To Hate Shepherds: Letter to an American Friend about a Jules Verne Story (or Why Technological Objects Sometimes Complicate Our Lives)

Are there any shepherds left in America? I suppose you have replaced them with computers or robots. It’s less expensive and cleaner. Jules Verne would have liked to live in your country—he was generous with his invectives against the race of sheepherders in his novel Le Château des Carpathes (1892). You know the book, and I’m sure you recall a passage that I personally find very striking. At first, the tone is rather flattering: “If we approach a shepherd on his idealistic side, he might easily be imagined a dreamy, contemplative being: he converses with the planets, he consults the stars, he reads the skies” (9). The next sentence undoes this portrait. The shepherd is not like that, Jules Verne adds, he is less than that, and one must set the record straight: “In reality he is generally a stupid ignorant brute” (9). In the style of hitting the enemy where it hurts, it would be hard to do better. Jules Verne does not like shepherds, a group that clearly annoys him and gets under his skin. He immediately proceeds to criticize the leading names in the bucolic genre, accusing them of idealism and of a lack of realism, something George Sand had done before him in her preface to François le Champi (1864).¹ But this makes his remarks no less violent. One must add, of course, that the majority of shepherds were illiterate at the end of the nineteenth century. They did not therefore constitute for the author of the Voyages extraordinaires what we would call today a reading public… But let’s not linger on this point.