fiction, plus two novels.

  Following the French revolution, Mosneron was appointed as a delegate to the new Legislative Assembly in 1791 and was sent to Paris with a specific mandate to defend the slave trade against possible prohibition by a government ostensibly committed to the rights of man. The artful speech that he made in that cause—probably not without a certain amount of risk—became his most notorious work; it was published in a number of places and can now be read on-line. He sat on the right of the Chambre and opposed the execution of Louis XVI, in spite of the fact that his Protestant family had absolutely nothing for which to thank the Bourbons; that was certainly not without risk. He was arrested and imprisoned during the Terror, but he escaped execution and was released when Robespierre fell. He came back to the legislative assembly after Bonaparte’s coup overturned the Directoire but did not remain there for long.

  Mosneron’s combative tendencies are displayed in both of his novels, the first of which, Memnon, ou le Jeune Israélite (1806), was the first of numerous French fictional accounts of the life of Jesus, carefully stripped of any miracle-working—a project calculated to cause offense to devout believers, but carried out with the author’s typical care and craft; the other writers who repeated the project subsequently included Alexandre Dumas and Félicien Champsaur. Le Vallon aérien might be reckoned a trifle mild by comparison, and also somewhat disjointed—its numerous chronological inconsistencies might well stem from an attempt to stitch together several different fragments into a more-or-less unified whole—but it is nevertheless notable within the rich history of French utopian fiction as one of the most readable, as well as one of the most conscientiously self-doubting works of that kind. Although it follows a relatively orthodox basic line in suggesting that a utopian society can only maintain stability if it is carefully technologically limited and sternly isolated from outside influences, and must at all costs resist the disruptive effects of technological progress, it examines that proposition with an even-handed approach that scrupulously gives consideration both sides of its principal arguments—as only a lawyer accustomed to considering both sides of a case might be expected to do.

  The patchwork account of the “aerial valley” and its inhabitants is awkwardly-structured, involving a number of different narrators as well as a hypothetical “editor,” who adds his own quibbling footnotes to those supplied by the account of the aeronaut who rediscovers the valley after more than a century of near-total isolation, but the eccentric product is nevertheless successful in building up a mosaic account of the circumstances that led the founders of the fugitive society to flee from France, the evolution of the society and its politics, and the reasons for its commitment to continued isolation. The balance of that detailed and multi-sided consideration is sufficiently dutiful to introduce an interesting thought-experiment into the story, in the form of the importation into the rigidly stable and naïve society of a well-meaning but subtly dangerous outsider, whose endeavors serve to test both the resilience and the justice of the story’s fundamental assumptions. That inclusion also helps to make the plot of the story more enterprising and more robust than is commonly the case in utopian fiction.

  As a modest anti-progressive utopia Le Vallon aérien cannot be reckoned, with the aid of hindsight, to be in the mainstream of the development of French utopian thought, but it is interesting as one of the more eloquent arguments for the “anti-euchronian” case, and one of the most sensitive challenges to the philosophy of progress as an instrument of perfectibility.

  L’An deux mil huit cent, ou Le Rêve d’un solitaire, first published as a pamphlet in Tours in 1829, and here translated as “The Year 2800” is, by contrast, a euchronian work in the tradition of Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s pioneering L’An deux mille quatre cent quarante (1770; tr. as Memoirs of the Year Two Thousand Five Hundred), but it serves to illustrate the fact that the nascent genre remained only marginally influenced by the notion that technological progress would be an essential component of social progress for some considerable time, basing its anticipations of future improvement almost entirely on social reforms.

  The booklet is listed by the Bibliothèque Nationale as an anonymous work, although it bears the signature “Turrault de Rochecorbon” at the end of the text. That signature also appears on one other text of the period, similarly published in Tours, the three-act comedy L’Épreuve de l’amour [The Proof of Love] (1827), and Turrault appears to be a moderately common name in the département of the Indre-et-Loire, in which the commune if Rochecorbon is located. The work’s utopian scheme is unremarkable, but it is interesting as one of the few works of that kind published between the fall of Napoléon I and the July Revolution of 1830 which created a constitutional monarchy; it imagines its reforms firmly within the context of what might be described, if the term were not oxymoronic, as a modified absolute monarchy.

  Paris en songe: essai sur les logements à bon marché, le bien-être des masses, la protection due aux femmes, les splendeurs de Paris et divers progrès moraux tels que chambres de transactions, justice à trois degrés, tribunaux d’indulgence et pardon, honorariat du commerce, parlement de paix by Jacques Fabien, here translated as “Paris in Dream” was first published as a small book in Paris by Dentu in 1863. The signature is surely a pseudonym, but there does not seem to be any published indication as to who the person behind it might have been; it might well have been one of Dentu’s regular authors, as it would have been an odd book for that publisher to issue while the Second Empire was still going strong, and its censors were still active, even though the text employs a conspicuously soft pedal in its treatment of government. It is also a relatively lively and well-written work, which suggests that the author was no novice.

  As with Turrault’s work, Fabien’s fits solidly into a euchronian tradition that had achieved a degree of dominance by the 1860s, especially with regard to specific examinations of the future of Paris, greatly encouraged by the ongoing endeavors of Baron Haussmann, who was busy remodeling the city in accordance with a utopian design. That exploit inevitably occasioned a great deal of discussion as to what the consequences of the remodeling might be, and how the scheme might be carried forward beyond Haussmann’s particular plans. Fabien’s version is one of the most elaborate, al
though the author restricts himself to the kind of modifications that Haussmann might have embarked upon had he had the inclination and the support of the relevant political will.

  Although it is not anti-technological in the way that the hypothetical inhabitants of the Aerial Valley decide to be, and nor is it oblivious to technological change, as Turrault de Rochecorbon seems to be, Fabien’s utopian dream is rather remarkable in its particular skepticism regarding the potential social value of electricity, in the contemporary applications of which it suspects a lurking catastrophe. For that reason, it differs significantly from most of the other visions of future Paris produced during the Second Empire.

  The succinct account of “L’Avenir” by Victor Hugo, here translated as “The Future,” is much more typical of the general run of future-Paris texts of the period. It was the first chapter of the great man’s introduction to a guide-book produced for visitors to the Exposition Universelle of 1867, although most surviving copies of the text date from 1869, when the guide was reprinted as a book for sale to the general public. It was published while the author was still living in exile in the Channel Islands, having refused to return to Paris—in spite of the offer of an amnesty—while Napoléon III was still in power.

  The invitation to the exile to write the preface to a guide book to one of the principal showpieces of the emperor’s reign might be reckoned a trifle unusual, but Hugo was universally recognized as the greatest writer in France, and by far the most appropriate individual to sing the praises of an Exposition Universelle staged in Paris. In any case, the futuristic vision is not unduly revolutionary in its suggestions, and it seems unlikely that the political censors saw any occasion to interfere with it, especially in view of its nationalistic fervor, which anticipate Paris being elevated in the twentieth century to the capital of a unified Europe.

  That same suggestion is reiterated in L’Amour en mille ans d’ici by Gustave Marx, a humorist better known under the pseudonym A. Vémar, and here translated as “Love a Thousand Years Hence.” The item in question was published in several parts in a reprint periodical called L’Omnibus 1889, but must have appeared previously in another periodical, almost certainly in 1873, which is the date of composition implied by the text, and corresponds more closely to the period when the author was in the most productive phase of his career.

  The misleadingly-titled story is a satire of the glut of utopian accounts of future Paris, perhaps penned with both “Jacques Fabien” and Victor Hugo in mind, as well as earlier high-profile contributors to the subgenre such as Théophile Gautier and Joseph Méry; it is written with tongue firmly in cheek, although not all the commentators on the recent ArchéoSF reprint of the text seems to have noticed the fact that it is a deliberate farce.

  As is normal with satires, the deliberate exaggeration goes far beyond the standard routine of possibilities featured in the earnest utopias of the period, although not all of the supposedly ludicrous possibilities still seem as absurd today as they would have done in 1873, and several seem distinctively conservative, especially in the matter of their chronology. The satirical wit also helps, of course, to make the story more readable than many of the works that it is parodying, and the narrative is conspicuously buoyant by the standards of the futuristic fiction of the period.

  Marx’s account of the future is remarkable in several ways, perhaps most particularly for its charmingly absurd account of the exploration of the solar system by travelers unreeling long metal cables behind them in order that all the planets—except, for some unstated reason, Mars—can enter into communication with one another by telegraphy. As a utopian fantasy it stands in exceedingly sharp contrast to Le Vallon aérien, although the intermediate texts in the present anthology offer an approximate series of stepping-stones illustrating the process of literary development that connects the two texts, adding an intermediary patchwork to the internal collages of the two parenthetical texts, and thus enabling the whole of the present volume to be a trifle more than the sum of its parts

  The translation of Le Vallon aérien was made from the copy of the edition reproduced on the Bibliothèque Nationale’s gallica website. The translation of L’An deux mil huit cent, ou Le Rêve d’un solitaire was made from the copy of the Goisbault-Belebreton edition of 1829 reproduced on gallica. The translation of Paris en songe was made from the copy of the Dentu edition reproduced on gallica. The translation of “L’Avenir” was made from the version reprinted in the Kindle edition of Philippe Ethuin’s ArchéoSF anthology Paris Futurs (2014). The translation of L’Amour en mille ans d’ici was made from the Kindle edition of the 2012 ArchéoSF reprint.

  Brian Stableford

  Baron Jean-Baptiste Mosneron de Launay: The Aerial Valley

  (1810)

  Editor’s Preface

  The discovery by Monsieur de Montgolfier, the most extraordinary of the discoveries of the eighteenth century, has not had any useful result. The research of scientists and the expectation of the public have been equally disappointed; aerostatics, which ought to have procured enlightenment regarding the higher regions of the atmosphere, assistance to commerce and services to military art has only offered an astonishing spectacle, and the ascension of a balloon only seems appropriate henceforth to figure in fêtes, as a very singular, very curious but utterly sterile showpiece.

  Such, at least, has been the general opinion of balloons for some time. The scientists, despairing of extracting veritable fruit from their endeavors, have renounced their use, and Monsieur Blanchard, parading his spectacle from one capital to another, enjoys his glory with regard to the public purse without competition.1 In the depths of Gascony, however, living in the greatest obscurity, there is a skillful aeronaut who had found perhaps the only means of rendering his ascensions useful. Monsieur de Montagnac floated in a balloon over the Pyrenean chain, making a map of the mountains, sometimes stopping on summits inaccessible to Ramond, Humboldt and Saussure,2 and made profound observations relative to geology, mineralogy and botany.

  He studied the gradations of temperature of the atmosphere, relative to altitude, and had even recognized regular air currents and periodic monsoons. But that modest man and veritable scientist did not want to make the public party to his discoveries until he was perfectly certain of their reliability. Departing from Perpignan and heading toward Bayonne, he had only traveled over half the chain in the space of eight years, because he repeated the same observations several times and was often obliged to wait a long time for the light air current favorable to his direction.

  When he had completed his excursions and Aerial studies over the Pyrenees, he planned to repeat them over the Alps; it was at the end of those difficult endeavors that the public was to collect their fruit. The work that would have resulted from them would doubtless have been epoch-making in the history of nineteenth-century discovery, but death took that estimable scientist by surprise in the little village of Saumède in the middle of the Pyrenees, where he had come down after a third ascension over Maladetta.

  I was then on holiday in those mountains, and had made the acquaintance of Monsieur de Montagnac there. The conformity of our tastes for the same study, which is the most powerful as well as the most agreeable of bonds, had brought us together from our very first meeting. The extreme amiability of his society had tightened our friendship, and if the death of that man of genius is an irreparable loss for the sciences, it will be a subject of eternal regret for my heart. He bequeathed me all his papers, giving me the freedom to dispose of them as I thought appropriate, but he recommended to me particularly the account of his voyage to the Aerial Valley. That voyage continually came back to his memory; it was the object of his most tender affections. I am, therefore, merely acquitting a sacred debt in publishing this account. I have left out everything pertaining to mineralogy and botany, because the scientific endeavor of which those studies are a part will form the subject matter of a separate work, which I hope to publish after this one.

  Relation of
my voyage to the Aerial Valley

  I had perceived in one of my recent ascensions a group of mountains arranged in a circle, in the middle of which I suspected the existence of a plain of considerable extent. Before rising up over that part of the Pyrenean chain, I wanted to know the name that had been given to the place, and whether it was inhabited. I therefore went to the foot of the mountains and sought enlightenment from the shepherds who came to establish themselves there in the summer with their flocks.

  They told me that the interior of the enclosure was as deep as the mountains were high, that nobody had ever been able to penetrate it, because all around the exterior there was a perpendicular rampart, as smooth as ice, but that everyone knew that the enclosure was the dwelling of a company of sorcerers who, if they were not true devils, at least had a close relationship with Hell. It had been observed that every time that hail fell, a frost or some other baneful accident, some of those sorcerers were seen laughing uproariously on the ramparts of the enclosure, which made it evident that they had sent the scourge.

  That was the only information that I could get out of those poor herdsmen. It would have been pointless to try to disabuse them: “Man is ice to verity, but fire to lies.”3 Those lines have a universal application, and it seems, given the interest that such fictions inspire in all classes of society, that they are necessary to the human mind; it often by invention alone that it can prove its thought, and the greater part of the human race would be reduced to the state of imbecility if truth were the only source from which he could extract his ideas.

  I concluded from the opinion of my shepherds, shared by all the inhabitants of the region, that the interior of that group of mountains merited examination. On the tenth of July I took advantage of an almost absolute calm to rise up to their height. Floating at a height of several hundred toises4 above that basin, it was easy for me to see humans with the naked eye, but as soon as they saw me they fled and disappeared—which would have been quite sufficient, had I had any doubt in that regard, to persuade me that those people had no relationship with the infernal empire. However, when I descended to the ground after having opened the valve to let a part of the gas out of my balloon, I armed myself against any eventuality before emerging from my nacelle, with two pistols and my saber.