Clockwork Futures

by Brandy Schillace

  He might have done just as well to call himself the oppressor of Engels’s free men—and Burnett brought all his socialist intellect to bear, enumerating facts and accusing the magnate of suppressing the truth to serve his selfish business interests. Rallies broke out all over England in support of the Nine Hours League, and the foreign replacement workers voluntarily began to leave the country. The workmen would win their case by October, forcing the proud Armstrong to bow to their demands. Burnett, like Engels, saw the wider significance: “the working-man by himself is weak, but [. . .] when combined with his fellows he is almost irresistible.”34 For the Victorian scientist-engineers, the battle lines were drawn between deprivation and industry, a fear of being left behind and a golden future of wealth and success on a national scale. But the lines had also been drawn between anarchy and control, between the specter of labor revolt and the enforced and terrible control of systems—of machinery that crushed men under the wheels, and men who had become machines.

  The World that Wasn’t

  “His furious oration was remarkably similar to the whistles, groans, jangles, squeals, the thousand unpleasant noises which escape an active steam engine; the speaker’s rapid delivery suggested a projectile hurtling at top speed [. . .] the grating phrases locked into one another like cogwheels.”

  —Jules Verne, Paris in the 20th Century

  Engels and Marx’s Communist Manifesto traveled further and faster than Engels’s own Conditions of the Working Class. The Manifesto appeared in 1848, just as a series of revolutions broke out in waves across continental Europe. In many respects, it was a workers’ revolution, a populist movement that demanded rights for the proletariat. In the German states, students led a march for freedom of the press and of assembly that was ultimately put down by the aristocracy, while in Denmark a constitutional monarchy was established after farmers and liberals marched on Christiansborg Palace. The most impacting of them all, however, occurred in France. Driven by urban workers, it demanded droit au travail or the “right to work,” workshops for the unemployed, and a voice in government. The king of France, a bourgeois monarch of elites, had been indifferent to the needs of the people—a despot in absentia, not active in suppressing them but oblivious to their cares. They wanted a voice, they wanted what the Chartist movement in England had accomplished in terms of the vote, and they wanted an elected parliament. As Armstrong would do, however, Philippe turned a deaf ear to all concerns. In 1846, harvests failed, workers lost jobs, and prices rose exponentially. No stranger to revolution, France once again teetered on the edge . . . and in February, a populist uprising overthrew King Philippe. Universal (male) suffrage became law in 1848, in time to elect Napoleon’s nephew, Louis Napoleon Bonaparte III, as president of the Second Republic. The class struggle that Marx and Engels laid out so clearly seemed, at this revolutionary age, to be coming to full flower: “It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views” and so demonstrate that it is they who truly represent the will of the people.35 It would be published in English, French, German, Italian, Flemish, and Dutch.

  It was the bourgeoisie, Marx and Engels claimed, that gave rise to industry, to machines, to technology and all the trappings of factory air and coal dust that go with it. Through the mechanization of all things, they had “stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe.”36 Inventors, innovation itself, here appeared as a tool of repression, for the bourgeoisie “cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production.”37 And yet, we can attest even in modern times how hard those impulses are to resist. Almost as soon as Napoleon III takes over, the conservatives organize under the call for “order”—for control, for a means of taking the provisional and slipshod government in hand. Workshops were closed, and the classes took to the street, workmen against soldiers in the “June Days uprising.” Marx took notice. The middle class had only used the working class to usurp the king. Napoleon III and his government shifted to the right, and in direct opposition to the original intent of suffrage and election, he established himself as emperor. And again, we know this story: campaign promises lead to dead ends, and the status quo returns. By 1851, Napoleon III had dissolved the National Assembly and proclaimed that liberty “never helped to found a lasting political edifice.”38 It’s a story we should all do well to heed; remember Nietzsche’s warning about those who claim to hunt monsters only to become them. Napoleon III established an anti-parliamentary constitution, unassailable by the pet electorate, and set his sights on industry.

  Paris, for all its political and social strife, was nevertheless physically on the verge of becoming the city of light and wonder that charmed Tesla on his first arrival: brightly lit boulevards and an eager anticipation of all things technologically new. The Paris Exposition of 1864 hosted fifty thousand exhibitors, mostly from France and Britain, and nine million visitors. Napoleon III wanted to impress the world with his modernist vision. Displays included France’s colonization of Africa and Polynesia, steam-powered vessels, and model homes meant for iron foundry workers at Le Creusot.39 Marxist realities would not come to be; the machine would serve the bourgeoisie, for Le Creusot had been riven with strikes over wages and working conditions—and the houses were now only available to those who bowed to industry, to their masters. The working class had been duped; they had lost to a façade of promises, of state-commissioned hot-air balloons that didn’t impress so much as leak and stink, weave and zag, and threaten to dump their passengers from on high . . . or the fiction of Napoleon’s submarine Le Plongeur which never once proved seaworthy. The exposition tried to claim Paris as the world’s center of industrial marvels. But not everyone would be so easily impressed. For Jules Verne, the power of science and industry enticed in its fabulous voyages, but it could also terrify. The steampunk aesthetic we’ve come to love in literature had very little of the human about it under Napoleon III, nor did it under King Philippe, or under Armstrong’s factory rules. What would become of the writer, the artist, the free spirit, and human mind that Engels promises as the right of everyone? Verne’s only dystopian novel, Paris in the 20th Century, looks into the future with a sense of overweening dread. His hero, Michel Dufrenoy, inherits a world of unfeeling machinery. “He is what they used to call an artist,” one of the bankers remarks, “and what we would call a ninny.”40 To broker his assimilation into the collective, Dufrenoy “was kept under severe discipline [. . .] in order to break any impulses of independence or artistic instincts.”41

  Sensitive, poetic, a delicate soul, Dufrenoy finds himself in a world where the humanities have gone, all art and literature buried beneath a systematic education meant to train cogs in the machine of industry. Charles Babbage once feared the sciences would be forgotten, but in Verne’s dystopia, only science and engineering remain. “If no one read any longer,” wrote Verne, “at least everyone could read”; under the mechanical system of education “legions of employees” carried on, controlled by the government as little machines themselves.42 The Director of Applied Science at the universal institution even speaks like a machine, the “whistles, groans, jangles, squeals” and “unpleasant noises” of engines and industry. The engine itself is praised for its utility and cheapness, its ability to light the streets, glare and bald, its means of rushing one group of passengers to the next, never stopping to wonder or admire, all impelled by the “demon of wealth” without either “mercy or relief.”43 This “modern” world rumbles with engines for war, “gas cabs,” and urban sprawl; Dufrenoy’s uncle, Monsieur Stanislas Boutardin, thinks in numbers and moves “with the least possible friction, like a piston in a perfectly reamed cylinder.”44 A director of finance, Boutardin sees no division between industry and recreation, between the mechanics of business and the mechanics of life. To drive the point home, Verne describes Boutardin’s wife as the very symbol of the steam-powered age: “She was the locomotive and he the engineer; he kept her in
good condition, oiled and polished her, and thus she had rolled forward for a good half century, with about as much sense and imagination as a Crompton Motor.”45

  This is no place for a young poet, Verne asserts, and the reader knows already that Dufrenoy, his dreams, and his romantic love interest are doomed to fall under the wheels. Bernstein and other critics remark that the story doesn’t get much right about the future—and in some ways, they are quite right. Verne’s dystopia isn’t a picture of the future at all. It is, however, a very apt depiction of the century in which he lived, at least from the perspective of those being crushed beneath it. Verne doesn’t extrapolate to predict the future; he’s looking backward at Napoleon III’s rise, and what it meant for his present. The world that “never was,” he tells us, is even now before us. And just as Burnett won his suit against Armstrong by virtue of pen and ink, it would be the writers who fought for the standard of humanism before the coming world.

  One of Napoleon III’s chief and loudest critics was a political conservative-turned-radical who argued for universal suffrage, free education, and the abolition of the death penalty. He was also then—and remains today—the most famous novelist and poet in France, author of Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame: Victor Hugo. He boldly defied the new regime, and declared Napoleon III to be a traitor to France, resulting in his own exile to Guernsey (then controlled by the British Empire). It’s no accident, then, that Dufrenoy’s first act in the novel is to seek out Hugo’s works. The bookstore is cavernous, “imperial,” and nearly palatial. Heartened by what he assumed to be a never-ending supply of literature, Dufrenoy requests Hugo’s complete works, calling him the greatest poet of the nineteenth century. The clerks respond with blank consternation—a shrug, a sigh: “Never heard of him. You’re sure that’s the name?” Michel begs that they look also for Balzac, Musset, and Lamartine, but to no avail. “No doubt,” the clerk explains after a fruitless search, “these authors were obscure in their own period, and their works haven’t been reprinted.”46 What the shop stocks instead, by great crate-loads and in endless rounds of versions, are works that Tesla might have relished: Abstract of Electrical Problems, Practical Treatise for the Lubrication of Driveshafts, and Meditations on Oxygen. Verne’s novel received criticism for being apolitical, for lacking the “big brother” of George Orwell or even a “little brother” in the form of the state.47 It is true that technology has absorbed everything, even the governing structure, into a hive mind of society—but the “critic” speaks through his absence. In real life, the exiled Hugo continued to write and work and criticize the dictatorship. Redeemed in 1870, Hugo returned to his homeland a hero. In a future unknown to Verne, he would lay the foundation for the Association Littéraire et Artistique Internationale, organized to protect the artist and his work, every bit the patron saint of Dufrenoy and entirely opposed to characters like Boutardin. Verne’s political critique, and Hugo’s too, was that the machinery of technology and of government alike will destroy humanity by first destroying literature and art. And this is still the complaint of the steampunk maker and artisan in our own time, that technological moguls have given us soulless devices devoid of personality. Their argument is not (like Carlyle’s) against technology, but against its misuse—its abuse by a system that privileged the machine over the human being. And that was the English Luddite’s argument in the first place.

  It’s no surprise that Karl Marx found a foothold with many when he published Das Kapital in 1867, and a revolutionary named Reclus translated it into French shortly thereafter. By the 1880s, a British Tory turned socialist had distilled it for easy uptake by workers, offering a version that “quickened their outrage and galvanized their activism” with “the promise of social revolution.”48 In 1881, a good two decades before George Shattuck Morison would publish The New Epoch, a different sort of “age” was being announced. H. M. Hyndman’s article “Dawn of Revolutionary Epoch” had rattled the cage of a middle-class renegade: William Morris. Morris had also read Underground Russia, an assassins’ creed, and embraced the idea of the industrial “terrorist” as “noble, irresistibly fascinating” and combining “two sublimates of human grandeur: the martyr and the hero.”49 It was Morris who noted the value of fiction (dystopian and utopian) as a mean of shaping ideology. After all, the sentiments and the sympathy were already provided, so long as the hero might be either pitied or emulated.

  Morris didn’t go to Paris, but to London, to stir up the men and women chained to machinery (and on occasion, hacked to bits by it). He took to the impoverished streets like an evangelist, espousing tenets that, says Butterworth, aligned with Reclus’s Ouvrier, prends la Machine! (or “Workers, take the machine!”). The essay blisters with hatred for artifice and calls the subdued worker back to a greater age. “We shall go back to the work of the fields and regain our strength and gaiety, seek out the joy of life again, the impressions of nature that we have forgotten in the dark mills of the suburbs. That is how a free people will think,” Reclus proclaimed, “It was the Alpine pastures, not the arquebus [a French gun], that gave the Swiss of the Middle Ages their freedom from kings and lords.”50 The same sentiment moves Michel Dufrenoy’s only humanities-loving family member, Monsieur Huguenin—except that, in the “future” world of Verne’s twentieth-century Paris, “there is no longer any such thing” as trees and fields and fresh air. And interestingly enough, the elder Frenchman blames a nineteenth-century London: “We envied London’s atmosphere, and, by means of ten thousand factory chimneys, the manufacture of certain chemical products—of fertilizers, of coal smoke, of deleterious gases, and industrial miasmas—we have made ourselves an air which is quite the equal of the United Kingdom’s.”51

  A collection of working-class autobiographies compiled by James R. Simmons gives the stark and startling details of nineteenth-century factory life that seem to prove Verne’s point. An Aberdeen laborer complains of the “small” lives they lead: “I have seen the race become diminutive and small, I have myself had seven children, not one of which survived six weeks; my wife is an emaciated person, and she worked during her childhood, younger than myself, in a factory.”52 Another of the narratives describes the condition of the Litton Mill of Derbyshire, riven with contagious disease, where “excess of toil, or filth, and of hunger” led to fevers—sometimes as many as forty sick boys at once.53 Likewise, the Lowdham Mill in Nottingham, with its long hours, bad provisions, and “want of wholesome air,” led to precipitous declines in health.54 Revolutionaries like Morris had landed in an echo chamber of woes, and though he believed that violent clashes might be avoided if the middle classes agreed to the tenets of social overhaul, he didn’t expect anything of the kind.55 Butterworth quotes letters from Morris, where he wrestled with these realities—“I want a real revolution,” he claimed, “a real change in society [with] well-regulated forces used for bringing about a happy life for all.”56 His words resonated in 1884, where the newly formed Socialist League gave workers a hope for an ideal future. What followed it, we know too well—strikes turning violent, homemade bombs, true and terrible revolutions and wars and the communist empire that would rise from the ashes . . . but in Verne’s imagined 1960, Huguenin’s advice to Dufrenoy isn’t to rise up. Rather, it’s to “stay where we are, close our windows tight, and have our meal [. . .] as comfortably as we can.”57 The safe road had been recommended already, and by the emperor Napoleon III himself: bow to the mill, toe the line, and receive affordable, safe housing on display at the exposition. Verne’s idol, Victor Hugo, had not taken that advice—and the young Dufrenoy doesn’t take it kindly, either.

  When Dufrenoy fails to learn the calculation machine, he is assigned as assistant to a man named Quinsonnas in “the Ledger.” A mysterious place, Dufrenoy’s new assignment so inflames his curiosity that he slips into the offices by night to see it. Groping his way ahead, he loses himself “in the center of this labyrinth” and brushes the Bond Safe in the dark. Suddenly, the floor gives way a
nd he slides into the iron dark of a cage. An “apparatus of virginal sensitivity,” the safe (through a series of trip wires and cogs) protected itself by “arresting” intrusion. Dufrenoy becomes a company laughingstock, but though the episode is comical and he escapes unharmed, the scene reverberates with violence: “a dreadful noise filled his ears; all the doors slammed shut; the bolts and locks slid into place” with “deafening whistles” and “garish light.”58 While never acting the part of a revolutionary, Dufrenoy symbolizes one. And in Verne’s world, both fictional and actual symbols matter.

  Anarchy gets its start in France with Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who became a member of parliament after the French Revolution of 1848 (when Napoleon III was first elected president and before he suspended the constitution). Proudhon and Karl Marx corresponded, influencing each other’s works—for both, the connections between labor, ownership, revolution, and anarchy were undeniable. The worker was owed the product, and should not be divorced from what they had made; Proudhon opposed ownership of property and other socialist-anarchists went further still, suggesting “the abolition of any sign of agricultural, individual, artistic or scientific property” and “the destruction of any individual holding of the products of work.”59 From these philosophies grew the “terrorists” admired by Morris, those who would sneak into factories and plant homemade bombs, or break looms, or incite mobs to the destruction of those industrial mechanisms that devalued the worker and consolidated property. Dufrenoy’s night-walking raises the revolutionary specter, even as the lights and noise remind us of the disaster that befell William Armstrong’s warehouse, the explosion and sirens that woke sleeping inhabitants of Gateshead, or to the Courrières mine disaster in France in which the workers were walled into burning shafts after rescue efforts failed. Henry George in the United States preached that, so long as capitalism allowed Vanderbilts to rise while the humble laborer lay down his hammer in dust, then “slavery was not dead.”60 Socialist anarchy received perhaps its greatest backlash in America after the Haymarket Riot, when five revolutionaries were sentenced to death after someone threw a bomb at police. One of the men, German immigrant August Spies, gave a chilling pronouncement before the floor fell out from beneath his noosed body: “There will be a time when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today.”61