Vernian projections of the current city: Paris in the 20th century

Abstract

This research article is structured around three hypotheses. We start from the idea that in his book Paris 20th Century Jules Verne presents the utopia-dystopia binomial as a constant. Not the desirable and the abhorred as separate phenomena, as would frequently be represented in 20th century literature; For the mentality of the 19th century, the time when his work was written, technology necessarily had that double face of admiration and terror, of revolution and involution. The second hypothesis maintains that the French writer uses a historical-logical procedure to write his novel. This path lies in considering the background of the past or present history of the technology of its time and, advancing logical consequences, projecting the Paris of the 20th century. That is to say, all his literary imagination is largely supported by a strong knowledge of the science of the time, a science that had not yet become hegemonic technology. The third hypothesis maintains that the impoverishment and death of the young artist, who is the main protagonist of Paris Siglo XX, may be a political interpretation of the defeats of the labor movement of the time, and that the spaces of the central city that the workers they had gained in the first decades of the 19th century are lost (or expropriated) by the Haussmannian reforms of the second half of that century