And Michel Dufrénoy, his hero, fits the period well. With his long hair, his literary aspirations, his rejection of the existing order and of a paying job, and his rather mopey manner, he prefigures the dreamy dropouts of the 1960s. Jules Verne's only child, a son born in 1861, was also named Michel; so were the ships that Jules loved to sail. We may assume that, in the author's eye, Michel is a positive figure. Yet one could say of him what Adolphe Thiers, the acerbic politician, said of Napoleon III: "He confuses the verb to dream with the verb to think. " In fact, Michel is a fool, but a nice fool: a poet and a ninny, as one is entitled to be at sixteen; and sometimes at sixty. And his Paris, the one Jules Verne envisions for our century, is a ship of fools running onto the rocks of modernity.

Under Napoleon III, the great emperor's nephew who ruled France between 1848 and 1870, the country's industrial production doubled, and its communications network tripled. Business and government enterprise, notably, transformed Paris: wide straight streets, green parks and squares, new apartment buildings, monumental railway stations, and workers' housing on the outskirts for people displaced from the center of town. Verne noted the ferocious materialism of his time and anticipated the fallout of progress with anxious fascination: overpopulation, pollution, lodgings hard to find in a city center where offices and public buildings crowded out private dwellings, and everywhere "machines advantageously replacing human hands. "

So many aspects of Jules Verne's imaginary twentieth century apply to the real one in which we live! The French language is in dire straits: specialists create their own jargon, scientists adopt English, Franglais is about to pounce. As with speech, so with social institutions: the family tends to self-destruction, marriage looks like heroic futility, the number of legitimate children diminishes, illegitimacy soars, bastards "form an impressive majority. " Books still exist; indeed, since the invention of paper made of wood pulp (1851), there are more of them. More books but fewer readers: literature has been marginalized, and "knowledge is imparted by mechanical means. " Mechanics have also invaded the arts. Music knows no more melody, painting no form, poetry sings Electric Harmonies and Decarbonated Odes, truly popular literature deals with practical matters like Stress Theory or The Lubrication of Driveshafts. Even Jules Verne failed to imagine that ideal warehouse for modern art, the Beaubourg museum, let alone the beau-bourgeoisie that worships at art's altars; nor had anyone yet coined words like "technocracy" and "technocrats. " But the government of the Second Empire was heavily involved in intellectual and cultural life, patronage and administrative manipulation subsidized and suggested, "joining the useful to the disagreeable" even more perhaps than they do today.

The Great Dramatic Warehouse (Chapter XIV), where Michel finds a job, houses teams of scribblers writing to order, or rewriting past successes as in Hollywood, to amuse "docile audiences by harmless works. " "Abandon originality all ye who enter here!" could easily be engraved above its gate. What had begun as private enterprise had passed under control of the State and of its bureaucrats. Théâtre managers (Verne had been one in his youth) became civil servants, authors state employees, and the stern censorship of nineteenth century administrations waned because self-censorship left no need for it.

Jules Verne's irony is sometimes heavy-handed. It can also be hard to discern for readers unaware of issues that concerned his times. Thus, unlike Britain, Belgium, or Prussia, the France of the first half of the nineteenth century had no national banking system; and this created problems in raising capital, obtaining credit, or even paying bills over a distance. In 1852, France joined the modern age when two visionary believers in industrial development and technocratic planning, the brothers Pereire, founded a national bank, the Crédit Mobilier, soon imitated by other joint stock clearing banks founded over the next ten years or so: Crédit Industriel, Crédit Foncier, Crédit Lyonnais.... The Academic Credit Union that appears in Chapter I transposes this financial revolution to the educational field: centralization, investment, profit, on a new mass scale. Verne's story begins on the Union's prize-giving day, a ceremony as familiar to the French of the 1860s as to their present-day descendants, and as commencement is to us. An educational system founded as the economy was, on competition, stimulated ambition by official recognition: prizes, medals, certificates of excellence, without which children were not expected to exert themselves. The struggle to win school prizes prepared for more serious struggles after graduation, hence for success in life. So the annual prize-giving day was a great occasion, and the speeches that marked it reflected values that society sought to inculcate: in this case, respect for foreign languages and for applied science.

In the 1860s, educated Frenchmen (few women had access to secondary education till later in the century) learnt to write good French by imitating models found in Latin and in the great authors of seventeenth and eighteenth century literature. That was the basis of rhetoric, whose models drawn from Greek and Roman antiquity taught good taste, elegant discourse, nobility of thought and of expression. Democratic opponents of rhetoric rejected it as pedantic, pompous, boring, and elitist. Victor Hugo, much admired by Michel as by Michel's creator, had recently denounced

Merchants of Greek! Merchants of Latin! pedants! dogs!

Philistines! magisters! I hate you pedagogs.

But Hugo was in exile for opposition to the Empire, and the respectable classes respected the classical curriculum that he criticized.

More dangerous for rhetoric's fortunes, its teachings were out of tune with the times. "Fine words do not produce beet sugar, Alexandrine verse does not help extract sodium from sea salt, " the physicist François Arago contended, attacking scholastic insistence on the classics and other useless knowledge.