La Bataille de Strasbourg was initially published as a 43-part feuilleton serial in issues 25–67 of La Terre Illustrée between 25 April 1891 and 11 February 1892, where it carried the subtitle “Histoire de l’invasion chinoise en Europe au XXe siècle” [“The History of the Chinese Invasion of Europe in the Twentieth Century”]. It was subsequently reprinted in two volumes in 1895 by L. Boulanger, the proprietor of the periodical in question, and was reprinted again as a feuilleton in the daily newspaper Le Matin between 29 July and 26 September 1900. Like La Guerre finale, it was ground-breaking in its employment of immersive fantasy and it is perhaps the earliest novel to do so straightforwardly with no other preliminary exposition than its initial subtitle.
Historians of futuristic fiction with the aid of hindsight now credit La Bataille de Strasbourg with launching a literary fad that is generally known as “yellow peril” fiction, and it is, indeed, the case that the idea of a “Chinese invasion of Europe” did become a significant bugbear on the ragged fringe of future war fiction, luridly developed in the context of English feuilleton fiction by M.P. Shiel in “The Empress of the Earth,” (1898; reprinted as The Yellow Danger), and the threat of Oriental plans for world domination subsequently fueled a very popular series of thrillers by “Sax Rohmer” (Arthur Sarsfield Ward) launched in 1913, whose villain, Fu Manchu, achieved a legendary status. The subgenre was imported into America where a variant supplied the basis for one of the earliest successes of the science fiction genre in “Armageddon 2419 a.d.” (1928)—which introduced the character of Buck Rogers—and where the reckless generic experimentation of the pulp magazines produced a brief Rohmeresqe subgenre in the dastardly exploits of The Mysterious Wu Fang (seven issues, 1935–36) and his successor Dr. Yen Sin (three issues, 1936). Jules Lermina had no idea that any such phenomenon might occur, however, and his novel involves a far more general Oriental uprising, which embraces India, the Kazakhs, the Turkmen, and the entire world of Islam as well as the Far East.
A more interesting digression concerns the odd circumstances of the novel’s first publication. La Terre Illustrée, which was a “geographical magazine” imitative of the Vernian periodical Journal des Voyages et des Aventures sur Terre et sur Mer was the third of four copycat periodicals founded by Boulanger in 1890–91, the fourth being La Science Française, an imitation of La Science Illustrée—to which, as regular readers of NYRSF will know, Louis Figuier had introduced a regular feuilleton slot dedicated to what he labeled roman scientifique [scientific fiction]. Boulanger entrusted the day-to-day editorship of those two magazines to the editors who were already running the other two magazines he had recently founded, La Revue Pour Tous and Le Monde de la Jeunesse: respectively, Jules Lermina and Charles Simond.
Although Lermina did not write feuilletons for La Revue Pour Tous, he decided to supply La Terre Illustrée with serial fiction himself, at least to begin with—which, as a prolific and versatile feuilletoniste, he was well equipped to do—and he probably welcomed the opportunity for a measure of self-indulgence that other editors did not routinely grant him. He ran three of his own serials simultaneously in the early issues of the magazine, all of them imitative of the sorts of story expected in a magazine of geographical adventure stories—but La Bataille de Strasbourg was a work of a very different stripe. In spite of its global range, it looks suspiciously like a response to a similarly odd move made by his rival, who launched La Science Française’s regular roman scientifique slot with “La Prise de Londres aux XXe siècle” [“The Capture of London in the Twentieth Century”] by “Pierre Ferréol” (Georges Espitalllier), in March 1891, only a few weeks before Lermina began serializing La Bataille de Strasbourg (which is very obviously made up as the author went along).
If Simond felt that Lermina was responding competitively to his own move and perhaps subtly expressing the opinion that future war fiction was as inappropriate an inclusion in a popular science magazine as it was in a magazine of worldwide adventure fiction, he was not deterred. By far the longest story serialized in La Science Française’s feuilleton slot was the fourth part of a series by “Capitaine Danrit” (Emile Driant) eventually published in book form in eight volumes as La Guerre de demain [Tomorrow’s War], the first volume of which had appeared in 1889. The particular war in question was between France and Germany although it expanded over a much larger stage than the two native territories. Danrit followed it up with the four-volume L’Invasion noire [The Black Invasion] (1895–96), the three-volume La Guerre Fatale—France-Angleterre [The Fatal War: France/England] (1901–02) and the three-volume L’Invasion jaune [The Yellow Invasion] (1905–1906), the last two of which picked up the central themes of La Prise de Londres and La Bataille de Strasbourg.
Whatever the relationship might have been between Lermina and Charles Simond, it can be taken for granted that Lermina disapproved strongly of Espitallier and Driant, both of whom were at the opposite end of the political spectrum from his own Anarchist sympathies. It is not entirely clear where Lermina and Simond’s employer stood, but the first “Capitaine Danrit” novel had been advertised in 1887 as the work of the son-in-law of General Boulanger, whose meteoric political career briefly posed a threat to the stability of the Republic in 1888. Whether L. Boulanger was related to the general and hence to Driant, it is difficult to tell—Jean-Luc Buard, who investigated his publishing activities for an article in Rocambole, was not even able to discover his first name—but it is not inconceivable that the detail has some relevance to the fact that Simond and Lermina were both replaced in their editorial positions in 1892 and that the story gradually unfolding in La Bataille de Strasbourg was so drastically and abruptly curtailed that the plot never reached the planned climax in Strasbourg.
Unlike Barillet-Lagargousse and in spite of the fact that he wrote numerous items of speculative fiction, Jules Lermina knew little or nothing about actual science and technology, but he did have a keen sense of the shifting horizons of their imaginative horizons. The central character of La Bataille de Strasbourg is Guy de Norès, a young inventor and writer of scientifically inspired poetry, whom we find at the beginning of the novel demonstrating a new telegraphic technology that will allow people in one location to watch on a screen what is happening at other locations in the world—essentially, a kind of live television. For the purposes of demonstration he has arranged with his fiancée, Marguerite Sametel, the daughter of another famous scientist presently on a mission to Peking, to arrange a transmission from that city of the celebration of the Chinese New Year.
Unfortunately, what the horrified crowd assembled in Paris for the occasion sees is a massacre marking the outbreak of an Oriental revolution, in which the united hordes of Asia intend to reject the yoke of European colonialism and exact their revenge by annihilating the nations of Europe with a massive invasion. Guy’s immediate impulse is to rush to his fiancée’s rescue by means of a new flying machine that he is in the process of developing, although the prototype has not yet undergone its crucial trials. Unfortunately, while he is showing the untested machine and another application of its fundamental technology to his friend, Dr. Sabirat, an accident hurls the apparatus into the air, carrying away Sabirat and Guy’s sister, Marie, at enormous velocity. By the time they finally figure out how to land the machine they are, unknown to them, in the vicinity of one of the key rallying-points of the Asiatic army that is preparing to invade Europe.
The tangled plot follows the adventures of the three resultant groups of people, centered on Marguerite in Peking, Guy in Paris, and Sabirat in Turkestan, but several of the story threads carefully laid down for future development are abandoned and others drastically abridged, so a work that might easily have rivaled Danrit’s La Guerre de demain for length had it been fully developed eventually collapses into a few sketchy scenes that wrap up the overall plot in a tearing hurry. What survives, however, is the notion of the advanced technology that eventually succeeds in putting an end to the seemingly irresistible invasion of a
n army numbered in its millions.
Lermina was writing before the discovery of X-rays or radium, but he had a vague idea of the potential of “radiation” by virtue of his knowledge of the Crookes tube, and he picked up an idea first broached in Listonai’s Voyageur philosophe, which had drawn an analogy between the pervasive effects of solar radiation and those of scent, tacitly suggesting that a solution to the mystery of the radiant capacities of musk might have interesting technological consequences. Instead of something analogous to radium, therefore, Lermina imagines something analogous to musk, whose stored emissions can build up enormous energies capable not only of hurling flying machines through the air but creating artificial tornadoes; it is those machines, once he has finally recovered his aircraft, that allow Guy de Norès to delay the Asiatic invasion just long enough for him to develop an even more powerful superweapon—which might or might not have been a conscious copy of the one employed by Lichtmann to destroy Koblenz—after using a seemingly magical method of skywriting to lure the bulk of the superstitious Asiatic army to the slopes of Mont Blanc.
The curtailment of La Bataille de Strasbourg undoubtedly left it a spoiled work, but its spoliation did not prevent it from being reprinted in the large-circulation daily newspaper Le Matin, where it reached a much vaster audience than it had in La Terre Illustrée or the Boulanger book edition and where it must have seemed a striking novelty, immersive futuristic fiction not having been tried out there previously. The decision to reprint it in Le Matin was undoubtedly prompted by the outbreak of the so-called Boxer Rebellion, which reached its violent climax while the story was being serialized, the Legation Quarter of Peking being attacked and besieged in June 1900. The actual siege lasted 55 days, considerably longer than the siege described in the story and slightly longer than the serialization of the novel, but the coincidence did give the reprint a bizarre topicality and lent its early chapters—but not the later ones—a vague implication of prophecy.
It is also possible that La Bataille de Strasbourg was more directly influential than historians of science fiction have thus far noticed. The two serials that introduced a dramatic expansion of scale into British future war fiction, George Griffith’s The Angel of the Revolution (Pearson’s Weekly, 1893) and Shiel’s “The Empress of the Earth” were commissioned by editors who were undoubtedly aware of the popularity of feuilleton fiction in France and might have been aware of specific examples. It is unlikely that either George Griffith or M.P. Shiel actually read La Bataille de Strasbourg, but both of them considered themselves in 1892 to be devout socialists, and they are likely to have been acquainted with some of the French Anarchists who sought refuge in London during the 1890s when Paris became an unsafe place of residence for them. Those Anarchists would have been very familiar with Lermina, who had long been active in their cause and had been jailed for his propagandizing more than once. It is not improbable that Griffith, a notorious borrower of other writers’ ideas, knew of the existence of La Bataille de Strasbourg when he was commissioned to write his own serial, and it is similarly possible that Shiel—who spent a lot of time in Paris—knew of its existence when he concluded that writing lurid feuilleton fiction would be a useful way to battle his perennial financial difficulties. Shiel’s Asiatic invaders employ the same tactics as Lermina’s, although they are defeated by a biological superweapon rather than brutal force.
Whether or not it had any wider influence, there is no doubt that La Bataille de Strasbourg moved the goalposts of French future war fiction decisively, assisting in the inspiration of more modest world war stories like the later ones penned by Capitaine Danrit as well as more extravagant fantasies in which the weapons that were supposedly too dreadful to be used (or at least reused) became far more flamboyant, if no more destructive, than Barillet-Lagargusse’s earthquake machines and machine guns. Some writers, of course, needed no such influence, and Albert Robida presumably considered that he was uniquely entitled to be considered the great pioneer of imaginative twentieth-century warfare.
Robida continued his own pattern of imaginative development in the serial he contributed to Louis Figuier’s feuilleton slot: La Vie électrique (serialized 1891; tr. as Electric Life), whose hero, Georges Lorris, is a reservist in the “Offensive Medical Corps”—the army unit charged with the deployment of chemical and biological weaponry. In the course of the plot, he is called up to participate in maneuvers which only simulate the probable pattern of the kind on invasion to which France might now be subject, but the fact that all the casualties only pretend to die merely adds a surreal note to the account of the fantastic battle fought with an assortment of poisons and ingenious methods of delivery.
In La Vie électrique the final war remains mercifully unfought except in pretense, but the amiable humor of the novel does not entirely deflect attention away from the presumption that if it were to be fought, with the kind of weaponry described, it really could be the final war, not only in the sense that its horrible example would function as a permanent deterrent but in the sense that it might obliterate civilization. After 1891, that possibility began to haunt the imagination of French speculative fiction with increasing force.
One of the most striking examples of that new consciousness is provided by Maurice Spronck’s novella L’An 330 de la République (1894; tr. as “Year 330 of the Republic”), which attacks the socialist ideas championed by Barillet-Lagargousse and Jules Lermina, and the pacifist ideas championed by Albert Robida, constructing a parable in which the triumph of socialism and pacifism in Europe leave it easy prey to an Asiatic invasion of the kind imagined by Lermina. In this nightmare scenario there is no Lichtmann or Guy de Norès to come to the rescue with a handy superweapon; the future history unfolds with a chilling sense of inevitability to the final line: “The barbarians have reconquered the world. Civilization is dead.” Spronck was subsequently elected to parliament as a député for the Seine in 1902 and retained his seat throughout the Great War although he moved in the meantime from the political right exemplified in his novella to join the Républicains progressivistes.
By the turn of the century, the kind of bitter irony developed by Spronck had become commonplace and ripe for further extension. It reached a satirical extreme in Henri Austruy’s L’Ère Petitpaon, ou La Paix universelle (1906; tr. as The Petipaon Era; or World Peace), in which Bernard Petitpaon, an actor-turned-politician who becomes President of the Republic, comes up with a plan to render war harmless by signing up all the countries in the world to a scheme by which the potential casualty figures of any future battles will be calculated mathematically on the basis of the number, skill, and weaponry of the troops, exactly like the results of the maneuvers described in La Vie électrique. The appropriate numbers of “casualties” will suffer only a symbolic and largely theoretical death, losing their citizenship while being able nevertheless to return safe and sound to the bosom of their families.
Absurd complications inevitably ensue in practice, however, when a petty puzzle arising from the difficulties of handling fractional deaths is gradually inflated into a casus belli, and when the crucial battle between France and Germany is eventually fought at Waterloo, the battles employ weapons so theoretically powerful that both armies are “wiped out.” The hypothetical deaths, supplemented by a cholera epidemic among the maneuvering troops, soon become horribly real with expanding consequences all the more nightmarish for their farcical irony.
By 1906, therefore, with eight years still to go before the actual outbreak of the Great War that had been visible on the political horizon of France since 1871, the long-cherished idea that war might become impossible because weaponry would become too advanced to make it practicable had effectively become obsolete. In the real world—as opposed to the more clear-sighted one in which speculative philosophers dwell intellectually—the notion of a “war to end war” still had a good deal of political currency. It was easily adequate to promote enthusiasm for the impending war and prepare illusions for the awful depths of
abuse that followed it. The consciousness was beginning to dawn, however, that the first impulse of the leaders of any nation possessed of a “weapon too dreadful to use” would be to use it before the opposition could develop it—and that the idea that they might be precipitating doomsday would not put them off.
The passage of time has given modern readers a very elaborate education in that regard, and we can now see very clearly that the “ultimate weapons” imagined by Joseph Méry and his immediate successors are very tame indeed by the standards of the weapons that were actually deployed in the Great War, let alone the standards subsequently set by the atom bomb and the hydrogen bomb. We now know that the scale and nature of the massacres that actually became feasible did not have the slightest deterrent effect on the willingness of any nation to go to war, although we also know, thanks to long and wry experience, that superweapons rarely have the actual killing power theoretically or imaginatively attributed to them.
By virtue of that experience in question, we can now envisage quite clearly the one possibility that not one of the works of the imagination detailed in this brief cross-section of yesterday’s future war fiction was able to conceive: the prospect of a world in which the final war simply goes on forever, never ending, but merely shifting its transient focal points, killing with ever-improving weapons but never killing in sufficient numbers to disrupt the long-term stability of the international balance of power and put a stop to the eternal orgy of mass murder.
To all of the writers of fantasies of the final war—not merely those whose exemplary works are described here but the even richer crops that followed the horrid disillusionments of 1919 and 1945, whose imaginative horizons continued to expand by leaps and bounds—that eventuality would have seemed like utter and absolute madness, although Henri Austruy, at least, would not have been surprised by it. In the twenty-first century, of course, it is merely the news.
Magazine - The New York Review of Science Fiction - 313 - 2014-09 Page 2