In the state of peaceful tranquility and perfect happiness at which humankind had arrived, quarrels of that magnitude did not often arise. The public—who, deep down, regarded Jeanne d’Arc as a joke—was amused by the debate and followed its ups and downs attentively, commenting scrupulously on even item of the attacks and ripostes, marking the hits and observing the parries as if in a fencing match. Enormous sums had been wagered on one side or the other by the time the affair was cut short by a communal plebiscite. The electorate, which had been tempted to take an interest in the heroine’s fate, did not want to seem to be siding with reaction, and voted unanimously for the removal of the statue.
The measure was, in any case, necessary. Since Europe had entered into its Golden Age, the number of benefactors of humanity had increased in such proportions that no one knew where to place the most modest bust; the external façades of houses were plastered with them from top to bottom. The streets, squares and crossroads were cluttered with a host of celebrities sculpted in marble or cast in metal. When the day came that the Commune of Orléans decided to erect a monument to the illustrious chemist Claude Moullard, no vacant surface worth of him any longer remained. The partisans of Jeanne d’Arc sensed that their resistance was futile; all those who were able to do so settled their bets honestly.
In spite of the annoyance of settling these accounts, no one dared protest against the honor rendered to Claude Mouillard. There was unanimous recognition of his immense worth as a philanthropist and scientist; no one was unaware of his admirable work in relation to the fabrication of artificial comestibles, and were in accord regarding the expansion that the science of alimentary chemistry—still in limbo in the first century of the republic—had undergone thanks to him. When he died, his industrial methods had brought within the range of everyone—and in profusion—fake nourishment as tasty and almost as healthy as the genuine article.
Such entitlements certainly merited a monument like the one in which the glory and the features of the great man would be immortalized. Upright, in a meditative attitude, he dominated from the height of his marble pedestal several majestic groups of allegorical sculptures, from which a figure of Abundance stood out, cornucopia in hand. The artist had been able to imitate the fabric of garments with an incomparable perfection.
In a truly civilized and happy country, the organization of a celebration is never without grave difficulties. Without extreme ingenuity, in fact, it becomes almost impossible to distract people whose life is a perpetual distraction. One does not distribute food to people who are overflowing with nourishment. One does not offer concerts, scenic representations or nocturnal illuminations to a city in which every inhabitant possesses a theatrophone and which is illuminated by electric light from dusk to dawn. If horse racing still retained some attraction in 313, it was only because the Society for the Protection of Animals had succeeded in rendering racecourses very rare. As for the inauguration of a statue, the charm of the unfamiliar had been missing from that king of spectacle for a long time.
It was, however, necessary to invent something in honor of Claude Mouillard and the centenary of Orléans. After infinite hesitation, the chief magistrate of the city, the Supreme Companion had an idea. That idea consisted of a complete archeological reconstruction of the barbaric life of the first century of the Republican Era.
Improvements in technology, made it quite easy to give certain quarters of the modern city something of their former wretched and unhealthy appearance. The electricity could be turned off for twenty-four hours: no more electric light, but lighting by gas; no more aerial locomotion, but carriages drawn by genuine horses, circulating through the streets and transporting the celebrants to different centers of the festival. In the suburbs, vast halls would be constructed in which the old industrial crafts would be practiced. Scenes of war and torture, such as hanging or the guillotine, would be staged in an immense hippodrome. Restaurants would furnish their clients with natural aliments, prepared and seasoned in the ancient style.
Two of these proposals, unfortunately, drew violent protests from the indefatigable Society for the Protection of Animals. Its members declared unanimously that to harness any living being to any sort of vehicle whatsoever was to take humanity back to the bleakest times of its history. In addition, the phrase “natural aliments” had made them anxious. Were sheep to be killed and their flesh eaten? When they learned that the planners of the program really did intend to do that, their exasperation knew no bounds. They threatened to leave the sacrilegious city en masse, and would certainly have done so if they had been more confident that anyone would try to stop them.
The solemn date finally arrived. At dawn, the municipality had artificial clouds launched, which dampened the ardor of the sun and spread a little moist coolness through the atmosphere. At the same time, the refrigerating machines maintained the temperature at exactly twenty-one degrees Centigrade. Vaporizers of rare perfumes were installed in several districts. On the route that the official procession was to follow and in the boulevards in the vicinity of Claude Mouillard’s statue, the marble of the streets was covered with precious carpet and the houses were decorated with bright fabrics, without any manifestation of bad taste.
At eight o’clock in the morning, the guests arrived; they were immediately received at the municipal palace, while the various engines of aerial locomotion that had brought them returned to park outside the city without there being any need for police. At eleven o’clock, the last belated delegations were introduced; the last consignments of phonographs had reached their destination and were only waiting to be placed on the speech stage to recite their compliments. The procession formed up in good order, and began to file away.
Each of the important individuals who composed it was seated in a mobile armchair, powered by electricity, somewhat analogous to ancient tricycles and easily steerable. It would, in fact, have been impossible to impose the obligation of a twenty-minute walk on men and women exclusively devoted to intellectual labor, long unaccustomed to physical exercise. The mobile armchair was, in any case, in common use among the people of the fourth century, for the last twenty-five or thirty years everyone had been making use of them, hardly quitting them except to go to bed.
At the head of eleven hundred and twenty representatives of foreign communes, the Supreme Companion of Orléans, Citizeness Paule Bonin, rolled in her tricycle. Although she was not surrounded by any of the theatrical paraphernalia dear to barbaric epochs and races, having no particular escort, no fancy uniform or multicolored decorations, the moral prestige with which she was clad was sufficient indication of her high status. The members of the crowd bared their heads as she passed by with respectful sympathy.
Citizeness Paul Bonin had once been pretty, but at the age of thirty-four she no longer was. Like the majority of her contemporaries, male or female, she had been afflicted by morbid obesity at a young age and had not taken long to reach an amplitude that would have rendered life impossible for her in a less perfect civilization. An ingenious system of corsetry armored her from her knees to her shoulders, compressed her thighs, held in her belly, clutched her waist, pulled in her torso and supported her arms, while her blotchy cheeks and chin descended over that amorphous ensemble in several stages. Only her eyes and forehead retained a forceful and, so to speak, intellectual beauty: the eyes were profound and brilliant between the heavy eyelids; the forehead was thoughtful, denuded and polished by long nights over the entire surface of the cranium, scarcely garnished now by a few tufts of graying hair.
No one had devoted herself more fully, body and soul, to disinterested and incessant labor for progress, science and the public good than Paule Bonin. Equipped with the solid and varied education that the commune gave to everyone, exempted by a superior social organization from the slightest material cares, she had been able to develop without hindrance and make the most of the marvelous resources of her genius.
At fifteen or thereabouts, like the majority of young peo
ple to whom the state of their health permitted it, she had dissipated in disorder time that would have been better spent in study, but even that time had not been wasted in her case, for it had taught her the vanity of love and pleasure; free of the moral prejudices that had once imposed duties on women different from those of men, she had tried the subtlest sensualities one by one; at twenty, having sampled everything and got past everything, in the great appeasement of her fatigued senses, she had renounced vulgar pleasures in order to devote herself to more nobly intellectual tasks and cultivate higher ambitions. In her voluntary solitude she had savored the joys of knowledge and understanding, and her heart beat then for humanity. Several significant discoveries had assured her the gratitude of her fellow citizens during her life and a statue after her death.
When all the delegations were ranged in their armchairs around Claude Mouillard’s monument, the master of the municipal fanfare pressed the lever of his music-box, and a triumphal march sprang forth from the immense crate mounted on six wheels, executed by a mechanical orchestra with impeccable precision. A murmur of admiration greeted the last notes of the piece.
After that, Citizeness Bonin’s tricycle climbed the inclined plane that led to the stage of honor; with a painful effort she lifted up her corpulence and made her speech in a standing position A further approving murmur underlined the peroration, and it was the same after each speech or phonographic audition. Two and a quarter hours later, the ceremony was concluded; the pedestal of the statue disappeared beneath wreaths and foliage. The audience dissolved, its members departing at hazard through the city in quest of diversion.
They amused themselves like civilized folk, with a correct reserve, devoid of the feverish excitement that savages put into their pleasures. The archeological reconstructions were sampled; the natural meals, judged to be a trifle repulsive, were less than successful, and only a few unfeeling individuals decided, for reasons of dilettantism, to bite into foodstuffs that had once been alive. The horse-drawn carriages attracted the curious. The various spectacles reproducing ancient wars and tortures interested the crowd by virtue of the perfection of the staging and the exactitude of the details. The triumph of the theatrical machinery even caused an incident that might have had grave consequences.
The program of tortures included an execution by guillotine. When an admirably constructed automaton was seen to emerge from the prison door, sustained by the executioner’s aides and accompanied by the priest, with a bloodless face and eyes rolled back in fear, a tremulous lower jaw and a shortness of breath that caused the shoulders to shake, a frisson of horror ran through the crowd. At the moment when a flood of red liquid spurted on to the ground from the mannequin lying on the platform, it was too much for the impressionable nerves of the audience; cries of protest and anguish burst forth; men and women fainted; a few attempted to race toward the exits, knocking down the old and the disabled; a general bustle was produced, in the midst of which the strident howls of epileptics abruptly seized by fits were heard. It was fortunate that there was no fatal accident to be deplored, but the following day the press fulminated, with good reason, against bloody exhibitions worthy of another era.
With the exception of that hitch, however, nothing troubled the joy of the celebrations. The inconvenience of gas lighting, the slowness with which the street-lights had to be lighted one by one and the yellow light that the spread around them, and that entire display of obsolescence, offered the Orléanais an entirely new spectacle, and made them smile. Those who were not completely worn out by the fatigues of the day stayed up quite late wandering in their tricycles through the archaic décor of the city, philosophizing among themselves on the beauty of science, the progress of humankind and the good fortune of living in the fourth century of the Republican Era.
A Retrospective Glance
Like every other commune in the world, the Commune of Orléans had not arrived at that condition of miraculous prosperity without effort. Indeed, it had only been achieved by noble struggle against inequality, poverty and injustice. An expense of inexhaustible devotion, relentless labor and, too often, abundant bloodshed made up the melancholy and glorious balance-sheet of the supreme crisis in which civilization was obliged to fight for several centuries against the inertia and ignorance of ancient barbarity.
The French Revolution had prepared everything but, in reality, had founded nothing. For a hereditary nobility it substituted an aristocracy of money, for one oppression another no less heavy. It had never contrived to understand that a society remains infallibly reduced to impotence so long as it has not shaken off such shackles as religion, patriotism, property and the family. The Convention marks a date in history; it did not advance the earthly well-being of the species by an inch.
The various regimes, monarchic or Caesarian, that were imposed thereafter lacked the capacity to cut through the problem of popular claims. For nearly eighty years, save for the brief clarity of the Second Republic, Europe seemed to hesitate. Illustrious thinkers designed admirable systems; a few apostles, more inspired, excited a multitude of bloody riots that maintained the crowd’s consciousness of its rights and obtained advantageous situations for the majority of their leaders. Nevertheless, the general march of progress was extremely slow; it required a simple dynastic and national question to emerge by chance to provoke a cataclysm and give the legitimate aspirations of humankind a further recrudescence.
The Franco-Prussian war provoked by the personal ambitions of King Wilhelm and Emperor Napoléon III was the evil from which circumstances were to bring forth good. Only the proclamation of the Paris Commune would have sufficed to pay for the thousand of cadavers strewn on the battlefields; it was the first material realization of the idea that was later to dominate the world; it would create a symbol for future social reformers.
By igniting a civil war before those who were then called foreigners of enemies, the Parisian insurrectional government denied the fatherland and affirmed universal fraternity; by shooting the priests, magistrates and officers that it detained as hostages, it put to death religion, the magistrature and the army—all the agents of ignorance and servitude; by burning houses and palaces, it cast down the idols of property and capital. Later, it had its martyrs. And then, as right always remains right, and ends up triumphant in spite of everything, a time came when a frightened bourgeois parliament no longer dared keep the heroes of the communalist revolution in its prisons; with regard to its victims it played the game of pardon; with a derisory generosity it offered forgetfulness of its own crimes to those it had robbed, exiled, imprisoned and massacred. The wretches submitted in silence to that supreme insult, and did not forget anything. The propaganda resumed.
The seed of future happiness was sown and had germinated; it only remained to blossom. The political and moral condition of Europe did not furnish it with an unfavorable terrain toward the end of the first century of the Republican Era. In those societies which claimed to be more or less democratic, and which were more or less strongly hierarchical, the so-called ruling classes did not possess any guiding principle and scarcely knew anything other than their immediate and egotistical interest. On the other hand, with the diffusion of education, the ruled classes were gradually emancipated from the old tutelage by means of which they were formerly controlled. With every passing year, they demanded more imperiously their share of wellbeing and enjoyment; they threatened recourse to force to obtain justice; in spite of their poverty and the legal shackles that enchained them, they syndicated their disseminated aspirations and contrived to organize for the struggle.
Everyone felt the imminent and probably implacable necessity of that struggle; in reality, however, it remained impossible as long as the powerful military administrations that resulted from the Franco-Prussian War had not been dissolved.
The system of the armed nation might have served the cause of socialism as well as aggravating the burden of taxation by making the barracks a meeting place between agricultural workers
and factory workers. Nevertheless, it maintained nationalist sentiments in the masses, and constituted an almost unbreakable guarantee of immunity to the rulers. There, too, right ended up victorious; when militarism had reached the full measure of the ridiculousness, shame and horror implicit in its essence, it crumbled, to the unanimous applause of populations.
A long time before, philosophers had already demonstrated the monstrosities of war. They accused it of not settling anything; on the other hand, they proved, figures in hand, that every battle cost a considerable number of human lives, and created an obstacle to the development of agriculture, industry and commerce; they established, furthermore, that a bullet or a cannonball could kill a man of genius as easily as an imbecile, and an honest man as easily as a rogue—by virtue of which, they concluded the immorality of the international duels in which primitive races invested their most cherished glory.
Some of those memorable philanthropists had devoted themselves to working for peace with an apostolic passion; slowly, by dint of hard work and patience, they obtained appreciable results. A time came when they were able to bring followers of the same doctrine together in conference, once a year, and exchange opinions on all the questions on which they were confident of agreement. As for the others, they distanced themselves pitilessly from the order of the day in fear of stirring up conflicts, and experience proved many times over that this precaution was wise, for if the peacemakers were admirably in agreement about the advantages that peoples would obtain from not fighting, they often quarreled violently about the practical means of obtaining that ideal.
Investigations of the Future Page 8