Merveilleux-scientifique

With brain swaps and death rays, a little-known French sci-fi genre explored science’s dark possibilities a century ago

https://aeon.co/essays/how-french-merveilleux-scientifique-fiction-reframed-reality





When Nicolas Vermont entered the greenhouse, he would make a gruesome discovery. It was the early 20th century in rural France, and Nicolas was visiting his uncle – a scientist and surgeon called Dr Frédéric Lerne – after 15 years apart. However, he had soon grown suspicious about his uncle’s odd behaviour, so for answers had decided to explore the grounds of his relative’s estate late at night. Inside a greenhouse in the garden, Nicolas discovered that Dr Lerne had been conducting disturbing scientific experiments. At first, he saw plants grafted onto one another: a cactus growing a geranium flower, and an oak tree sprouting cherries and walnuts. His uneasy curiosity, though, soon turned to dread. ‘It was then that I touched the hairy plant. Having felt the two treated leaves, so like ears, I felt them warm and quivering,’ he recalled. Grafted onto the stem were the parts of an animal: the ears of a dead rabbit. ‘My hand, clenched with repugnance, shook off the memory of the contact as it would have shaken off some hideous spider.’ [Quotations from published English-language editions translated by Brian Stapleford; the rest are the author’s own.]

Dr Lerne was in fact an impostor. His assistant Otto Klotz had stolen the true uncle’s body through a brain swap, and would not hesitate to punish Nicolas for his ill-placed curiosity… by transplanting his consciousness into the body of a bull. Le docteur Lerne, sous-dieu (1908), or ‘Dr Lerne, Demi-God’, was a celebrated novel by Maurice Renard, hailed by the poet Guillaume Apollinaire as a ‘subdivine novel of metamorphoses’. Published in English as New Bodies for Old, it heralded the dawn of a new French literary genre – one that ventured boldly into the uncertain and the unknown. Renard called it ‘merveilleux-scientifique’ (‘scientific-marvellous’) and its ambition was to help the reader speculate on what could be, and on what exists beyond the reach of our senses, rather than what will be. In other words, allowing a better understanding of what Renard poetically called ‘the imminent threats of the possible’. As he wrote in 1914, the goal was to ‘patrol the margins of certainty, not to acquire knowledge of the future, but to gain a greater understanding of the present’.

Rejecting the ‘scientific adventure’ storytelling of the celebrated French sci-fi writer Jules Verne – who had died only three years before the publication of Le docteur Lerne, sous-dieu – the merveilleux-scientifique genre was grounded in plausibility and the scientific method. According to Renard, only one physical, chemical or biological law may be altered when telling a story. This strict discipline, he argued, is what lent the genre its power to sharpen the reader’s mind, by offering a wholly original kind of thought experiment. For example, Renard modelled Dr Lerne on the very real surgeon and biologist Alexis Carrel, who had experimented with surgical grafts, transplants and animal tissues… to the point that he even grafted a dog’s severed head on another living animal (the attempt failed). Following in his footsteps, Renard imagines an exchange of brains – and personalities.



Leafing through the merveilleux-scientifique novels today allows for a dual rediscovery: firstly, it uncovers the previously unrecognised richness of Belle Époque scientific fiction, which did not perish with the works of Verne. The stories take in journeys to Mars, solar cataclysms, reading of auras, psychic control, weighing of souls, death rays, alien invasions, even strolls among the infinitesimally small. But exploring the genre also offers insights into the cultural history of the era, marked by a significant permeability between science and pseudo-science. Reading this work, we can learn a lot about the aspirations, fears and beliefs of early 20th-century Europe. Perhaps more importantly, the lesser-known stories of merveilleux-scientifique allow us to question the official history of science fiction – a term that did not even exist in France at the time as it as it would be popularised in English by Hugo Gernsback only in the 1920s. Whereas today it is sci-fi writers like Jules Verne or H G Wells who are most remembered from this period, the merveilleux-scientifique novels were just as imaginative and visionary, but often far more provocative, daring and strange.

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