Call to yourself the little children and the women and the proletarians, and inform them by predication and example, of the claim they have to the right of individual and social development. Confess the omnipotence of the Revolution, all the way to the steps of the barricade, all the way to the platform of the scaffold. Be the fuse that ignites and the torch that illuminates. Pour bile and honey on the harsh and the oppressed. Wave in your hands the standard of ideal progress and provoke free intelligences to a crusade against barbaric ignorance. Oppose truth to prejudice, liberty to authority, good to evil.
Human errant, be my champion; throw down to bourgeois legality a bloody challenge; fight with the rifle and the pen, with sarcasm and the paving-stone, with the head and the hand: die or...
Human martyr, socially crucified, bear with courage your crown of thorns, bite the bitter sponge that the civilized put in your mouth, let the wounds in your heart bleed; it is that blood of which the sashes of free humans will be made. The blood of martyrs is a fecund dew; let us shake its drops over the world. Happiness is not of this century, it is on the Earth that revolves on its axis every day in gravitating toward the light; it is in future humankind.
Alas, you have yet to pass through the filter of many generations, you have yet to witness many deformed attempts at social reformation, and many disasters, followed by further progress and further disasters, before arriving in the promised land and before all the -cracies and the -archies have given way to an-archy. People and peoples have yet to break and reconnect their chains many times before casting the last link behind them.
Liberty is not a prostitute who gives herself to all comers; it is necessary to win her by means of valiant ordeals, necessary to render oneself worthy of her to obtain her smile. She is a great lady proud of her nobility, because her nobility comes from the head and the heart. Liberty is a chatelaine who is enthroned at the antipode of civilization; there she will convey humankind. With steam and electricity the distance is abridged. All roads lead to that goal, and the shortest is the best. Revolution is laying down its iron rails there; people and peoples, go!
The Idea has spoken; I bow down...
Fernand Giraudeau: The New City
(1868)
PROLOGUE
Man agitates.
Cruel Doubt!
For more than thirty years, uncertain, tossed and dragged hither and yon, I have been wandering, without knowing my route, over the somber and stormy ocean of politics. What direction ought I to take? Which of the thousand currents that push or pull humankind should one follow? Is it necessary to try to stop in one’s course? Is it necessary to go back, or to precipitate more rapidly forwards? Where are the generations headed? Where will these eternal and terrible struggles end?
If I cast a glance over the history of human destinies, how petty the greatest men seem to me! What are they? Not even immortals! How many kings and heroes have filled the world with the noise of a name of which only a worn stone conserves the unknown characters today! The memory of men of genius: pale and feeble glimmers that float momentarily, agitated and capricious, above the great necropolis of people, then to vanish forever!
And what are the peoples themselves? Obscure crowds who are born, multiply, eat and drink, fabricate, sell, fight, make laws and break them, love, believe, pray and are dissipated, bequeathing the earth a few edifices that time takes charge of burying.
That is the spectacle. Where is the philosophy therein? What is the law of these frightful hecatombs?
Theocracies, Oriental despotisms, Republican aristocracies, feudalisms, tempered monarchies, democracies, demagogies: all these ephemeral forms have their goals and rejections by turns; all of them are stages; none is a terminus; none can last—and when the series is exhausted, the indefatigable world retraces its steps and recommences the process. Are we going round in circles? Is the human species subject to an eternal back-and-forth movement?
What is the best of societies? Is it one that marches to grandeur and glory by way of arms, letters, sciences and arts? Is it one that encloses in its bosom the greatest number of materially contented individuals? Or is it the one that tends to make people virtuous and to distract them by religion from the miseries of this world? Perhaps it is all of those at once. Is what is necessary to direct people here or there, or anywhere at all, even by oppressing them, or to let them wander at their whim, even if they will perish sooner? Is the best society the most vigorously constituted, or the one in which the individual is almost disengaged from any obligation toward his fellows?
Is the most civilized the best? Alas, civilization is not indefinite: Egypt and Greece were as civilized as one another, but differently, and they succumbed nevertheless, as we shall succumb. Civilization and progress, alas, are no more the goal of humankind than barbarity and regression: the world belongs to them by turns.
But is one society better than another? Are not all states good, or at least indifferent? Is not the most important thing simply to be? Does the manner in which people are signify anything?
Yes, to be, that is to what humanity appears condemned: incessantly to die and always to live again.
You will always transform and always exist, rocks, trees, humans, societies and stars: such is your destiny.
Why?
Chapter I
The living go quickly.
I feel a finger placed imperiously on my shoulder. I raise my head.
It’s Graymalkin.17
“Come,” he says.
I follow him, and we go downstairs.
Scarcely have I crossed the threshold of my dwelling than I stop, stupefied.
It was no longer my Rue de Ixe. The one in which I found myself did not resemble it at all.
To either side the houses rose up to such a height that, in spite of the width of the causeway, one would have been plunged in obscurity if the gas had not been burning by day as well as by night. That black and permanently damp street, where the sunlight never penetrates, was formed by constructions in bricks and iron that had twenty-five floors. They were all built on the same model, and not a single ornament cheered up their sad façade. Considered as an ensemble, they had the air of an immense barracks or monstrous factory, which made their destination dubious. No simulacrum of an edifice or monument broke the implacable monotony of their long somber mass. They were dirty, and nothing indicated that anyone was responsible for seeing that they were not. Heaps of filth accumulated outside every door, exhaling miasmas. That imprisoned atmosphere was stifling, dense and poisonous, and the sky seemed very high. At the extremity of the street one glimpsed others exactly similar.
Was that part of the city animated, properly speaking? I cannot say. There was a bewildering movement there, in the midst of a deathly silence. No pedestrians, no horses, no carriages: a multitude of little vehicles moved by steam or some other physical force, carrying one, two or three people, circulating with an almost vertiginous rapidity. To the extent that I could glimpse them in their evolutions, the visages of all the passers-by, among whom there was not a single woman to be seen, were singularly fatigued, wan and thin. The universal expression was that of lassitude preoccupation, worry, harshness and egotism.
On looking into that place—I almost said into the depths of that abyss—at that pale and fantastic light formed by gaslight and the reflection of a few rays from above, on seeing those mysterious shadows hurrying as if drawn by a fatal force, I wondered momentarily whether I did not have before my eyes the damned, accomplishing some strange punishment of which people on earth have no idea.
“Deceptive spirit,” I said to Graymalkin, “to what new illusion are you delivering my senses?”
“None, this time,” he told me, in his habitual glacial tone. “You’ve slept for a hundred and thirty years and I’ve just woken you up. Look and learn.”
“I’ve slept for thirty minutes!” I exclaimed. “And you’ve made me take some narcotic that has permitted you to transport me I know not where. Where am
I?” I added, stamping my foot. “I want to know.”
“In the seventh city.”
“What’s the seventh city?”
“It was once Paris, but nowadays the cities, like the streets and the houses, are designated by numbers. The number one belongs to the most populous city. At present, that’s San Francisco; Panama is number two, Montevideo number three; Yeddo is the fourth city.”
“That’s not picturesque; it’s even rather cold.”
“It’s more utilitarian,” said Graymalkin, dryly, “than all those baroque names of which no one even knew the meaning.”
“And less clear as an appellation; it can vary from day to day or year to year—but no matter. What is New York’s rank?”
“It’s the twenty-second city.”
“Impossible! What’s the fifth, then?”
“Port Said.”
As I was about to ask what extraordinary series of events had caused the greatest cities to fall to that extent, while others had overtaken them, Graymalkin took me into a kind of untidy office, at the door of which a man was standing, handing out announcements to the passers-by. He was the telegraph clerk. His functions were limited to counting the clicks of the apparatus that the sender of the dispatch transmitted himself, and collecting the money. He did all that with his ears and one hand, while he was distributing with the other. Time is precious. It was also in application of that maxim that he was operating with one foot I know not what machine, at the summit of which a poor child about four years old was perched, pale and unsteady, and working with difficulty.
I might perhaps have made that the subject of observations to the clerk, but Graymalkin, who had sat at the apparatus and was making it function, was speaking to me.
“I’m telegraphing,” he said, “to person 85, number 4, street 26, city 3, nation 2—which is written 85, 4, 26, 3, 2.”18
“What!” I said. “Friends are numbered too!”
“Everything is numbered.”
“Like veal-calves?”
“There are no more names today; there are a hundred numbers, from 1 to 100. Everyone has a number, and no forenames.”
“Only a hundred names? But that must give rise to inextricable confusions.”
“There’s sometimes a little confusion, but that doesn’t matter; it’s simpler. It’s more utilitarian.”
“Oh yes?”
The dispatch had gone. Graymalkin took a piece of paper from his pocket, which he said was worth 320 francs, the price of the telegram.”
“It’s America, then, the second country?”
“No, it’s Germany.”
“And that costs 320 francs?”
“That’s not much.”
“Damn!”
“One the one hand, money is worth four times less than it was in your time, and objects of acquisition cost four times as much; things are therefore eight times as expensive.19 On the other hand, the telegraph companies have an understanding, and it’s take it or leave it, because they’re free to fix their prices and I’m free not to send dispatches.”
“Free, free! If there are no other companies, and if they have the right to raise their tariff infinitely, why has the State given them the concession…?”
“There is no concession. We’re all free; everyone does what they want.”
“Or what their neighbor wants, when there’s no competition.”
“Haven’t I just sent my dispatch myself? That’s liberty.”
“Of course. You’re perfectly correct.”
He was getting up in order to pay when a man raced into the office, knocked him off his chair, sat down in his place and started the apparatus going, without worrying in the least about what harm he might have done. I was indignant.
“Monsieur,” I said, moving closer to him. “I desire to know whether you knocked my friend over deliberately.”
No response; impassively, he continued to click away. I grabbed his arm, in spite of the intervention of Graymalkin, who seemed desirous of letting the matter drop. Jabbing his elbow into my stomach, the boor sent me sprawling in a corner, and said to me at the same time, without turning his head: “Imbecile foreigner. Broken arm? Dislocation? Bumped head? Will pay.”
All that was accomplished in less than a minute, and yet Graymalkin had had time to pick me up and prevent me from leaping on the fellow.
“You don’t understand,” he said.
“What! I don’t...”
“No. He’s in a hurry, that’s all.”
“Of course! I don’t doubt it.”
“Well, it’s necessary to make way for him. If he’s injured us, he’ll pay.”
The man in a hurry had finished his dispatch. He paid for it and ran outside, shouting: “17, 15, 3.”
“That’s his address,” said Graymalkin. “There’s nothing to say.”
“Nothing to say! You’ll see,”
And I ran after Monsieur 17. But he was already far away. I stopped, and Graymalkin, having caught up with me, explained that what had just happened was not contrary to custom, and that similar things happened every day to everyone, because time is money.
Besides, he added that I was free to do as much to anyone else. “We’re all free.”
“By the way,” I said, “What proof do I have that that clown is really citizen 17?”
“It’s embroidered on his hat. Every citizen has to have his name and address on his hat.”
“Has to? That’s not liberty.”
“It’s order.”
“Ha! Liberty has its limit, then? Liberty is sometimes sacrificed to order here? That’s no mistake.”
Graymalkin shoved me under a hangar filled with the mechanical vehicles I saw in the streets. He chose one of them, climbed into it and made me sit down beside him, received a ticket bearing the address of the hangar, had his own address inscribed there by the clerk, along with the time at which he was taking the smashall—that is the name of the vehicles—and we left. Graymalkin explained to me that when we arrived at our destination we would return the smashall to an office of the company and pay on presenting our ticket. There were smashall offices at every street corner.
We slid over the ground with a speed equal to that if locomotives, and I was admiring the dexterity with which everyone steered their vehicles, and sureness of eye with which they avoided one another, when a loud scream rang out. It was ahead of us; one of the smashalls in front of us had run over a child.
To my great surprise, no one stopped. The smashall driver who was the author of the accident had continued on his route without slowing down for an instant, and those who separated it from us contented themselves with making a detour as they approached the unfortunate child, who, with both legs broken and his head injured, was writhing bloodily on the ground, making vain efforts to get up.
That indifference revolted me; I told Graymalkin to stop, and that I wanted to help the poor child. He increased speed and laughed at me, saying that it was not customary, and that it was the concern of the child, and his mother at most. I nearly hit him. I contained myself, however, resolved to discharge my anger on the person who had done the damage. I seized the handle of the smashall and, launching it at top speed, found myself, after turning a corner, level with the ill-fated vehicle.
“Since there are no police in this street,” I cried, leaning out of my seat and seizing the individual by the collar in spite of all Graymalkin’s efforts, “I’ll arrest you myself.”
I then received a furious punch, but as I had not let go, counting on the scuffle assembling the passers-by and attracting a policeman, a regular battle commenced. The two smashalls stopped; we got out and boxed in earnest.
After a few minutes, during which no one paid the slightest attention to us, being equally weary of having obtained no result, we concluded a tacit armistice in order to catch our breath.
My adversary immediately took out his wallet and inscribed therein the numbers borne on my hat, which was still in my vehicle.
&n
bsp; “Good day,” he said, then. “Seized by the collar; forced to stop for quarter of an hour; forced to box. Damages and interests. Dirty, dirty. Good day. Are we continuing?” And he put himself on guard again.
I did the same—but Graymalkin addressed my adversary. “Imbecile foreigner,” he said, indicating me.
“Imbecile foreigner! Thought sent by competition to cost me business. No matter: will pay, will pay. Dirty, dirty.”
He bounded into his smashall and departed like an arrow. I was unable to follow him.
Then I turned against Graymalkin, and asked him what he meant by “imbecile foreigner.” He told me that the designation was not personal, but that in this country foreigners were despised to such an extent that they were always thus designated.
We resumed our route, and he explained to me on the way that in the seventh city, like all the rest, no one occupied himself with anyone else’s affairs, because one had enough of one’s own, and because everyone was responsible for his own actions. An accident only concerned the person who was its author and the one who was its victim. “The damage is charged to one or the other, according to the share they had in it. The law regulates all that. There’s a tariff; it’s so much for a contusion, so much for a blow that draws blood, so much for a fracture, so much for a punch, a blow with a stick, a stab with a knife. There’s a fixed price.”
“As among our ancestors the Franks, so renowned for the advanced state of their civilization.”
“As for the child,” Graymalkin continued, “If he has no one interested in him, to whom does it matter whether he’s wounded, suffers or dies? It only concerns him; it’s therefore up to him to get himself out of it. On the other hand, it’s absolutely certain that the citizen whom you molested so ardently has thrown his number to the child; with the consequence that, if the accident was his fault, he’ll indemnify the latter. As for you, as he said, you lost him a quarter of an hour with no reason. And you struck him. You’ll pay, pay, and are dirty, dirty.”
The Humanisphere Page 16
