Paris in the Year 2000
Page 1
Paris in the Year 2000
by
Dr. Tony Moilin
translated, annotated and introduced by
Brian Stableford
A Black Coat Press Book
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction 4
PARIS IN THE YEAR 2000 11
ADVERTISEMENT 11
I. THE TRANSFORMATION OF PARIS 13
II. THE ORGANIZATION OF LABOR 29
III. SOCIETY 49
IV. EDUCATION 66
V. GOVERNMENT 82
VI. RELIGION AND CUSTOMS 106
FRENCH SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY COLLECTION 128
Introduction
Paris en l’an 2000, by-lined Docteur Tony Moilin (his actual forenames were Julius-Antoine), here translated as Paris in the Year 2000, was published in Paris by the author, in association with the Libraire de la Renaissance, in 1869. Moilin had previously published consisted of three medical textbooks, Leçons de Médecine physiologique (1866) Manuel de Médecine physiologique (1867) and Traité élémentaire, théorique et pratique du Magnétisme (1869), and three political pamphlets, Programme de discussion pour les sociétés populaires (1868), La Liquidation sociale (1869) and Le Suffrage universel (1869), but Paris en l’an 2000 was his first venture into fiction. It was also his last; his career came to an abrupt end not long thereafter.
In August 1870 Moilin was charged with involvement in a plot to assassinate Napoléon III and sentenced to prison for five years. He was liberated during the Prussians’ siege of Paris, and enlisted in the National Guard as a surgeon-major, probably under compulsion, as a condition of his release. When the Commune took control of Paris Moilin did not join it, but he agreed to accept the position of Maire of the 6th arrondissement when the Communards attempted to set up an Administration for the city. He was taken prisoner in May when the Commune fell, rapidly court-martialed, ostensibly for having accepted the administrative post, and summarily executed by firing-squad. He was thirty-nine years old; prior to his conviction he had been the assistant of the renowned physician and physiologist Claude Bernard (1813-1876) at the Collège de France, having formerly been his pupil.
Although it would obviously be an exaggeration to say that it was Moilin’s publication of Paris en l’an 2000 that had prompted the authorities to trump up a charge on which to imprison him, and then to put him before a firing squad without even taking the trouble to trump up anything faintly resembling a justification, it was surely a significant factor. It is generally true that although scrupulous accounts of ideal societies tend to bore those readers who are sympathetic to the ideas set out therein, they horrify and terrify readers opposed to them, sometimes arousing an uncommonly violent indignation. By the same token, the various works that reacted against the ideas elaborated in Moilin’s utopia—some of whose authors had obviously read it—are much more dramatic and satirically spirited than any work espousing those ideas could possibly hope to be. Such anti-Socialist works as René du Mesnil de Maricourt’s La Commune en l’an 2073: au bout du fossé! (1874; tr. as “All the Way! The Commune in 2073”) and Maurice Spronck’s L’An 330 de la République (1894; tr. as “Year 330 of the Republic” 1) are far more flamboyant and rhetorically effervescent, because attack is inherently more glamorous than defense.
Moilin’s work never attained anything remotely akin to the success of its most obvious predecessor, Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s L’An deux mille quatre cent quarante (1771; tr. as Memoirs of the Year 2500), or the best-selling socialist utopia of the 19th century, Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888), but it would probably have had a wider circulation and attracted more discussion had it not appeared on the eve of the Franco-Prussian War and been so rapidly eclipsed by that catastrophe; the murder of its author cannot have helped, even though its aftermath granted him a kind of martyrdom. Indeed, there is a darkly ironic sense in which the Franco-Prussian War showed up the greatest flaw in the historical schema sketched out in Paris en l’an 2000, of which the author was all too obviously painfully aware by the time he recorded it.
In the same way that religious authors who set out painstakingly and analytically to “justify the ways of God to man” in dramatic terms often end up, consciously or unconsciously, in the Devil’s party, with their initial faith shattered, shaken or transfigured, writers of utopian novels often reach a point in their own analysis where their own faith falters, and they realize that what they are endeavoring to offer as a viable and practicable political prospectus is, in fact, a mere dream impossible of attainment. That point is usually recognizable because the satirical sarcasm that can never be far below the surface of any hypothetical image of a reconstructed society suddenly breaks free and becomes explosive, causing a fracture from which the text might never recover. Paris en l’an 2000 provides an unusually clear example of that; once Moilin’s sarcasm had grabbed the bit and carried him away in section 3 of Chapter V, it never consented to be thoroughly disciplined again, and the narrative seems to lose a certain amount of heart thereafter, plugging on with a determination that, although far from grim, is a trifle lacking in wholehearted enthusiasm and conviction.
Although Moilin’s utopia is set squarely in the euchronian tradition founded by Mercier, it also represents, in one sense, an inversion of the strategy followed by its august predecessor. In order to add new verve to the somewhat tired tradition of utopias set on faraway islands, attained with difficulty by travelers who have usually lost their way, Mercier took the unprecedented step of setting his in the future, in a real place, and representing it as a potential social achievement rather than an intrinsically-remote possibility. Many others followed in his footsteps, some of them going so far as to abandon the visionary framework that Mercier had felt obliged to employ, there being no other way in 1771 to gain seemingly-plausible access to a future viewpoint, although the idea of employing a future-located narrative gradually gained acceptance thereafter simply by courtesy of familiarity. Inevitably, however, as visions of future Paris accumulated in number and variety, the more obvious their contingency became and the greater the tendency became to have fun with their speculative elements, either satirically or simply flamboyantly.
By the 1850s, such visions of future Paris as those contained in Théophile Gautier’s “Paris futur” (1851; tr. as “Future Paris” 2) and Joseph Méry’s roughly contemporary “Ce qu’on verra” (original publication untraced; tr. as “What We Shall See” 3) found it both difficult and undesirable to take themselves too seriously, and a rich tradition of stories sardonically depicting future Paris in ruins, cast into the dustbin of history, its relics misinterpreted by blinkered archeologists, had been launched by Méry’s “Les Ruines de Paris” (c1844; tr. as “The Ruins of Paris” 4), to be carried forward in striking fashion by Alfred Bonnardot’s “Archéopolis” (1857; tr. as “Archeopolis” 5) and Hippolyte Mettais’ L’An 5865 (1865; tr. as The Year 5865 6). Moilin had probably read some of those works, and might well have been acquainted with Mettais, a fellow-physician also working in Paris. It is, therefore, not entirely surprising that he decided to turn the strategy on its head, by presenting a supposedly futuristic viewpoint that is actually a feint, and describing what is, in effect, an alternative present: a state that might be established by means of purely political action beginning in the present day.
To this end, Paris en l’an 2000 takes virtually no account of the possibility of technical progress. Although it imagines a very dramatic transformation of the physical appearance of Paris, that metamorphosis is not dependent on any new technological discoveries, except perhaps in terms of the swiftness with which it can allegedly be carried out—and it has to be remembered that Moilin had already been witness to a large-s
cale transformation of Paris carried out under the auspices of Baron Haussmann, and therefore knew very well what marvels could be accomplished in a relatively short time. Although the extraordinarily elaborate systems of railways and bridges that form an integral part of his imagined Paris would represent an amazing feat of engineering, and the trains traveling on it are radically redesigned, the only significant technological innovation cited is a smoke-absorbing facility fitted to the locomotives.
Indeed, the only item of technology cited in the novella whose means of realization clearly did not exist in 1869 is the one featured in the most far-reaching paragraph of section 3 of chapter V, and it was probably not until he reached that point in his writing that Moilin realized both how crucial that particular innovation might, and how unlikely it was that, even if the relevant discovery did work in the way he imagined, it would have the effect he was compelled to attribute to it.
We now know, of course, what effect the actual equivalent of that particular discovery really did have, just as we know about all the other things detailed in the novella that never happened between 1869 and the year 2000, because we now know exactly what Paris was really like in the year in question. That awareness, however, merely serves to emphasize the fact that Paris en l’an 2000 ought to be regarded as an alternative history rather than a future history, and enhances its comparative dimension. In his “advertisement” Moilin asks his readers to make their own judgment as to the desirability of the society he describes, but his contemporary readers were not really in a position to make a reasoned judgment on that point, as the present-day Paris that provided their only yardstick was about to be rendered helpless by Prussian guns and then further smashed up, physically as well as politically, by the localized civil war that obliterated the Commune. Modern readers are, therefore, much better situated to make multiple comparisons between Moilin’s imaginary Paris, the actual Paris of the year 2000, and a whole host of other hypothetical Parises produced in the interim between 1771 and now.
In 1869, of course, nothing resembling a Socialist Republic had ever existed, and the idea was pristine in its imaginative purity, although a distinct note of skeptical sarcasm with regard to social perfectibility in general had crept into Moilin’s hypothetical construction even before he reached the fatal fault-line—a note particularly plangent in section 6 of chapter III. The situation is very different today. Many ostensible Socialist Republics have been established—fleetingly, for the most part—and, far from being pristine, the whole notion now seems irredeemably tarnished by mostly-bitter historical experience. Beneath the stains inflicted upon it, however, the idea itself retains a fugitive innocence, enshrining the hopeful ideal that motivated Tony Moilin and formulated his endeavor. It is not insignificant that France is one European nation where that ideal still retains some muscle and vigor, and where it continues to surface—even, on occasion, although compromised in every imaginable way, in elections for the Presidency of the Republic. Some credit for that retained vigor is due to the impetus lent to it along its long and thorny path by the likes of Louis-Sébastien Mercier and Tony Moilin, as well as to the historical examples of the 1789 Revolution and the Commune.
Tony Moilin is the only martyr of the Commune who is granted a forename as well as a surname in the best-known commemorative protest song that emerged from the aftermath of its suppression, Elle n’est pas morte! [It (i.e., the Commune) is not Dead!] (1886), written by Eugène Pottier, who also wrote the words to the Internationale, to be sung to a familiar tune by Victor Parizot. That exception has more to do with preserving the scansion of the relevant verse than Moilin’s perceived historical importance, but it is still a tribute of sorts. Wikipedia lists twelve versions of the song in question recorded between 1967 and 2008, so the worthy doctor’s name is unlikely to fall into total oblivion any time soon, even without the assistance of this translation.
One further preservation of Moilin’s name, and the contents of Paris en l’an 2000 in particular, that is worthy of mention is the novella’s citation in Walter Benjamin’s Das Passangen-Werk (tr. 2002 as The Arcades Project), a work that Benjamin began in 1927 and left incomplete on his death in 1940, and which he intended to be his magnum opus. When the existing text was edited and published in the 1980s it attracted a great deal of attention and controversy, and Benjamin’s account of Moilin’s “gallery-streets,” as an important adjunct to the evolution of the arcades of Paris and the culture they helped to create and shape, has helped to renew interest in Paris en l’an 2000. That particular innovation, sociological rather than technological, along with the consequences that Moilin attributes to it, does, indeed, constitute the most original and fascinating aspect of the novella, all the more so because it is largely independent of the work’s political propaganda.
The translation has been made from the version of the first edition reproduced on the Bibliothèque Nationale’s gallica website.
Brian Stableford
PARIS IN THE YEAR 2000
ADVERTISEMENT
I confess that the Paris that is in question in this work bears little resemblance to present-day Paris. To all the incredulous individuals who find my reforms too radical and impossible to realize, I will only say one thing in reply: that between now and then, 131 years will go by, and during that long lapse of time, more than one revolution might occur, and bring about many changes.
There is, however, one thing that will not change so soon; that is the very foundation of human nature, and for a long time yet, people will be egotistical and sensual. That is why, unlike some other Socialists, I have abstained from crediting all qualities and all virtues to the inhabitants of my ideal Republic. They are human beings, neither better nor worse than those of today; sometimes, by design, I have even exaggerated their faults, so fearful was I of falling into the ridiculous utopia of universal perfection.
All the reforms that I have indicated, therefore, have taken place not in human beings themselves but in the institutions that rule them. To put them into practice, it would not be necessary to wait for citizens to be more enlightened, more virtuous and more disinterested that they are at present; it would be sufficient to make a few new laws and repeal a few others, and the social Republic would function with the French people of the present day as well as with those of the future.
Throughout the course of my book, I have supposed that we are living in the year 2000 and that my reforms, already accepted for a long time, have borne all their fruit. That is a literary procedure intended to give ideas a more gripping form and set the things themselves before the eyes. In comparing the Society of the year 2000 with that of today, readers will easily be able to see the difference, and choose which of the two seems preferable to them.
But when, I might be asked, will the social renovation that I propose take place? Will it not be for another century, or in an era much closer to the present? That is a question that it is not up to me to decide, and which must be settled by the Parisians themselves, since it concerns the city that they inhabit. It is for them to decide whether they are satisfied with their present situation, or whether, on the contrary, they desire a change, and are resolved to do what is necessary to obtain it.
I. THE TRANSFORMATION OF PARIS
1. The Expropriation of Houses
When the Socialists came to power and were the masters of Paris, the first thing they had to think about was expropriating the houses of the city, in order to transform them and bring them into line with the new social institutions.
The architects consulted in this regard wanted everything to be demolished, and then to have “model houses” constructed, at great expense, in conformity with the plans they presented. Fortunately, the Government was as prudent as it was economical. It therefore rejected the architects’ projects, which would have involved too great an expense, preferring to utilize the houses of Paris as they were and to adapt them as well as possible to their new purpose, rather than launch into a costly system of demolition and reco
nstruction.
Before giving the details of that transformation of the capital, however, let us first explain how the Administration went about expropriating all the houses in Paris and becoming their legitimate owner. That acquisition of an entire city was all the more remarkable as a financial operation because the State, when the Republic was inaugurated, had debts of more than eighty billion and not a centime in its coffers.
Far from being alarmed by that penury, and knowing perfectly well that France was rich enough to pay its old debts and to contract new ones, the Government, as soon as it as solidly established, hastened to expropriate all the houses in Paris, paying a fair price to their owners. They did not make that payment in metallic money, since they did not have any. Nor did they make it in paper money that would have been immediately depreciated, and rightly refused by the owners. They did it quite simply, and to general satisfaction, with entitlements to annual income payable by the public Treasury.
The mean income of each house was calculated in accordance with the rents of the previous fifty years, and then that income was capitalized, at a standard interest of 5%. The capital thus calculated was transformed into yearly income in conformity with the tariffs adopted by the Insurance Companies.
In the early days it was necessary to give very large sums to the former owners, but as they were dying every day, the income paid to them diminished every year, and was soon amply covered by the produce of the rents paid by the citizens to the State.
Furthermore, what greatly aided the Socialist Government to pay off its own debts and those of previous regimes was the introduction of an income tax.