Travel Scholarships. Jules Verne
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his fair share.”38
This plurilingual ideal strikes an obvious contrast with the author’s personal situation: throughout his whole life, Verne never spoke any language other than French. In 1903, in his old age, however, he agreed to become the honorary president of the Esperantists of Amiens and to propagate the idea of a universal language in a future novel. In order to understand this course of action, which went beyond the internationalism espoused in Travel Scholarships, it is essential to recognize the cultural standing that the French have always attributed to their mother tongue, the loss of which—even in part—was seen as a loss of identity. Since 1890, Verne himself had been a very active proponent of the Alliance Française, a patriot organization whose aim was to disseminate, with obvious political intentions, the French language and culture throughout the world in order to confront the expansion of English and German, especially in the colonies. In the summer of 1903, while Travel Scholarships was being published, Verne began his last novel, Study Trip (Voyage d’études), which was supposed to extol the advantages of Esperanto. In the text, he intentionally poked fun at “those good French, perhaps too patriotic, who consider their language to be superior to any other, able to suffice in all circumstances.”39 Study Trip, like his first novel, was intended to take the reader across the breadth of sub-Saharan Africa. But it remained unfinished: after five chapters of drafts, Verne abandoned the project.
Verne’s attitudes toward internationalism are quite complicated and require a more nuanced analysis. In Travel Scholarships, he contrasts the noble and altruistic internationalism of the boys from the Antillean School against the anarchy and selfishness of the pirates led by Harry Markel, ruthless outlaws who do not respect a single human value and who, as the narrator repeatedly suggests, live in a community of criminality without any national attachment. One remembers in this regard the crew of the Nautilus under Captain Nemo in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, whose members cut themselves completely off from their countries and even create their own artificial language, to bind them together and to separate them from the rest of humanity. Even if Captain Nemo justifies his actions in order to avenge and support oppressed peoples, his half-criminal character remains highly ambiguous throughout the novel. No such ambiguity exists in another Verne novel, For the Flag (1896, Face au drapeau), where pirates from many different nations live in the interior of “Back Cup,” a small island in the Bermudas, and force the French chemist Thomas Roch to attack his own country’s ships with a new, powerful weapon of his own invention. When the narrator of For the Flag insists that “patriotic sentiments … are the very essence of the citizen” (chap. 1), he denounces the absence of such feelings among the pirates, who come together only as a power-driven collective: “But, if these inhabitants of Back Cup are not bound by ties of race, they are certainly so tied by bonds of instinct and appetite” (chap. 9). Although the inventor Roch, driven mad, seems to share these purely egotistical instincts, he recoils at the last moment and refuses to destroy a warship flying the French flag in an international squadron of naval vessels. Even though this novel is easily one of the most patriotic of the Extraordinary Voyages, the moral of the story is still that the common good can only be assured by an alliance wrought between rival nations.
In Study Trip, it can be deduced from the narrator’s comments that Esperanto would not be a substitute for existing national languages. Rather, it would serve as a tool, an egalitarian link to enable better communication and, by extension, better understanding between people of different ethnicities. Even while promoting the utopian ideal of the Antillean School, the narrator of Travel Scholarships remains well aware of the factors limiting its plausibility, given that “Sometimes racial instincts, more powerful than good examples and good advice, won the day” (Part I, chap. 1). In line with nineteenth-century beliefs, Verne considered national character to be a natural trait, and he made use of such stereotypes when describing his characters in Travel Scholarships and in other Extraordinary Voyages: the French are imperturbably odd, the English are proud, the Danish cold and reserved, the Americans energetic but impatient, and the Dutch phlegmatic. In A Two Years’ Vacation, Verne was very explicit about wanting to present his readers with “a band of children from eight to thirteen years old, abandoned on an island, fighting for life amidst passions fueled by differences in nationality”40 (especially between French and English, with the American Gordon playing the part of mediator). These conflicts are much more attenuated in Travel Scholarships and, if they do arise from time to time, they are quickly resolved. Patriotism is considered a healthy and natural attitude so long as it respects other nationalities, but it risks becoming ridiculous or arrogant when it exceeds its limits (consider the exorbitant patriotism of the Frenchman Henry Barrand or the Englishman Roger Hinsdale, for example). Or as Doctor Clawbonny so superbly put it in another Verne novel: “You can’t swim 300 miles, even if you’re the best Briton on earth. Even patriotism has its limits.”41
On a more serious note, the numerous changes in nationality of the Lesser Antilles since the seventeenth century (which Verne dutifully details for each island) make the bloody battles fought over them by European powers appear quite absurd. The novelist juxtaposes the egotistical claims and shortsightedness of humans with the slow and unstoppable workings of nature that incessantly transform the physical organization of the Earth by volcanic forces. This evolution applies just as well to the Lesser Antilles, whose geological condition, for Verne, was nothing less than conclusive:
It is not impossible that the submarine floor, which is coralline in nature, might someday rise up to the surface of the sea through the persevering work of coral polyps or even as the result of a plutonic upthrust. In such conditions, Saint Martin and Anguilla would then form only one island. […] Could they imagine a future time, very distant no doubt, where these islands would be joined to each other, forming a sort of vast continent at the mouth of the Gulf of Mexico, and, who knows! even connecting with the American territories? Under such conditions, how could England, France, the Netherlands, and Denmark maintain their claims to have their national flags on these lands? (Part I, chap. 15)
In the Extraordinary Voyages, volcanic action is an ever-present geological force that mercilessly and indifferently reveals the limits of human power, even when supported by science and industry. Volcanism destroys as it creates and creates as it destroys, as demonstrated by the end of The Mysterious Island and the real catastrophe in Martinique in 1902.
In this global perspective, humanity must always, according to Verne, work out its differences and overcome the conflicts caused by national interests. It is no doubt just a fortuitous coincidence that Verne conserved among his working notes a long article excerpted from an unidentified journal, dedicated to “the Hague Conference.”42 Although this first international peace conference was not able to halt the ongoing growth of military armament among the Western powers, it did manage to set up an international judicial tribunal and establish rules for armed conflicts. The Hague Conference was held from May 18 to July 29, 1899—about the same time as Verne was writing Travel Scholarships.
TEXTUAL VARIANTS
This translation by Teri J. Hernández was based on the final edition (grand in-octavo) of Verne’s Bourses de voyage, although it is not clear that this version is necessarily the most thoroughly corrected one. Comparing the version from the Magasin to that of the in-octavo reveals a highly unequal number of variations: about 630 for the first part and 170 for the second, which might at first seem to be a huge disparity. But a large portion of these corrections are of secondary importance and are undetectable in translation since they mostly concern punctuation, choice of synonyms, and sentence structure. Nonetheless, it is surprising to note that, although the first part published in the Magasin is closer to the manuscript, such as might be expected, the second part of the edition grand in-octavo, by contrast, shows greater resemblance to the hand-written draft, at least for chapters 1–9.