Nicolas Camille Flammarion was born on 25 February 1842 at Montigny-la-Roi in the Haut-Marne. His father had formerly been a farmer, but a series of financial misfortunes had reduced him to keeping a shop. Camille was apparently something of a child prodigy, forming an interest in astronomy at a very early age, fascinated by his observation of a solar eclipse on 9 October 1847. He observed a second eclipse on 28 July 1851, and contrived to retain a certain child-like sense of wonder in his contemplation of the starry firmament for the rest of his life.
He began to record his astronomical and meteorological observations at the age of eleven and began to write voluminously in his teens—another habit that remained with him indefinitely. The family’s continuing financial difficulties caused them to move to Paris in 1856, where Camille was apprenticed to an engraver. He continued his studies in amateur astronomy alongside assiduous attempts to increase his education, and by the time he was sixteen had produced an unpublished “Voyage extatique aux régions lunaires, correspondence d’un philosophe adolescent” [A Visionary Journey to the Regions of the Moon, related by an adolescent philosopher] and a 500-page manuscript modestly entitled Cosmologie Universelle [Universal Cosmology], a version of which eventually saw print in 1885 as Le Monde avant le création de l’homme [The World Before the Creation of Humankind]. The latter was noticed by a physician called to treat him, who was sufficiently impressed to recommend the young man to Urbain Le Verrier (1811-1877), who was then in charge of the Paris Observatoire.
Le Verrier accepted Flammarion as an assistant, putting him to work in the Bureau des Calculs. Flammarion did not find this routine work to his taste, and was frustrated by the lack of opportunity to make his own observations; thus, when the publication of La Pluralité des mondes habités [The Plurality of Habitable Worlds] in 1862 gave him hope that he might be able to make a living as a writer, he left. Advertised by its subtitle as a study of the conditions of habitability of the planets in the solar system from the viewpoints of astronomy, physiology and natural philosophy, La Pluralité des mondes habités was a very successful work—it went through thirteen more editions in the next thirty years—and Flammarion also became a frequent contributor to several periodicals, but he could not support himself adequately on his writing income and he obtained a position in the Bureau des Longitudes, which allowed him to make further use of his experience as a calculator.
Flammarion did not allow his duties at the Bureau to impede his literary production. He may well have seen his next book, Les Habitants de l’autre monde; révélations d’outre-tombe [The Inhabitants of the Other World: Revelations of the Afterlife] (2 vols., 1862-63) as a companion-piece to its predecessor—he had met Allan Kardec, the French founder of “psychic research” while researching La Pluralité des mondes habités—but he must soon have been apprised of the fact that reporting alleged revelations from beyond the grave channeled by a spiritualist medium (Mademoiselle Huet) would not do his scientific career any good. His next book of the same kind, Des Forces naturelles inconnues [Unknown Natural Forces] (1865) was initially issued under the pseudonym Hermès, but he abandoned such subterfuges thereafter. He was always careful, however, to make it clear that his interest in psychic research was that of an open-minded scientific researcher; he was not a follower of the Spiritualist faith, and refused to consider the texts he produced during his experiments in automatic writing as anything other than the product of his own imagination.
Flammarion followed up his first work of speculative science with Les Mondes imaginaires et les mondes réels [Real and Imaginary Worlds] (1864). The first part of the book was a revisitation of the various worlds in the solar system, supplemented with a speculative note about planets illuminated by double stars, but the second was a thoroughgoing historical and critical survey of mythological, philosophical and literary speculations about the inhabitants of the planets and stars. His scientific work of this period included work for the Annuaire de cosmos [Cosmic Yearbook], and he began his own Annuaire astronomique et météorologique [Astronomical and Meteorological Yearbook], initially in Le Magasin pittoresque [The Illustrated Magazine].
Although he constructed a telescope of his own in 1866, Flammarion returned to the Observatoire in 1867 to take part in a project observing and mapping double stars. He also continued his meteorological observations, undertaking many balloon flights in order to observe atmospheric phenomena at closer range, resulting in his pioneering study of L’atmosphère [The Atmosphere] (1871). He continued, in the meantime, to produce popular articles and books with increasing rapidity, taking in vulcanology and climatology as well as astronomy. He was a frequent contributor to such periodicals as Le Cosmos, L’Intransigéant and Le Siècle.
Flammarion’s greatest success as a popularizer of science came in 1880 when the publishing company in which his younger brother Ernest (1846-1936) had become a partner in 1875 issued his paradigmatic guide-book for amateur astronomers, Astronomie populaire [Popular Astronomy]. One admirer of his work, Monsieur Meret, was moved to make him a present of an estate in Juvisy-sur-Orge twenty miles south of Paris, to which Flammarion and his wife of eight years, Sylvie, moved in 1882. They constructed a new telescope there to facilitate his work. All these projects proved to be enduring: the Flammarion publishing firm still exists; the Astronomie populaire was continually updated by other hands after Flammarion’s death; and the Juvisy telescope is still operational. Flammarion also founded the journal L’Astronomie [Astronomy], which took over his Annuaire astronomique et météorologique and became the definitive periodical for amateur astronomers. In 1887 he combined forces with other interested parties to found the Societé Astronomique de France, another organization that persists to the present day. The Societé supervised the construction of the first telescope for the use of the general public in the Latin Quarter of Paris.
Flammarion’s most important endeavors in the popularization of science include a study of La planète Mars et ses conditions d’habitabilité [The Planet Mars and the Conditions of its Habitability] (1892; expanded edition 1909) which collated all observations of the planet made since 1636, including his own discovery (in 1876) of the seasonal changes affecting the dark regions—an observation as significant in its way as the “canali” publicized in 1877 by Schiaparelli. Even before the outbreak of the Great War of 1914-18, however, he had begun to concentrate his efforts increasingly on his studies in psychical research, holding regular séances at Juvisy in parallel with his astronomical observations. The famous Italian medium Eusapia Palladino was one of many who performed there, but he also entertained such visiting scientists as the American astronomer Percival Lowell.
After the war—which put an abrupt end to the continual reprinting of his early works—such new work as Flammarion published was almost all in the field of psychic research; the three volumes of La Mort et son mystère [Death and its Mystery] appeared between 1920 and 1922, and Les Maisons hantées, en marge de la mort et son mystère [Haunted Houses: On the Margin of Death and its Mystery] in 1923. Flammarion was deeply affected by the horrific casualties inflicted by the war—as was the English speculative writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who became his friend after developing a similar interest in spiritualism—and his observations at Juvisy became something of a refuge from the world after 1918. He died there on 4 June 1925. His second wife Gabrielle—whom he had married in 1919—continued his work thereafter, assuming responsibility for further updates of the Astronomie populaire, which was by then his only work that retained substantial popular interest.
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Although Camille Flammarion was not the first writer urged by a fervent missionary zeal to make the revelations of science available to ordinary readers, the sheer extravagance of his production—in terms of ambition as well as quantity—made him the figurehead of a growing movement of amateur and popular science. His journeywork as a cataloguer of stars, on the other hand, was soon absorbed into the ever-growing database of astronomical knowledge; like many another assiduous collector of data who never happened upon a particular discovery of charismatic quality or talismanic significance, he would soon have faded into obscurity had his name not been so widely advertised by his popularizations.
Much of Flammarion’s work for periodicals was hastily-composed, and many of his books give the impression of being first drafts. Although he continually revised his most popular works as they went through consecutive editions, he almost invariably did so by inserting extra text rather than by rewriting existing chapters, further emphasizing an unfortunate tendency to repetition and only rarely contriving any stylistic improvement. He was never content to employ a useful metaphor or narrative device only once; certain key images and arguments recur throughout his work, appearing again and again with relatively little modification. These tendencies do, however, go with the territory; if Flammarion’s career is compared with the heroic endeavors of such twentieth century popularizers of science as Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke one can easily find points of similarity in terms of method and idiosyncrasy as well as missionary enthusiasm.
Flammarion worked harder than any other man of his day to make the revelations of science accessible to ordinary readers, experimenting with every narrative device he could imagine in order to make his communications more effective. Although his reputation within the scientific community suffered, partly because of his success as a popularizer, partly because of his fondness for flights of wild fancy, and partly because of his unceasing attempts to apply the scientific method to studies in what would now be called the “paranormal”, he did more to prepare the way for public acceptance of the cosmic perspectives of modern science than any other nineteenth century writer. The scope of his imagination was inevitably restricted by the limitations of the scientific knowledge on which he drew (especially in biology), but no one else matched his imaginative avidity or audacity.
In doing everything that he could to make people aware of a vast universe potentially filled with habitable worlds, whose life-forms must—by virtue of being adapted to different physical circumstances—be radically different from those found on Earth, Flammarion anticipated much of the substance of modern science fiction and helped lay the groundwork for its development. He was, however, writing at a time when the literary method of modern science fiction had not yet been perfected; the fact that his primary interest was in the didactic potential of his work directed him away from the story-forms that were to be developed by Jules Verne and H. G. Wells towards such hybrid formats as the philosophical dialogue and the dream-journey, and towards such artificial devices as crediting hypothetical intelligence and a voice to inanimate objects or symbolic figures. For this reason, most of Flammarion’s adventures in speculative fiction seem to the modern reader to lie in an awkward grey area between fiction and non-fiction.
Although his early voyage extatique was his first experiment in romance, Flammarion first began to publish didactic fiction in popular magazines in the mid-1860s. Lumen is of particular interest to historians of science fiction not only because it comprises his first serious endeavor of this kind but also because it remained his boldest. It set out to dramatize the ideative content of two of his earliest works—La Pluralité des mondes habités and Dieu dans la nature [God in Nature] (1867)—but changed direction in mid-stream to take aboard a third: the translation he made in 1869 of Humphry Davy’s Consolations in Travel (1830). Lumen is a manifestly shaky start to the business of constructing didactic fictions, the various “récits” (actually dialogues) comprising it having been composed in three separate batches between 1866 and 1869, but once the text finally hit its stride, it enabled Flammarion to produce a new and truly spectacular vision of the universe, which laid the groundwork for an entire tradition of modern visionary fantasy.
Lumen’s first book publication was in the collection Récits de l’infini (1872; translated as Stories of Infinity, 1873), where it was supplemented by his next two endeavors of a similar kind: “Histoire d’une comète” (1869; tr. as “The History of a Comet”), which views episodes in the history of the Earth from the viewpoint of Halley’s Comet; and “Dans l’infini” (1872; tr. as “In Infinity”), which describes the decoding of a cryptic communication from the spirit world. Lumen was first issued separately in 1887, although it also continued to feature in new editions of Récits de l’infini, which had attained its thirteenth edition by 1892. The final version of the French text—which incorporated some new material composed for the 1897 English translation—was a separate edition that was reprinted several times more before 1914 (its final printing was advertised as “seventieth thousand”, presumably counting editions of Récits de l’infini as well as separate editions).
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The record of Lumen’s predecessors is comprehensively set out in the second part of Les Mondes imaginaires et les mondes réels. Thanks to this essay, we know the titles of almost all the relevant works that Flammarion had read before setting out to write Lumen in 1866, and can easily judge the extent of their impact on his imagination and influence on his method.
The first two chapters of this critical review are a survey of ideas contained in oriental and occidental mythologies, while the third covers the development of theological and mystical images of the universe in the first millennium of the Christian era. The fourth moves from Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica to the literary images of Dante, Ariosto and Rabelais, by way of the speculations of Nicholas of Cusa. Chapter Five describes the Copernican revolution, and the significance of such supporters thereof as Giordano Bruno, Montaigne and Galileo. It includes a description of John Kepler’s Somnium (1634), a visionary fantasy that attempts to make the Copernican system accessible to the imagination by describing cosmic events as an observer on the moon would see them—and which digresses, in its final pages, to address the question of what lunar life might be like, given the necessity of its adaptation to extraordinarily long days and nights.
The sixth and seventh chapters are devoted to imaginary voyages to the moon, including those of Francis Godwin and Cyrano de Bergerac, and such speculative essays as the 1640 supplement to John Wilkins’ Discovery of a World in the Moon (1638) and Pierre Borel’s Discours nouveau prouvant le pluralité des mondes (whose composition date Flammarion gives as 1647, although it was not published until 1657). From Cyrano’s bold (but unfortunately incomplete) Histoire des états et empires du soleil (1662) Flammarion moves on in the eighth chapter to more extravagant and wide-ranging cosmic voyages, including Athanasius Kircher’s Itinerarium Exstaticum (1656), but it is not until the ninth—entitled “Les grands voyages” that he reaches the crucial work that is now recognizable as the foundation-stone of the tradition of the popularization of science, and which provided the model for Lumen: Bernard de Fontenelle’s Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (1686; translated under various titles, the most accurate being Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds).
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The first edition of Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes consisted of five conversations, allegedly taking place on successive evenings between the first-person narrator and the Marquise de G***. Although a sixth evening was added in the second edition, its conversation served merely as a summary, and such revisions as were made as it passed through many other editions before Fontenelle’s death in 1757 were mere tinkering, as much for the purpose of stylistic adjustment as to incorporate a handful of new discoveries. The work is conspicuously light-hearted and deftly witty; unlike previous works of natural philosophy employing the dialogue as a form of discourse—most notably Galileo’s—it does not set up assertively opposed positions to dispute the truth, but establishes an innocent in search of both amusement and instruction, and an informant equally skilled in both.
The first conversation explains and justifies the Copernican model of the solar system. The second argues that the moon is a world not unlike the Earth, perhaps inhabited. The third prevaricates ingeniously, first taking back the suggestion that the moon might be inhabited by arguing that, because no clouds can be seen moving across the face of the moon, conditions on its surface must be very different from those supporting life on Earth, but then taking leave to wonder whether life-forms quite different from Earth might exist there, perhaps living beneath the surface.
From this specific case the narrator moves swiftly to the proposal that life in the universe might be infinitely various, and the fourth conversation elaborates this idea by wondering what life might be like on the other planets of the solar system. The fifth conversation introduces the notion that the stars are suns like ours, with their own families of planets, and wonders how various life might be beyond the solar system.
The fourth and fifth dialogues also go to some trouble to explain and elaborate the imaginative implications of René Descartes’ theory of vortices, which asserted that space is not really empty, because all aggregations of matter—from atoms to stars—are constantly revolving, establishing “etheric whirlpools” around themselves, by means of which they constantly interact with one another even though they may appear to observers to be separated by vast distances.
The content of Fontenelle’s light-hearted conversations seems quite innocuous to the modern reader, and even his educated contemporaries—those, at any rate, who had read John Wilkins (whose Discovery had been translated into French in 1655)—could not have been overly surprised by the casual proposition that the moon is a world that human beings will one day be able to visit, when the technology of flight is sufficiently improved. Fontenelle was, however, writing in a Catholic country, not long after Louis XIV’s revocation of the Edict of Nantes, which had withdrawn from Protestants the right to pursue their religion in their own way, forcing many of them to flee the ensuing persecution. In providing a direct challenge to the Church’s cosmology, the conversations were trespassing on dangerous ground—and in making their key ideas more easily accessible to ordinary people, with plausible and commonsensical supporting arguments, they provided an active and powerful antidote to blind faith.
Fontenelle’s previous works had included a dramatic comedy, La Comète (1681), inspired by the comet of 1680—whose display had been far more impressive than the one put on in 1682 by Halley’s comet—which had made much of the importance of comets in disproving the Aquinas-endorsed Aristotelian notion that the heavens consisted of a series of crystal spheres with the Earth at their centre. The Entretiens employs a similar lightness of tone and delicate wit to conceal its seriousness, but there could be no doubt that the narrator’s protestation that the Marquise and his readers need not believe the ideas featured in the conversations is a protective device.
In the same year as the Entretiens Fontenelle produced an Histoire des oracles [History of Oracles], in which the myths and legends of the ancients are clinically analyzed as a record of the gradual development of a better understanding of nature, whose central progressive thread is the disposal of supernatural explanations and belief in magic. Although he carefully omitted any specific commentary on the prophecies and miracles that were key items of Christian faith, it was open to any reader to place them in the same sequence and subject them to the same skeptical scrutiny. It was, however, the Entretiens that became a huge best-seller, widely translated and continually reprinted. It helped secure Fontenelle’s admission to the Académie Française, but he was not satisfied until he had also won admission to the Académie des Sciences, whose secretary he became in 1697. It was in that role that he produce a long series of éloges (eulogies) celebrating the work and achievements of every newly-deceased member of the Academy, collectively championing the notion that the scientific investigation of nature was not merely a solemn duty and a significant realm of heroic achievement, but also a source of great delight.
Fontenelle continued to produce éloges until he died, a mere month short of his hundredth birthday. He was not only Camille Flammarion’s great hero and chief inspiration but the principal influence on the subsequent development of science-based speculative thought and the methods used by its boldest pioneers. Like Flammarion, he is more-or-less forgotten today, but as in Flammarion’s case that is because he achieved what he set out to do in making once-problematic ideas seem so obviously true that no further dispute was necessary or possible.
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Flammarion’s chapter on “les grands voyages” in the Revue critique also includes descriptions of Gabriel Daniel’s Voyage du monde de Descartes (1692) and Christian Huygens’ Cosmotheoros (1698). The following chapter tracks the rich tradition of “voyages imaginaires” through the eighteenth century, including Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Ludvig Holberg’s Nils Klim (1741), Voltaire’s Micromégas (1752), and several less familiar items.
The next chapter begins with the observation that while imaginative travelers’ tales grew ever more numerous and extravagant in the 18th century, attempts to imagine what conditions on other worlds might actually became rather stagnant by virtue of the failure of observation to maintain a healthy flow of new data. Even so, Flammarion concedes that some valuable precedents were set by Emmanuel Swedenborg, Imannuel Kant and such flamboyant cosmic expeditions as Voyages de Mylord Céton dans les sept planètes [Journeys by Lord Seaton to the Seven Planets] (1765) by Marie-Anne de Roumier.
Roumier’s work, in particular, must be reckoned among the more important influences on Flammarion, because of the extensive use it makes of the notion that the other worlds of the solar system are arenas into which souls embodied in the Earth are routinely reincarnated, according to a definite scheme of moral propriety. Roumier’s Mars is a “temple de la Gloire” [temple of glory] where cadavers are heaped up in a kind of Hell; its inhabitants include many great generals and conquerors, including Oliver Cromwell and Attila the Hun. The sun itself is the realm of truly great men: philosophers. One solar country accommodates a company ranging from Thales, Anaxagoras and Pythagoras to Cassini, Descartes and Newton; another’s inhabitants range from Homer, Plato and Sophocles to Pascal, Montesquieu and la Rochefoucauld. Although the bodies of the violent retain their vulgar corporeality, the reincarnate philosophers are diaphanous; the thoughts in their heads and passions in their hearts can be clearly seen. Voyages de Mylord Céton was one of many works reprinted in a thirty-six-volume series of Voyages imaginaires produced in Paris by Charles Garnier in 1787-89.
The twelfth chapter of the Revue critique, which brings the story up to date by considering nineteenth century works, is oddly slight, giving only brief mention to numerous works of fiction and non-fiction. The most elaborate consideration is given to Edgar Poe’s “Unparalleled Adventure of one Hans Pfaall” (1835). Later editions of Les mondes imaginaires et les mondes réels added a thirteenth chapter to the second part, which listed and annotated interplanetary voyages and speculative works touching on the subject of life on other worlds published after 1862. This includes thirty-one titles published between 1863 and 1876, but Flammarion gave up trying to keep track thereafter, and no further titles were added to the editions of the book published in the 1890s (by which time the number of such editions was in the mid-twenties). Rather perversely, however, he never went to the bother of revising any of the earlier chapters. Given the unsatisfactory nature of the chapter on the early nineteenth century, this omission is regrettable, all the more especially because he subsequently became acquainted with a number of key works published before 1862.
Three such works, in particular, are relevant predecessors of Lumen: Nicolas Restif de la Bretonne’s Les Posthumes [Posthumous Correspondence] (1802; but written 1787-89); Humphry Davy’s Consolations in Travel; or, The Last Days of a Philosopher (1830); and Edgar Poe’s Eureka—An Essay on the Material and Spiritual Universe (1848). Les Posthumes is an epistolary piece in which the letters from a dead nobleman include an account of a cosmic voyage modeled on and perhaps satirizing Roumier’s. It is possible that Flammarion never read it, but he certainly read Consolations in Travel; or, The Last Days of a Philosopher, which impressed him so profoundly that he was moved to translate it into French; his translation appeared in 1869, the year in which he resumed work on Lumen after a two-year gap, and it was obviously fresh in his mind when he wrote the remainder of the text.
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Consolations in Travel consists of a series of six philosophical dialogues, whose hypothetical narrator is eventually given the name Philalethes (“love of truth”), although he remains unnamed in the first, which describes how he sat alone in the ruins of the Coliseum in Rome by the light of the full moon, ruminating on the transitory nature of human endeavor. These ruminations give rise to a vision in which a “superior intelligence”, which he elects to call the Genius, carries him away on an educational voyage through time and space.
The narrator first reviews the history of humankind, observing the abrupt transition—a literal re-creation—of the species from brutal wildness to the birth of civilization and the subsequent intellectual, social and technological progress of that civilization. The Genius then begins to explain the cosmic perspective into which the career of humankind needs to be set:
“Spiritual natures are eternal and indivisible, but their modes of being are as infinitely varied as the forms of matter. They have no relation to space, and, in their transitions, no dependence upon time, so that they can pass from one part of the universe to another by laws entirely independent of their motion. The quantity, or the number of spiritual essences, like the quantity or number of the atoms of the material world, are always the same; but their arrangements, like those of the materials which they are destined to guide or govern, are infinitely diversified; they are, in fact, parts more or less inferior of the infinite mind, and in the planetary systems, to one of which this globe you inhabit belongs, are in a state of probation, continually aiming at, and generally rising to a higher state of existence.”
The Genius tells the narrator that the spiritual essences that were once Socrates and Newton are “now in a higher and better state of planetary existence drinking intellectual light from a purer source” and conducts him to the planet Saturn, so that he might see its alien inhabitants:
“I saw moving on the surface below me immense masses, the forms of which I find it impossible to describe; they had systems for locomotion similar to those of the morse or sea-horse, but I saw with great surprise that they moved from place to place by six extremely thin membranes, which they used as wings. Their colours were varied and beautiful, but principally azure and rose-colour. I saw numerous convolutions of tubes, more analogous to the trunk of the elephant than anything else I can imagine, occupying what I supposed to be the upper parts of the body.”
The Genius explains that each of these trunk-like tubes “is an organ of peculiar motion or sensation” and that their superior sensory apparatus and intelligence have allowed the Saturnians to discover far more about the universe and its laws than humankind ever could, and to become far more virtuous. He reveals that the other planets in the solar system are inhabited by beings at various levels of intellectual and spiritual development, and that the “higher natures” that exist elsewhere in the universe make use of “finer and more ethereal kinds of matter” in their organization. After death, therefore, men—among whom scientists are those most ready for rapid advancement—will make heavenly progress by slow and measured degrees, through a series of extraterrestrial incarnations: “The universe is everywhere full of life, but the modes of this life are infinitely diversified, and yet every form of it must be enjoyed and known by every spiritual nature before the consummation of all things.”
The narrator is permitted to glimpse one other mode of existence, when he observes cometary “globes...composed of different kinds of flame and of different colours”, containing figures that remind him of human faces. Although they were once incarnate as men, these beings can no more remember their humanity than men can remember life in the womb. The only “sentiment or passion” that the spiritual essence or “monad” carries forward through all its successive metamorphoses is the love of knowledge, whose ultimate extrapolation is the love of God. If this love is misapplied to worldly ambition or the pursuit of oppressive power, the Genius explains, a spirit “sinks in the scale of existence...till its errors are corrected by painful discipline” but the narrator is not insulted by any vision of such subhuman modes of existence. The Genius concentrates on celebration of the progressive aspects of the post-human situation, insisting that the cause of progress is not merely the highest good but the source of the greatest joy of which any imaginable being is capable.
Flammarion must have thought this vision wonderful, but he must also have regretted that the five dialogues following the first did not extrapolate it further, preferring instead to remain on Earth to debate matters of more immediate and intimate concern to the dying scientist. Although the first three parts of Lumen seem to be taking up where Fontenelle left off in his carefully-structured and calculatedly casual representation of a universe filled with infinitely various forms of life, the fourth manifestly takes up where Davy left off in elaborating his cosmic scheme.
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As in Fontenelle’s Entretiens, the narrative voices that Flammarion employs in the dialogues constituting Lumen are not disputants but a willing teacher and his eager pupil; like the Latinate characters in Davy’s Consolations, however, they are as much symbols as actual human beings. Although the teacher, Lumen, gives an elaborate account of his life on Earth, his name declares that he is also light itself: the light of the stars, as observed and analyzed by astronomers. His interrogator, Quaerens, is partly Flammarion and partly his imagined reader, but his name signifies “Seeker” (of Knowledge).
It has to be admitted that the first dialogue, which labors long and hard to establish its elementary ideas, is rather slow, stodgy and repetitive. Flammarion—or perhaps his editor—seems to have been exceedingly doubtful as to the readiness and ability of his readers to take aboard the simplest corollaries of the limited velocity of light. The most interesting idea that the first dialogue raises—the principle that time and space are not absolute, but only exist relative to one another—is left stranded, and never properly developed. This is bound to seem disappointing to the modern reader, who might be inclined to wonder what Flammarion thought of Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity when it was published in 1905, and whether he cursed himself for not having extrapolated his own version of the idea more carefully and more boldly.
The second dialogue, whose central idea is that a viewpoint moving faster than light would be able to see events in reverse order, suffers from the same faults, partly because Flammarion did not take the trouble to remove from the collected version material that originally served to recap the basic thesis for the benefit of new readers. It is only at the end of the second dialogue that the author picks up the pace and begins to broaden his imaginative horizons to take in wider vistas in both time and space, but, once having done that, he fails to carry the extrapolations of the third dialogue very far forward. He might have cut it short when it had hardly got going because he simply ran out of steam, but it seems more probable that the editor of the periodical in which the serial version appeared aborted it—in which case, Flammarion’s decision to keep the first dialogue simple and to labor every point it made might have been wiser than it now seems.
The first three dialogues might be seen, collectively, as an extrapolation of a remark made by Fontenelle’s narrator near the beginning of the Entretiens: “All philosophy,” he tells the Marquise, “is based on two things only: curiosity and poor eyesight; if you had better eyesight you could see perfectly well whether or not these stars are solar systems, and if you were less curious, you wouldn’t care.... The trouble is, we want to know more than we can see.” Better telescopes and brand new spectroscopes had improved the sight of the naked eye considerably by 1867, but Flammarion was eager to demonstrate what a really powerful eye might see, and it was for that reason that he gifted Lumen’s spirit self with a power of vision that proved troublesome to explain and protect from criticism.
Although the slight gap between the first and second dialogues made no evident difference to Flammarion’s outlook, he seems to have emerged as a changed man from the two-year interval between the third and fourth. Perhaps the marked change of attitude and tone merely reflects the fact that he now felt free to express himself more freely and say what he really thought about such matters as the human tendency to war and French prevarication over the principles of republicanism, but it might be that he really had undergone a change of heart. Were it not for the testimony of the footnotes, a modern reader might easily wonder whether the crucial gap had been from 1869-71 rather than 1867-69, given that the Franco-Prussian War would have provided ample excuse for the hardening of his attitude to “great statesmen” and their warlike tendencies. It seems more likely, however, that he spent two frustrating years casting about for an editor willing to allow him to extrapolate his ideas as boldly as he wanted to—and that once having found one, he conceived an ardent ambition to make the most of the opportunity.
The crucial point in Lumen’s discourse arrives when he explains that the form of the human body results from its adaptation to a specific set of physical circumstances rather than divine design, and that sentient beings elsewhere in the universe are likely to be very different, by virtue of being adapted to a wide variety of environments. Fontenelle had made a similar point, but the arguments backing up his insistence that the life-forms on other worlds must be different from men had been conscientiously playful, giving a higher priority to the likelihood of divine versatility than the necessity of adaptation; his examples had been calculated to amuse, and none too specific. Lumen, on the other hand, also insists that physical forms are the products of slow and never-ending processes of evolution, and thus steps up his argument by another gear.
It is at this point that Davy’s example becomes more crucial than Fontenelle’s. Flammarion’s evolutionary theory is thoroughly Lamarckian, and its extrapolation from an earthly to a cosmic scale easily assimilates Davy’s insistence that evolution is moral as well as physical, so that souls are subject to their own evolutionary process as they move through successive incarnations. In moving on to this larger stage, however, Flammarion is determined to keep hold of the key element of the earlier dialogues: the insistence that human curiosity is confounded and confused by “poor eyesight”. He remains deeply preoccupied with the idea that our image of the universe is conditioned by the particular properties of our senses—and this is the notion that fuels his exploration of the multitudinous possibilities open to alien life.
The one significant respect in which Flammarion flatly refuses the influence of Fontenelle is that he considers Descartes’ theory of vortices hopelessly outdated. Even so, he holds to its essentials; like Descartes and Fontenelle, Flammarion clings to the idea that the emptiness of space is an illusion of poor eyesight, and that it is actually full of connections binding visible entities together. Today, alas, Flammarion’s talk of ondulations [undulations, or waves], and his contention that light might have hundreds or thousands of analogous “vibrations”. seem just as primitive as Fontenelle’s talk of Cartesian vortices—and yet, even though modern physicists have pared the number of fundamental forces to four, and have disposed of the outdated “luminiferous ether”, they have retained the notion that “empty” space is a seething sea of potential particles, replete with hidden and seemingly-unexpressed energies.
It is, perhaps, ironic that the most striking anticipations in Lumen have little to do with the testimony of light, and that they rest on the discredited foundation of Lamarck’s theory of evolution. The historian of science might dismiss them as mere folly, but to the historian of science fiction they are very important. Flammarion was the first writer to apply the theory of evolution to the wholesale construction of authentically alien beings, in so doing he established one of the ideative foundation stones on which modern science fiction is built. Although he continued to take an interest in hypothetical aliens, especially Martians, he never again exercised this kind of invention on the scale that he did in the fourth and fifth parts of Lumen; that is why Lumen remains a uniquely interesting work, and an astonishing product of its era.
We have grown so used to the idea of alien beings since H. G. Wells found a melodramatic role for them to play in The War of the Worlds (1898) that it is hard to imagine a time when the idea was new and wonderfully exotic. Kepler and Fontenelle deserve the credit for coming up with the idea that the life-forms existing on other planets must be very different from those of Earth because they would need to be adapted to very different physical circumstances, but Flammarion was the first man to attempt to extrapolate that notion to its hypothetical limit, and to fill that range with examples by the dozen.
Perhaps Flammarion decided subsequently that he had been far too ambitious in Lumen, in that he kept his imagination under a much tighter rein after 1869—and the modern reader can hardly help forming the impression that he could have been far more ambitious than he was—but the fact remains that the last two parts of Lumen represent an amazing feat of the imagination, which no one dared to emulate for more than a generation. Although the decay of Spiritualism and its associated researches has robbed Lumen of a significant pillar of the ideative foundations that Flammarion constructed to make the account plausible, modern readers should still be able to recognize that the fourth and fifth dialogues constitute a remarkable triumph of pioneering imaginative exploration.
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Perhaps Lumen would be even more original than it is had it not been for the fact that its ambition to produce a coherent vision of the new book of destiny that had been opened by the astronomical discoveries of the early nineteenth century had been anticipated by Edgar Poe. Flammarion had not had the opportunity to read Charles Baudelaire’s 1864 translation of Poe’s Eureka when he wrote Les Mondes imaginaires et les mondes réels in 1862, and probably had not yet got around to it when he wrote Lumen in 1866-69, but he certainly discovered some time thereafter the extent to which he had been anticipated. He must have been pleased to discover that the most adventurous element of Lumen—the attempt to imagine and map the potential range of alien life-forms—had not been part of Poe’s project.
In other works, Poe had also anticipated many of the other strategies that Flammarion was to try out in the service of the popularization of science, and had certainly deployed them to far better literary effect—but the real triumph of Eureka was that it construed certain aspects of the testimony of light more ingeniously and more accurately than Lumen, although the extent of its cleverness did not become obvious until the 1920s. Although it is the least read of Poe’s prose works, Eureka provides a magnificent example of the role that the creative imagination has to play in the interpretation of scientific data, and the extent to which the science-fictional imagination can assist the serious business of thought-experimentation. What it does not do, however, is to populate the universe it imagines in the way that the fourth and fifth dialogues of Lumen fill the universe with wondrously exotic life.
Poe was the first writer fully to grasp some of the key implications of nineteenth-century astronomy, particularly the realization that the stars were mortal—in consequence of which, whether it was infinite in space or not, the universe could not be infinite in time. Gravity, he therefore presumed, would determine the ultimate fate of the universe. Eureka imagines moons falling upon planets and planets into suns,
“…and the general result of this precipitation must be the gathering of the myriad now-existing stars of the firmament into an almost infinitely less number of almost infinitely superior spheres.... But all this will be merely a climactic magnificence foreboding the great end.... While undergoing consolidation, the clusters themselves, with a speed prodigiously accumulative, have been rushing towards their own general centre, and now, with a thousandfold electric velocity, commensurate only with their material grandeur and with the spiritual passion of their appetite for oneness, the majestic remnants of the tribe of stars flash, at length, into a common embrace.”
Having attained this climacteric, Poe reaches further still, suggesting that this achievement of unity surely ought to be followed by a new expansive Creation, part of an eternal sequence that he characterizes as the pulsation of the “Heart Divine”—which is, by some essential analogy, also the beating of our own hearts. Poe probably means to imply more than the obvious analogy here; he was influenced considerably by Blaise Pascal, whose famous dictum that “the heart has its reasons which reason knows not” refers to a kind of apprehension identical to the “intuition” which Poe cited as his guide in the speculative adventures of Eureka. Flammarion was eventually to borrow all of this, but he did not produce his own version until he wrote the second part of La Fin du monde [The End of the World].
Had it been more widely read, Eureka might have made as great an impact on the evolution of speculative fiction as Flammarion did, but there is no doubt that Lumen is the work that had the more profound impact on the development of European scientific romance. It is certainly arguable that other French writers who were heavily influenced by Lumen and its derivatives had little further influence outside their own country, but it is arguable too that this was unfortunate, and that the evolution of American science fiction might have benefited had the Wellsian image of the alien as a monstrous competitor in a cosmic struggle for existence in which only the fittest would survive been more adequately supplemented by a Flammarionesque image of the alien as a precious element in the infinite variety of life in the cosmos. Despite the overarching example of Wells, British scientific romance did benefit to some extent from that kind of example in the first half of the twentieth century, and was the better for it.
Flammarion continued to experiment with the formats he had road-tested in Lumen and “Histoire d’une comète” throughout his career. He wrote only one more-or-less orthodox novel, the bildungsroman Stella (1897), which draws extensively on Flammarion’s own experiences, although its eponymous protagonist is female. His most successful works of speculative fiction after Lumen were, however, Stella’s predecessors, Uranie (1889) and La Fin du monde (1894). Uranie was surprisingly successful in the short term (although it was not reprinted as frequently as Lumen) and its best-seller status caused three different translations to be made in the USA within a matter of months. Although advertised as a novel it is actually a portmanteau piece reminiscent of Récits de l’infini in more ways than one, comprising three pieces that must have been written separately and were presumably first published in periodicals.
The first part of Uranie is a voyage extatique in which the seventeen-year-old Flammarion, in his first year with Le Verrier at the Observatoire, is visited by the muse of astronomy, Uranie (Urania in English, although one of the three translations leaves the name in the French form). She takes him on a celestial voyage to view life on many other worlds, including a planet of the multiple star Gamma Andromedae, where androgynous dragonfly-like “humans” live in a symbiotic relationship with mobile plants. The catalogue of aliens included here is a straightforward extension of the one offered in the fourth dialogue of Lumen, and the entire piece is effectively a supplement to that dialogue.
The second part is also an appendix to Lumen, but to the pseudobiographical elements of the first three dialogues rather than the substance of the fourth. It describes the life and early afterlife of a friend of Flammarion’s, here called George Spero. The third is another voyage extatique in which Flammarion makes an unaccompanied dream-journey to Mars, which he explores in the company of two human-seeming Martians, who lecture him extensively on the follies and moral weaknesses of humankind—especially war. After awakening on Earth Flammarion is visited by Spero’s spirit just as the narrator of Lumen had been visited; Spero reveals that he was one of Flammarion’s guides on Mars, having been reincarnate there as a female, but explains that Flammarion had been deluded into seeing the Martians as humans rather than the six-limbed winged beings they really are. Uranie then reappears to restate and amplify some of the points made in the first dialogue of Lumen, summarizing them in a series of aphorisms.
La Fin du monde (1894) was less successful than Uranie, although it is considerably bolder in imaginative terms. It too is a portmanteau work, whose first part, “Au Vingtième siecle: les théories”, had appeared separately as a serial in the previous year. This first part begins as a cautionary tale about the panic that might be expected to follow the news that the Earth is about to be struck by a comet—a possibility that Flammarion had popularized in a number of magazine articles. The story veers away from the sensational, however, when it is revealed that the close encounter will only inflict light casualties, and a conference of savants meets to discuss alternative ways in which the world might end. The eventual glancing contact is spectacular, but the world survives.
The second part of the story, “Dans millions d’années”, consists of an ambitious future history of life on Earth: a counterpart to the past history contained in Le Monde avant le création d’homme and dramatized in the second dialogue of Lumen. The concluding section displays the influence of Eureka as clearly as the fourth part of Lumen had shown the influence of Davy:
“Mankind had passed by transmigration through the worlds to a new life with God, and freed from the burdens of matter, soared with endless progress in eternal light.
“The immense gaseous nebula, which absorbed all former worlds, thus transformed into vapor, began to turn upon itself. And in the zones of condensation of its primordial star-mist, new worlds were born, as heretofore the earth was.
“So a new universe began, whose genesis some future Moses and Laplace would tell, a new creation, extraterrestrial, superhuman, inexhaustible....”
Stella attempts to take up where Uranie had left off, but failed to please the same audience, presumably because its mildly satirical depiction of contemporary French society left something to be desired. Having been wooed away from the fashionable haut monde (where she mingles with such characters as M. Aimelafille [girl-lover] and M. Pièdevache [bovine charity]) by reading a book entitled L’affranchissement de la pensée par l’astronomie [The Liberation of Thought by Astronomy] and subsequent dialogues with Flammarionesque savants, Stella d’Ossian falls in love with the young astronomer Raphaël Dargilan. Her nearest relatives, the Comte and Comtesse de Noirmoutier (moutier is a colloquial term for monastery, so the name’s nearest English equivalent would probably be Blackfriars) do not approve, but she marries him anyway. Shortly afterwards Stella and Raphaël are fortunate enough to be caught up in a bizarre electrical storm, which leaves them both dead, but she contrives to get a posthumous massage back to Earth to reassure those left behind that he and she are deliriously happy, having made sufficient progress in their Earthly incarnation to be worthy of reincarnation on Mars.
Flammarion continued to produce shorter works in which factual material was dramatized by fictional devices until his production finally began to falter in the last years of his life. A few hybrid works produced in parallel to the books cited above can be found in Dans le ciel et sur la terre [In the Sky and on the Earth] (1886) and Clairs de lune [Moonlights] (1894). The last and best of several derivatives of Lumen is the longest item in Rêves étoilés [Starry Dreams] (1914), the voyage extatique “Voyage dans le ciel”, which can be found in an English translation in E. E. Fournier d’Albe’s translation of the collection, Dreams of an Astronomer (1923). Another equally-derivative piece, which appeared in the first French edition of Rêves étoilés but not in reprints or in the English translation of the book, and which appears to have been written in the wake of the success of Uranie, was translated into English as “A Celestial Love” in the December 1896 issue of The Arena.
Flammarion’s last collection consisting entirely of fiction—Rêves étoilés is a mixture of fiction and non-fiction leaning more toward the latter—was Contes philosophiques [Philosophical Tales] (1911), whose six items include “Conversation avec un Marsien”, a discourse on the folly of war in which the narrator dreams of meeting an inhabitant of Mars, and “Dialogue entre deux Académiciens et deux insects stercoraires”, in which two dung beetles offer an appropriately contrasted view to that of two academicians on the subject of the conditions necessary to allow life to flourish on other worlds. The only sense in which these last revisitations carry the relevant arguments further than Lumen is that they are here expressed with a subtler and more playful irony.
Such work as this was perceived, even in Flammarion’s own day, as something essentially second-rate, but there is a certain injustice in that judgment, and in the way that his name has been gradually erased from twentieth-century reference books. By 1945 the commentary on his career contained in the encyclopedic Nouveau Petit Larousse had been reduced to two seemingly dismissive words—séduisant vulgarisateur (seductive populariser)—but it is a description that he would surely have worn with pride, and rightly so.
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The writer who absorbed the imagery of Lumen and its successors most fully, and redeployed that imagery most productively, was the Belgian writer Joseph-Henri Boëx (1856-1940), who signed himself J. H. Rosny aîné (he and his younger brother Justin had shared the pseudonym J. H. Rosny between 1893 and 1907, and divided it in two when they went their separate ways). In the novelette “Les Xipéhuz” (1887), prehistoric men encounter and exterminate inorganic aliens of an exceedingly strange kind, which might well have been drawn from a Flammarionesque catalogue. Rosny adopted a Flammarionesque method as well as a Flammarionesque visionary daring in the “fictionalized essay” La Legénde sceptique [The Skeptical Lenged] (1889), which served as a foundation for much of his subsequernt speculative fiction, although nothing that he wrote subsequently reproduced the casual daring of its speculations about the “planetary physiology” uniting the universe into a single super-creature. Although “La Mort de la terre” [The Death of the Earth] (1910) owed more to La Fin du monde and Les Navigateurs de l’infini [Navigators of Space] (1925) seems to owe its direct inspiration to the final part of Uranie, they both assume the same kind of exotic evolutionary schema that Flammarion had sketched out, and to which Rosny had added his own higher level of organization. In the 1920s Rosny began a series of earnest philoshophical essays attempting to popularize the notion that the seemingly-empty space between the stars and within the atom could not really be empty, but must conain an infnity of parallel universes currently imperceptible by human senses—an imaginative leap of which Flammarion would surely have approved.
Both Rosny brothers served, under the chairmanship of Joris-Karl Huysmans, on the jury that awarded the very first Prix Goncourt, so it is not entirely surprising that the prize was won by a book of a kind that would have stood no chance of winning the same competition at a later date: the striking visionary fantasy Force ennemie [Hostile Force] (1903) by John-Antoine Nau (Eugène Torquet). Force ennemie employs Flammarion’s notion of serial reincarnation in a far less optimistic fashion, afflicting a contemporary human with a kind of demonic possession by a soul whose present incarnation on another world is a perpetual torment. The most extravagant extrapolation of the notion of interplanetary reincarnation can be found in the two “planetary romances” that comprise the “Martian epic” of Octave Joncquel and Théo Varlet, Les titans du ciel [The Titans of the Sky] (1921) and L’agonie de la terre [The Death-throes of the Earth] (1922; translated in an omnibus edition as The Martian Epic). Although the prefatory material to these melodramas acknowledges a debt to H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds, the aftermath of the interplanetary war described therein is a further crisis caused by the fact that the souls of the Martian casualties seek reincarnation on Earth, as they believe is their due.
To trace the imaginative legacy of Lumen outside France would be a highly speculative process, but the kinship with it of two important British scientific romances is worthy of comment, even if no direct influence can be proved. The cosmic vision contained in William Hope Hodgson’s The House on the Borderland (1905) is Flammarionesque while it deals with the fate of the Earth and the dying sun, but in the same way that the eponymous house is an allegory of the human mind, the whole universe is transformed by Hodgson’s narrator’s dream into an allegory of all that the mind must endure and contemplate. As with so many sons of clergymen who were converted to freethought by the discoveries of nineteenth century science, Hodgson took a gloomy view of the tacit moral order of the Christless universe, and his cosmic vision is far less optimistic than Flammarion’s. A similar element of gloom is present in the twentieth-century work that has most in common with Lumen, and might be regarded as a definitive updating of it: Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker (1937).
Whether Stapledon ever read Lumen or not, Star Maker sets out to do a very similar job in presenting an image of the universe revealed by early twentieth-century telescopes, and imagining the many kinds of life that might be contained within it. Like Flammarion’s cosmic schema, Stapledon’s is a product of design, which has a progressive process built into it at the most fundamental level, and, like Flammarion’s vision, Stapledon’s is haunted by the idea that humankind’s role in the cosmic plan is cursed by the self-destructive tendencies exhibited by a predilection for war. Although Stapledon cannot in the end consider the designer of his schema anything more than an incomplete artist, who still has a great deal to learn about the craft of creation, he still concedes that progress is being made, and hopes that it might one day be made more rapidly. Camille Flammarion—not to mention Lumen, George Spero, and Stella d’Ossian—would surely have approved wholeheartedly of the “two lights for guidance” offered to the reader in the final paragraph of Stapledon’s novel:
“The first, our little glowing atom of community, with all that it signifies. The second, the cold light of the stars, symbol of the hypercosmical reality, with its crystal ecstasy.”