Although the coincidence in timing between Mettais’ contributions to the tradition of speculative fiction and Verne’s is primarily striking as a study in contrasts, in which Verne emerges as by far the more fluent and elegant story-teller, it is worth noting that Paris avant le Déluge appeared between the two editions of Voyage au Centre de la Terre (1864; revised 1867; second version tr. as Journey to the Center of the Earth), in which Verne addressed the question of the true age of the Earth as suggested by the evidence of geology. Although it is now largely forgotten that Verne’s novel existed in two versions, because the earlier one was never reprinted and never translated, it is significant that the first version accepted a explanation of the “creationist” account of the origin of humankind, while the second offered a more elaborate evolutionist account, reflecting a change of mind by the novel’s principal scientific source, Louis Figuier, between the two editions of his La Terre avant le Déluge [1863; revised 1867; second version tr. as The World before the Deluge).
If Mettais had read Figuier and Verne, as he probably had, he could only have seen the first versions of both their books, which makes his own dabbling with the theory of “transformism” all the more original and interesting. The project of accelerating the hypothetical evolutionary process in order to produce a human being by metamorphic means, credited by Mettais to Chephren, was recapitulated in several later works of French speculative fiction, including Louis Boussenard’s Les Secrets de Monsieur Synthèse (1888; tr. as Monsieur Synthesis)4 and André Couvreur’s “Le Valseur Phosphorescent” (1923; tr. as “The Phosphorescent Waltzer”)5. The fact that Chephren is, in Mettais’ fictitious prehistory, the prototype of the Biblical Noah contrives an intriguing transfiguration of the notion of the ark that anticipates much later accounts of biotechnological “arks.”
In sum, although Paris avant le Déluge is primarily interesting now as a historical curiosity, it is of some historical significance, as well as being monumentally curious. It does not have the imaginative scope of L’An 5865, being more narrowly confined by its notional framework, but it does have a similarly endearing quirkiness in its notions of antediluvian architecture, geography and transport. Its hypothetical exercises in the sociology of religion and the politics of revolution are undoubtedly primitive, but they are not without a certain dash and daring in the context of their time—when, it ought to be remembered, the censors of the Second Empire had not entirely relaxed their once-vicelike grip on literary expression, and advocacy of democracy and freethought were still subject to manifest diplomatic hazards. The novel remains an important document in the history of French speculative fiction and the modern development of the Atlantis myth.
This translation was made from the copy of the first (and only) edition of the text, as reproduced on the Bibliothèque Nationale’s gallica website. All of the author’s footnotes are clearly labeled as such, and I have placed his notes in quotation marks, except in one instance where an unusually long note is appended to a chapter. Where an addendum follows one of the author’s notes outside the quotations marks, it is my additional observation. The other footnotes are mine.
Brian Stableford
INTRODUCTION
Today, according to the oldest interpretation of Genesis, it is five thousand eight hundred and ten years since our world was created.6
The earth existed long before then, according to the scientists—at least sixty-six thousand years, says the illustrious and pious Buffon, who proves it. That earth was not inhabited by humans, because it was uninhabitable for our species, but it contained animals and fish. Whether there were vegetables, Buffon does not say.
Humans finally arrived, but in what epoch, how and in what conditions? That is what it is very important for us to know.
Moses, one of the oldest and most respectable writers who remains to us, says that the first man, Adam, was created sixteen hundred and fifty-six years before the deluge.
Sixteen hundred and fifty-six years! That is a very long time, I admit, but it is insufficient if I want to have any confidence in general history and scientific facts, which reveal to us a very advanced civilization in that epoch. I know that it takes a people less time than that to pass from infancy to maturity, and from maturity to old age—or, to put it better, from barbarity and ignorance to civilization and from civilization to decadence, but the people still require they be founded. And the antediluvian people of Moses were not rapid in development; they were slow—very slow—in being born. That is easily understandable, in fact; they only had one man for a father. One single man to supply numerous and civilized peoples in a period of sixteen hundred and fifty-six years!
It is true that Moses shows us that period occupied by only a few generations of patriarchs and a few petty princes almost as powerful as them. The earth was almost deserted then, only a few parts of it being inhabited, and none civilized. Everyone lived as he liked, doing good if his instinct inclined him that way and evil if he was evil. And it appears that people were more often evil than good, since God repented of having created the world and resolved to punish and annihilate it beneath the waters of a universal deluge.
Thus recounts Moses, who was writing more than two thousand five hundred years after the creation of the world, eight hundred and fifty years after the deluge.
I will admit right away that other historians, also very commendable, give our history a very different chronology.
To write as accurate a history as possible with our very feeble means of investigation, it is evidently necessary to consult inscriptions, commemorative monuments, testimonies—any authority, in sum, that might guide the writer. Good faith is not sufficient.
Do we know what authorities Moses consulted in order to discover the truth about a period as long as the one covered by his book, and to learn about events that had happened two thousand five hundred years before him, and often had no witnesses?
The sacred writer does not inform us. On the other hand, we do not see in the most ancient and reliable histories, other people recounting what he recounts, or that they furnished him with materials to compose his book.
One might ask oneself, in consequence, whether Moses really had the intention of writing an exact history of his time and the times that had preceded him, and if he also wanted to talk about times to come. In any case, we only ever see him occupied with his brethren, their education, their beliefs and their conduct. It appears very evident, therefore, that he was only writing for them, for the people of his blood—I do not say his nation, because his nation did not exist prior to him.
Moses was, therefore, a legislator, not a historian. We ought not to be surprised, therefore, if the historian continually gives way to the legislator, and if his history is sometimes faulty.
I say that Moses’ history is sometimes faulty, and I shall explain myself, although everyone knows it, because I would be desolate were anyone to think that I do not have all the respect for his accounts that they deserve. I believe in them, and I confess without difficulty—but I also believe in philosophical and reasoned history; I believe in science.
When Moses represents to me the fathers of his nation, his ancestors, living before the deluge in all the simplicity of the family and nature, I believe him. But history tells me that not all of the universe was there, any more than France and present-day Europe are in the Kabyle.
If he talks to me about his fathers after the deluge, and shows them to me as pastors living in the midst of their flocks, as patriarchs rich in the number of slaves they have acquired to serve them and fight battles, if necessary—nomads like the Arabs of our own day, seeking everywhere for the best pastures and installing themselves temporarily where nature smiled upon their needs and desires—I believe him.
I believe him, and I say in consequence that it is not imprudent to suppose that those families of patriarchs and pastors, who had the same way of life and some relationship between them, also had the same belief, the belief in God—as, moreover, almost all t
he peoples did then, in spite of the variations that each one added to it, according to the views of its legislator, and in accordance with climatic influences, which it is necessary never to forget in order to understand the theology of a nation.7
It can also be presumed that the belief in question was revealed in religious worship that was indubitably very simple, and that the tradition was very similar in all the primitive families.
Since I have mentioned tradition, I do not think that I will be thought very bold in saying that from the moment that there is belief in God, religious worship established by tradition, there is also a tradition relating to the origin of the world, its creation—the past, in sum, and the future. It is difficult to imagine a thinking man without presuming him to be occupied with those grave questions.
But was there a written belief? Were there durable monuments of the past? Were there books and inscriptions in that era among the families of the patriarchs?
Why bother? The father instructed his sons and his slaves; he told them what his father had told him, adding to it what he thought useful to his designs. The life of herdsmen is scarcely suited to written sermons; they have enough to do attending to the needs of the day...
Moses was therefore the first Hebrew writer, and Genesis the first book that was composed for that nation.
That ought not to astonish us, in any case, if we have not forgotten the calm and regular life of the patriarchs, devoid of ambition, and if we remember, on the other hand, the important and multiple roles, replete with perils, that Moses had to fulfill in the midst of his brethren.
Dispersed in different countries and slaves of the Egyptians, who treated them harshly, the Hebrews had at that time no national bond. They were isolated, devoid of any strength, demoralized and brutalized under the whips of their masters, but, in spite of that, feared by the government that did all it could to oppress them. All their desires, therefore, were for a better future. But if they groaned, if the cursed their persecutors, no one made a move, until Moses formed the incredible project of liberating them and taking them far away in order to found a nation.
“It is the will of God,” that strong, profound and energetic man, full of the enthusiasm with which history credits him, said to them one day.
It is the will of God! With that mystical, superhuman cry, he soon gathers six hundred thousand Hebrews, removes them from Egypt and walks with them for forty years through an immense and arid desert to reach the land of his fathers and conquer it.
But the difficulties were great! Moses does not dissimulate them. He was a poor pastor, pursued for a murder, in the service of foreigners for many years, obscure, unknown to anyone and devoid of all influence in consequence. It was not difficult for him to persuade his brethren, who were as unhappy as he was, to flee oppression—but how can he guide that multitude, how can he govern them, and, in sum, submit them to his views?
How does he know that among those six hundred thousand people, whom he must reduce to passive obedience in order to arrive at the noble goal of which he has dreamed, there will not be envious, mutinous and treacherous individuals? How does he know that he will always be able to feed that considerable host, with whom he wants to traverse a vast and desiccated region, and that the hunger he anticipated will not make those coarse men regret the onions8 and the golden gods of Egypt? How does he know that there will not be plots against his life, rebellions against his authority?
That is precisely what happened, as we know, and yet, Moses accomplished his prodigious task. He surely accomplished it, in the main, with the admirable narration of Genesis.
Today’s history has no expression sufficiently vivid to praise Julius Caesar in antiquity and a few others in modern times, including Charlemagne and Napoléon. How far above them, in my estimation, Moses was!
Like Caesar, he wielded both the pen and the sword; he was a conqueror like him, and more than him. But Caesar was rich, powerful and also ambitious, while Moses...
With nothing, Moses created something; alone, he gathered his scattered people, as a shepherd gathers a flock lost in a dense wood; alone, with no money, no power, no credit and without any strength—and, moreover, without ambition to sustain him—he extracted a human multitude from the chains of a powerful nation, a civilized nation; he led them, not by caressing them, but with a severity that was sometimes cruel, through a thousand perils into the country that he wanted to occupy, and made them into a people.
Who else has ever done that?
Flatterers have said that a religious man turns everything he touches into gold. It would be truer to say that he spoils everything he touches.
Instead of seeing Moses as he is, and his work as it presents itself to the free thinker, that great man has been made into an instrument and his book the inspiration of another. Admittedly, that other is God.
That is too bold an assertion.
But that does not astonish me; I recognize the tree by its fruit, and the man by his voice.
A caste that cannot reign by the sword has wanted to reign by means of belief. With that aim, it has taken possession of our monuments, our inscriptions and our ancient documents, and declared itself their sovereign and infallible interpreter.
It is a fine entitlement.
It is the caste in question that represented God to the warrior barons of the Middle Ages wearing armor and a helmet, with a sword in his hand, fighting for the noble and powerful lords who will endow his elect most magnificently.
If that caste had lived in the time of the patriarchs, it would have shown them God with a crook in his hand, guiding the flocks of the faithful into lush pastures, and those of infidels into meager and desolate fields.
In our day, God is merely, for them, a magnificent king seated on a golden throne, with a crown on His head and a scepter in His hand, listening graciously to the prayers of His intimates. In front of Him are scales to weigh the virtues of Levites and the petty merits and crimes of “men of the world.” For some He prepares resplendent thrones, for others a few sufficiently habitable corners in the empyrean or the fires of Hell.
Well, it is that caste which, having taken possession of Genesis, tells us: “This is the work of God, and we order you to believe it.”
The work of God! Does one see Kings delivering the works of their intelligence to the criticism of the reader?
People can experience other needs than that to command—the need to persuade, for example—but what need has God, who commands and persuades as He wishes, to write books, and books full of scientific errors into the bargain?
The work of God! That is a very serious assertion, it seems to me, if it means that God had a different relationship with Moses than with other men who attempt great things, for every one of the sacred writer’s pages easily allows glimpses of the ignorance and prejudice of the human mind, as each of his actions easily reveals the man: a man who wants to reach his goal no matter what, even by means of rigor, even by means of cruelty, always obedient to the maxims of conquest, which are almost never the maxims of right and justice.
Would God have written that book? Would God have inspired that conqueror? Was God, then, guilty of ignorance and cruelty? Did the Perfect Being not have all the perfections? Did He not know, in dictating to His prophet, the scientific truths that are familiar to us? Did He not care to educate him with regard to justice and forbearance?
That cannot be.
Oh, I know full well that those errors and that martial conduct do not frighten our zeal. They are explained; they are annotated. God did not want to eclipse the writer completely; God did not want to make use of exact science in the midst of a primitive and ignorant people with its own prejudices, superstitions and beliefs...
The entire earth belongs to God; God could have given Moses the idea of taking possession of the land of Canaan, of expelling the inhabitants he could not kill and passing the blade of his sword through all those he could reach, without distinction...
It is a crime worthy
of death, people still say, like the men of the Inquisition, to forget God. Moses therefore acted in accordance with the spirit of God in ordering the massacre of twenty-three thousand of his brethren who, in his absence, had thought about the gods of Egypt...
A strange morality, in truth! Where, then, does it come from? Who, then, has revealed to these philosophical dictators that what is bad today was once good, for one man alone? Into what privy council have they entered in order to know more about that than anyone else? Let them give us the key to their science, then, in order that we can judge it for ourselves. Yes, for ourselves—and why not? Are we other men than them, so that we cannot understand? Why do they want to make this book, which is ours as well as theirs, which we admire no less than they do, a sealed treasure of which they alone have the key?
No! They are mistaken. There is no mysticism to explain in the book of Moses.
The book is simple and simply written; not everything in it is perfect, but the idea is profoundly unusual; it is the sublime idea of a man of genius.
Paris Before the Deluge Page 2