Once a month, The duty challenges history buffs to decipher a topical theme based on a comparison with a historical event or figure.
A major author of world literary heritage, Jules Verne (1828-1905) marked — and continues to mark — collective imaginations with his Extraordinary journeys. It is spontaneously associated with geographical exploration, rail and maritime travel, fabulous machines or even the audacity of its heroes, very often British. However, through his interest in foreign nationalities and cultures, Verne was an exceptional novelist in the French literary landscape of his time, and Canada was for him, in particular, his “favorite country”, as he confided. to his publisher, Hetzel, in a letter of 1887.
Besides Alfred de Vigny, Verne is probably the only major French author of the 19th century.e century who took a genuine interest in Canada. He published three “Canadian” novels and depicted, elsewhere in his work, Franco-Canadian characters, disseminating a geographical, historical and human imagination that would help to fix some of the representations of Canada in the eyes of Europeans for a long time.
Verne thus publishes The land of furs in 1872-1873, an account of a Hudson’s Bay Company expedition to the Arctic Sea; Family-namelessin 1889, historical novel on the rebellions of the Patriots of 1837-1838; and finally The Golden Volcano posthumously in 1906, which depicts the Klondike gold rush and a territorial dispute between Canadians and Americans. As we can see, this Canadian Jules Verne is indeed the novelist accustomed to travel and exploration, but he is also, in a less known part of his work today, an author who is interested in history and political conflicts.
However, Verne is himself a homebody. He traveled relatively little and only spent twenty-four hours in Canada, at Niagara Falls, enjoying a brief stay in the United States in 1867. So where does his knowledge of Canada come from, if he is not first hand? The question deserves to be asked, in order to understand how France represents a country that refers it to its own history and its colonial past in North American territory.
To understand him, we have to go back to his working method. As was the case during the preparation of most of the accounts of the Extraordinary journeys, Verne is a bulimic reader. All his knowledge of the geography, history and customs of the countries he describes in his work comes to him from book sources as well as from the contemporary press, both daily and periodical.
For family-without-nameit draws abundantly from theHistory of Canada published by Eugène Réveillaud in 1884, but, a very rare phenomenon for a Frenchman of his time, he was also interested in Canadian historians: François-Xavier Garneau and Louis-Napoléon Carrier. Moreover, the novels of James Fenimore Cooper, enjoying great popularity in France since the publication of Last of Mohicans in 1826, feed his imagination and make him very sensitive to the cohabitation of European settlers with Aboriginal peoples.
happy utopian
Verne is the exact contemporary of the first media era, which profoundly transformed Western societies in the 19e century and which allows readers to satisfy their thirst for curiosity. In Verne’s time, a large number of periodicals of geographical exploration, bulletins of learned societies and maritime and colonial journals were offered by subscription, while the tradition of the travelogue evolved towards the practice of reportage in the mainstream news media. The novelist is thus subscribed to the World Tour since its launch in 1860 by the publisher Hachette. This weekly offers several geographical and human reports devoted to Canada, as well as many other stories that will inspire him for his novels.
Verne displays in several novels a tendency to create utopias which do not go in the direction of history. We can thus consider the first Extraordinary journeys like a great bridge erected between the French-speaking and English-speaking cultures, so much so that, in Twenty thousand leagues under sea (1869), a Canadian character stands out as the emblematic figure of this romantic reconciliation.
Ned Land, the prisoner harpooner of the Nautilus alongside Professor Aronnax, is the symbolic incarnation of the Canadian in the first part of the Vernian work, and more precisely of the Quebecer, in the sense that this word had in the XIXe century: an inhabitant of Quebec City. For a Canadian reader, the question that arises spontaneously is of course whether this character is Francophone or Anglophone, but this alternative does not exist in Verne’s symbolic construction. The Canadian converses in “the old language of Rabelais”, but swears and sings in English. It is, before its time, a form of fantastic representation of the Canadian identity that the most ardent federalists of today would not disavow.
However, twenty years later, nothing is going well in this harmonious reconciliation of national identities. In family-without-namethe desire for freedom that was that of Ned Land desperately seeking to flee the Nautilus (he who “would risk everything to be able to enter a tavern in his country”) would come to characterize the whole of the Franco-Canadian community, prisoners of the British Empire.
Verne is the exact contemporary of the first media era, which profoundly transformed Western societies in the 19th century and which allowed readers to satisfy their thirst for curiosity.
In the two decades between these novels, Verne has clearly ceased to believe in the reconciliation of enemy nations and now sees Canada as a tragic place where the French element is unfairly abused by the English. However, he remains a happy utopian insofar as family-without-name proposes a symbolic reconciliation between the French and the Amerindians this time, who unite there to found a new culture. The utopia is now one of fruitful coexistence between Canadians and Aboriginal nations, as illustrated by the characters of master Nick, a notary of Huron origin, and his “pure wool” apprentice Lionel Restigouche.
Accelerated travel
At the end of the 19the century, the time is over when Canada crossed itself in long weeks. This acceleration of travel across the country coincides with the gold rush, opening a cultural series that has had a strong impact on the Western imagination, from The Call of the Wild from Jack London (1903) to Gold Rush by Charlie Chaplin (1925).
Significantly, Verne therefore bases the action of one of his last novels, The Golden Volcano, in the Klondike. Exploiting the fascination of contemporaries for the images of processions of miners in the icy lands and by the accounts of the conflicts which arise from the search for gold, the novel tells the adventure of two Montreal cousins, similar in certain aspects to Ned Land , since they come from a North American crossbreeding that never ceases to fascinate Verne: Summy Skim and Ben Raddle were both born to a French-Canadian mother, but Skim has an English-Canadian father and Raddle, a American. Deeply retouched by Michel Verne (the son of Jules), the version published in 1906 by Hetzel is very different from that composed by the author of Extraordinary journeys. It is the version of Jules Verne that we will soon give to reread.
Even the less popular of Verne’s novels have proved influential, for several reasons and in particular because Verne is a writer for writers, appreciated as much by Guillaume Apollinaire as by Ian Fleming, both by Edgar P. Jacobs and Alan Moore, so that his imagination migrated directly from his works to those of more than one successor. One can thus wonder if the character of Ned Land does not continue to influence the conception that the French have of Quebecers, for example if he is not at the origin, in Marcel Proust, of the passion of the baron of Charlus for Canadian airmen in Recovered timeor if the Canada of the Extraordinary journeys is not the country Louis Hémon set out to meet, haunted by a Canadian typology to which Jules Verne contributed a great deal.
Occupying vast wild and icy expanses, the inhabitants of the fur country would regularly be the prey of attacks by polar bears, would travel by sled, and would borrow their way of life from the First Nations, whom they would rub shoulders with harmoniously. In many ways and throughout his work, Jules Verne’s Canada remains a compensatory utopia.
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