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Facing the Flag
Facing the Flag
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Facing the Flag or For the Flag (French: Face au drapeau) is an 1896 patriotic novel by Jules Verne. The book is part of the Voyages Extraordinaires (The Extraordinary Voyages) series.
Like The Begum's Millions, which Verne published in 1879, it has the theme of France and the entire world threatened by a super-weapon (what would now be called a weapon of mass destruction) with the threat finally overcome through the force of French patriotism.
It can be considered one of the first books dealing with problems which were to become paramount half a century after its publication in World War II and the Cold War: brilliant scientists discovering new weapons of great destructive power, whose full utilization might literally destroy the world; the competition between Superpowers to obtain overwhelming stockpiles of such weapons; and, efforts of other nations to join the nuclear club.
Plot summary
Thomas Roch is a genius French inventor, who came up with the idea of the Fulgurator, a weapon "whose action upon the atmospheric strata was so terrific that any construction, warship or floating battery, within a zone of twelve thousand square yards, would be blown to atoms", so that "the state which acquired it would become absolute master of earth and ocean".
For all of the above, however, there is nothing to show but Roch's own word, backed by no experimental proof whatever, and he demands to have huge sums delivered to him before making any details known and certainly before any tests were made of the weapon's feasibility. While Roch is not an unknown, having had some earlier inventions to his credit, no official could justify spending such sums to buy a pig in a poke.
Upon the failure of his negotiations with his own government, Roch "forgets what could never be forgotten" - i.e., France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 and the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, a wound still deeply nursed by many French in their mindset of Revanchism - and crosses the border to offer his weapon at Berlin. But he meets no greater success there than in Paris, nor are the British and Americans which he later tries any more amendable.
In the process, Roch increasingly loses his sanity, becoming - as depicted by Verne - more and more bitter, megalomaniac and paranoid - until the US Government finally tucks him away at a luxurious asylum in New Bern, North Carolina, where he had spent eighteen months at the start of the book and looks likely to spend the rest of his life. ---From Wikipedia
Like The Begum's Millions, which Verne published in 1879, it has the theme of France and the entire world threatened by a super-weapon (what would now be called a weapon of mass destruction) with the threat finally overcome through the force of French patriotism.
It can be considered one of the first books dealing with problems which were to become paramount half a century after its publication in World War II and the Cold War: brilliant scientists discovering new weapons of great destructive power, whose full utilization might literally destroy the world; the competition between Superpowers to obtain overwhelming stockpiles of such weapons; and, efforts of other nations to join the nuclear club.
Plot summary
Thomas Roch is a genius French inventor, who came up with the idea of the Fulgurator, a weapon "whose action upon the atmospheric strata was so terrific that any construction, warship or floating battery, within a zone of twelve thousand square yards, would be blown to atoms", so that "the state which acquired it would become absolute master of earth and ocean".
For all of the above, however, there is nothing to show but Roch's own word, backed by no experimental proof whatever, and he demands to have huge sums delivered to him before making any details known and certainly before any tests were made of the weapon's feasibility. While Roch is not an unknown, having had some earlier inventions to his credit, no official could justify spending such sums to buy a pig in a poke.
Upon the failure of his negotiations with his own government, Roch "forgets what could never be forgotten" - i.e., France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 and the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, a wound still deeply nursed by many French in their mindset of Revanchism - and crosses the border to offer his weapon at Berlin. But he meets no greater success there than in Paris, nor are the British and Americans which he later tries any more amendable.
In the process, Roch increasingly loses his sanity, becoming - as depicted by Verne - more and more bitter, megalomaniac and paranoid - until the US Government finally tucks him away at a luxurious asylum in New Bern, North Carolina, where he had spent eighteen months at the start of the book and looks likely to spend the rest of his life. ---From Wikipedia
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