The Year 5865 Read online

  The Year 5865

  by

  Hippolyte Mettais

  translated, annotated and introduced by

  Brian Stableford

  A Black Coat Press Book

  Introduction

  L’An 5865, ou Paris dans quatre mille ans by “le Docteur H. Mettais,” here translated as The Year 5865, was published in Paris by Librairie Centrale in 1865. It is a remarkable novel in several ways, the bulk of it consisting of a first-person narrative related by a character living 4000 years hence, after various disasters have obliterated almost all the documents relating to the world with which the readers of 1865 were familiar. In consequence, the narrator’s knowledge of the reader’s world is severely limited and densely clouded by myth; in his world, archeological investigation is in its infancy, and has only just begun to provide corrective evidence allowing some slight penetration of that fog of myth.

  In the latter respect, there is a crucial similarity between the world of 5865 A.D. featured in the book and the world of 1865 A.D., in which archaeological endeavors—particularly those in Egypt sparked by the legacy of Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign—were beginning to cut through the fog of myth clouding the past of several millennia before, creating a heady combination of intellectual excitement and threat to entrenched belief. For that reason, the project of writing such a novel must have seemed both exciting and challenging—but it posed extremely awkward technical problems for whose potential solution there was virtually no literary precedent in 1865. The establishment of a first-person narrative viewpoint that is both radically different from that viewpoint of the reader and ignorant of huge amounts of information known to the reader creates obvious problems for a writer in transmitting information to the reader, because of the considerable dissonance between what the narrator knows—especially the things he takes for granted—and what the reader knows and takes for granted.

  L’An 5865 was not the first work to make the heroic attempt to cope with such problems, but in 1865 it was by far the longest and most complex, and its endeavor was unprecedented in some significant ways. Previous novels providing elaborate descriptions of the future, including the landmark examples Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s L’An deux mille quatre cent quarante (1771; rev. 1786; tr. as Memoirs of the Year 2500) and Émile Souvestre’s Le Monde tel qu’il sera (1846; tr. as The World as it Shall Be) had employed protagonists from our own time who were able to observe the future in visions, and were thus able to transport the reader’s awareness into the future with them. Even the handful of much shorter works that had attempted to do away with such artifice and offer straightforward accounts of future reality, the most important of which were Charles Nodier’s “Hurblubleu” and “Leviathan Long” (1833)1 and Félix Bodin’s Le Roman de l’avenir (1834)2 had used an omniscient narrator able to serve, at least to some extent, as an interpreter ready, willing and able to explain to readers what is happening in the future being described, in terms of their own experience.

  Mettais scorned the use of both of these explanatory crutches; even when he interpolates fragments of texts supposedly originating from the 19th or 20th centuries into his story, as he occasionally does, they only make information available to the reader slightly and elliptically, and even though he equips the principal first-person narrative with a documentary frame, that too is strictly limited in its assumed vision. Given that the unreliability of remembered history and the vagueness of transtemporal understanding are important themes of the novel’s didactic endeavor, this essentially fractured viewpoint—which requires the reader to deduce many things that cannot be explicitly stated in the text, and almost always leaves such deductions open to doubt—is perhaps uniquely appropriate to the project, but that does not make it any less difficult for the writer, as a methodical project, or for the reader, whose attempts to make complete sense of what is happening are likely to feel slightly frustrating throughout.

  This problem is further complicated in the present translation because its 21st century readers are significantly removed from the context of French readers in 1865, aware of an extra century and a half of actual history and no longer immediately aware of many facts and issues that seemed familiar and urgent then. I have tried to compensate for the latter deficit by including footnotes that point out some of the items of information known to French readers in 1865, whose remembrance would have been triggered by names and other clues included in the text, but I doubt that I have been able to catch them all, and there is much, in any case, that Mettais either intended to remain mysterious or never quite got straight in his own mind. By way of compensation, the spectacular development of futuristic fiction in that interim has given 21st century readers much greater expertise in negotiating text akin to L’An 5865, but the fact remains that to modern English readers, as well as to its contemporary French readers, the novel retains certain indissolubly puzzling aspects. That is by no means entirely a bad thing, however, adding to the sum of the book’s interest rather than distracting from it.

  In the context of early French futuristic fiction, L’An 5865 belongs to a curious and fascinating set of texts that might be called the “Ruins of Paris” sequence. The sequence was initiated by a brief text by Joseph Méry, “Les Ruines de Paris”3 which first appeared in book form in 1856 but had almost certainly appeared in a periodical earlier than that date (but no earlier than 1848). Méry’s story is essentially an inflated joke, which mocks the habit of equipping Parisian monuments with Latin inscriptions liable to confuse future archeologists. In the story, amateur archaeologists living in a Phalanstery in North Africa in the year 3844 play a flying visit to the chilly northern climes that civilization has long since deserted in order to inspect what survives of ancient Paris; they blithely draw absurd conclusions by misinterpreting the inscriptions on various familiar Parisian monuments, sometimes mangled by their slapdash reconstructions. Méry’s idea was then considerably elaborated in Alfred Bonnardot’s novelette “Archeopolis” (1857),4 which combined a similarly farcical account of archeological misinterpretations with a more earnest account of the historical processes that had caused the ruination of decadent Western European culture and the subsequent shift of the forefront of civilization and progress to the heart of Africa.

  Mettais—who was almost certainly personally acquainted with Bonnardot, as was Méry—took up the argumentative thread where Bonnardot’s visionary fantasy left off, and elaborated it vastly. Further developments of the theme, in Alfred Franklin’s Les Ruines de Paris (1875),5 Léo Clarétie, in the final sequence of Paris depuis ses origines jusqu’en l’an 3000 [Paris from its Origins to the Year 2000] (1886) and Edmond Haraucourt in “Cinq mille ans, ou la traversée de Paris” (1904)6 reduced the scale again and reverted to a documentary style of narration that was much easier to handle, leaving Mettais’ Herculean endeavor isolated in its magnitude and distinction. Although most of the other inclusions in the series had serious points to make as well as, or by means of, their jokes, they were all essentially light-hearted; Mettais was the only contributor to the series to attempt to substitute melodrama for humor, thus contriving a very different compound with his earnest arguments.

  To some extent, those earnest arguments are peripheral; like most of the French futuristic novelists of the day, Mettais had a strong interest in social reform, and his recipes for desirable reform are interpolated with the story-line, sometimes forming lumpen obstacles to the progress of the plot and the pace of the narrative—although the complexity of the work does have the effect of producing a ragged spectrum of utopian possibilities rather than a single focused image. One serious issue is, however central, and that is the one he took over from Bonnardot: the notion, common at the time, that 19th century French society, along with the rest of Western culture was fast approaching an irredeemable decadence, and was then bound to collapse, as so many other civilizations (including monumental Egypt, glorious Greece and Imperial Rome) had collapsed before, having passed inexorably from triumphant grandeur to ignominious decay and ultimate oblivion.

  Mettais’ primary purpose, throughout his exercise in viewpoint gymnastics, is to undermine arrogance: not only the arrogance of historians, who overestimate the reliability of their own narratives, but the wider arrogance of a culture that believes itself not only to be progressive but immortal in its progress. L’An 5865 is, in essence, a cultural memento mori. Mettais is well aware, of course, that the job of whispering “Remember thou must die” in an Emperor’s ear traditionally devolves to a Fool, but he is not afraid to don motley for the purpose. If his preface is a trifle defensive in that respect, beginning with the claim that what he is doing is neither a joke nor an assault, it is also unrepentant, pleading necessity as well as correctness. Like many of the writers of the period, Mettais dates the effective collapse of Western civilization to the temporal environs of the year 2000, but the fact that we have contrived to reach 2011 while still teetering on the brink is, of course, no cause for self-congratulation, and that part of his argument still remains relevant, in spite of all the recent technological advances that make his account of and attitude to mechanical progress seem distinctly quaint.

  One of the curious side-effects of Mettais’ innovative literary method is that in attempting to interpolate his didactic material into a melodrama rather than a travelogue—following the example set and fervently advocated by Félix Bodin—he provided an anticipatory echo of a future subgenre of popular fiction: the “lost race” story. In conventional ventures of that sort, of course, it is present-day e
xplorers who find relics of ancient civilization rather than futuristic explorers who find echoes of ours, but it is noticeable that the displacement in time does not affect the plot-structure that seems somehow to arise naturally from the theme. Thus, significant elements of the story-line of L’An 5865 are strangely echoed, undoubtedly by coincidence, in such classics of the lost race subgenre as H. Rider Haggard’s She (1887) and A. Merritt’s Dwellers in the Mirage (1932), which are themselves echoed plangently in Romantically-inclined works of modern science fiction, including The Legion of Time (1937) by Jack Williamson and The Dark World (1945) by C. L. Moore and Henry Kuttner. Given that it was the advent of labeled science fiction that paved the way for the standardization of the kind of immersive futuristic fantasy pioneered by L’An 5865, the repeated echo is intriguing.

  Another factor that needs to be taken into account in looking back at the text from a 21st century viewpoint is that the issues inevitably raised by futuristic fiction in 1865 were highly sensitive in both a political and a religious context. The use of a first-person narrator allows Mettais to mask his own political affiliations, giving him what is nowadays called “potential deniability,” but his protagonist is a Republican who is sympathetic to radical ideas—a stance that had had got many writers into serious trouble in the aftermath of Louis Napoléon’s coup d’état of 1951, resulting in the exile of such prominent figures as Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas. The Second Empire seemed much more secure by 1865 (an arrogant illusion, as it transpired) so Mettais was no longer at risk of bringing the wrath of the censors down on his head merely by treating Republican ideas sympathetically, but his awareness of the political sensitivity of what he is doing is very obvious in his text, especially in the section dealing with the penitentiary of “Tahiti.”

  The religious sensitivity of Mettais’ ideas is equally obvious in his text, albeit mostly in terms of the determined omission of any direct reference either to Christianity or (given the importance of Morocco and the Sudan within the story) Islam. He does hint, very diplomatically, at a potential misinterpretation of Christian iconography that was to be much more fully developed (in much less hostile circumstances) by Edmond Haraucourt, but does not press the point. The danger of offending entrenched religious beliefs—much sharpened in the context of the archaeological and paleontological discoveries of 1865 by the determination of many believers to cling rigidly to Archbishop Ushher’s chronology dating the creation of the world to 4004 B.C.—probably seemed more urgent to Mettais than the danger of offending Napoléon III’s censors on political grounds, in that he was a physician in private practice, whose livelihood would be at stake if he became publicly embroiled in religious controversy.

  In this context, one of the most remarkable arbitrary interpolations in the text is the protagonist’s brief visit to the island of the “Androgenes” and his subsequent debate about the origins of humankind with a mysterious individual who might or might not be an Androgene. Just as the protagonist cannot believe that his interlocutor means his argument seriously, the reader has to interpret the whole episode as a fable akin to Aristophanes’ apologue regarding the androgyne in Plato’s Symposium (which Mettais must surely have had in mind) but as a veiled comment on the debate about the evolution of humankind, as it stood in 1865, it is as striking as it is peculiar. It was, however, the argument by omission that was most likely to cause offence to Mettais’ contemporary readers: the assumption that the entire theological and ritual heritage of Judaism, Christianity and Islam might be something temporary and arbitrary, cable of being lost and forgotten without any consequent damage to moral philosophy, is something that was bound to give pause to believers, however covertly and diplomatically it was presented.

  L’An 5865 therefore qualifies as a daring text in more ways than one, in terms of both its literary method and its innate convictions. For those reasons alone it would be worthy of the attention of modern readers, but it is also notable that, in spite of its self-imposed obstacles to easy reading, the narrative does built up a certain pitch of dramatic suspense as well as a teasing pattern of mystery, which is, in the end, rather engaging. Even those readers who will think the melodrama’s ultimate denouement sneakily evasive will surely be unable to deny that it has a certain eccentric and provocative charm.

  Hippolyte Mettais was, as his by-line indicates, a physician who practiced in Paris from 1834, when he left his native town of Blois, until the 1870s. His birth date is given in the first edition of Pierre Larousse’s Grand Dictionnaire as 1812, and that datum is reproduced in the catalogue of the Bibliothèque Nationale, but he was not considered important enough to warrant inclusion in subsequent editions of Larousse and the date of his death is unrecorded in any of the standard sources. None of the easily-available sources indicate whether or not he was related to the roughly-contemporary illustrator and portrait-painter Charles Joseph Mettais, but it might be relevant that the latter also had literary connections, once having collaborated, in 1845, with Paul Féval on a dramatic production.

  Although he had previously published a medical treatise, Hippolyte Mettais’ first manifest literary endeavor was in the early 1840s, when he published two novels of his own, Rupert (1841) and Le Portefaix, roman de moeurs [The Street-Porter; a novel of (contemporary) mores] (1842) and one in collaboration with the prolific but now-forgotten writer of popular fiction Georges Touchard-Lafosse (1780-1847), Un Lion aux bains de Vichy [A Lion (i.e. a social “lion”) at the Vichy Spa] (1842). Touchard-Lafosse also contributed an introduction to Le Portefaix, and the fact that he published nothing more after his collaboration with Mettais suggests that he had recruited the latter to help him complete a project imperiled by ill-health. Mettais might well have been his doctor. Although the subtitle of Le Portefaix suggests that it was affiliated to the reaction against the supposed excesses of Romanticism stigmatized by Charles Asselineau as “the novel of common sense,” it may be worth noting that the term roman de moeurs had previously been used, and perhaps coined, by another of Touchard-Lafosse’s occasional collaborators, Étienne Lamothe-Langon, a writer who delighted in deception and fakery, and rarely removed his tongue from his cheek.

  That first foray into literary publication was presumably unsuccessful, because there was a long gap before Mettais resumed that aspect of his career, publishing another naturalistic novel, Le Père Thuillier [Old Thuillier], in 1857. His next publication was, however, a reformist pamphlet, Des Associations et des corporations en France [Associations and Corporations] (1859), whose propagandist argument in favor of the elaborate development of trade-union-based insurance and pension schemes is summarized in one of the more arbitrary chapters of L’An 5865. He then published Souvenirs d’un medécin de Paris [Memoirs of a Parisian Doctor] (1863), which is a novel rather than an autobiography, but claims in its introduction to be factually based. The literary ambitions of the young doctor who is its protagonist, and the similar ambitions of his friends in Paris in the late 1830s and 1840s, are peripheral to the plot, but the story does feature walk-on parts by Alexandre Dumas, Alfred de Vigny and Émile de Girardin, and places the young protagonist very firmly in the Romantic camp.

  It was, perhaps understandably, after his excursion into autobiographical fiction, recalling his youthful hopes and ambitions, that Mettais cut loose and soared away into uncharted literary skies in L’An 5865. He followed that novel up with an inverted companion piece, Paris avant le Déluge [Paris Before the Deluge] (1866), whose title is a trifle misleading, as its primary concern is the hypothetical lost continent of Atlantis. It was one of the earliest modern fantasies of that subgenre, predating the repopularization of the Atlantis myth by Ignatius Donnelly’s magisterial scholarly fantasy Atlantis, the Antediluvian World (1882) and Madame Blavatsky’s mystical extravaganza The Secret Doctrine (1888). Paris avant le Déluge has links of its own with subsequent lost race fantasies, which provide a further complement to its predecessor, and I hope to translate it at some time in the future.