Napoleon as Dynamite: Geoffroy's Napoléon Apocryphe and Science Fiction as Alternate History

Summary

Louis-Napoléon Geoffroy is usually credited as the author of the first ‘alternate history’. Karen Hellekson asserts confidently that ‘the alternate history did not exist in Western literature until 1836’, the ‘year that saw the first novel-length alternate history, Louis-Napoléon Geoffroy- Château's Napoléon et la conquête du monde 1812–32’ (Alternate History 13), and Paul K. Alkon describes Geoffroy's novel as ‘the first uchronia of alternate history’ (Origins of Futuristic Fiction 146). This belief connects with a larger thesis, to which many scholars of science fiction subscribe, that the late eighteenth-century flourish of political revolutions across Europe and America, into which we may bracket the effectively global Napoleonic wars to which they gave rise, reconfigured the logic of the genre; that, as Darko Suvin puts it, ‘around 1800, space loses its monopoly upon the location of estrangement and the alternative horizons shift from space to time’ (Positions and Suppositions in Science Fiction 89). Revolution, the argument runs, challenged the older preconceptions about history as such, undid perceived inevitabilities and opened the door to imagined alterities. Out of this rupture emerged, inter alia, alternate history as a new sub-genre, fully formed in Geoffroy's novel, as abruptly as Athena bursting from the forehead of Jove. It is an argument unlikely to be disturbed by the observation that, in fact, there were many earlierpublished novels with good claims to be alternate histories, going back to the middle of the seventeenth century.

So instead of trying to unseat Geoffroy from his position of absolute priority, this chapter will start with the observation that there is a reason why his name stands, conventionally, at the origin point of alternate history. Something about Geoffroy's particular approach proved influential in subsequent iterations of the mode, sometimes at secondhand; and this fact has had profound consequences for how history as such is portrayed in science fiction. And indeed we need not look far to see what this is: the ideological valence of his subject, the way Napoleon blasts through the obstacle of ‘actual’ history by sheer force of military, political, and persona charisma. Geoffroy was a man who hero-worshipped Napoleon (he changed his first name from Louis to Louis-Napoléon in homage, for instance), and the whole of his novel makes quite plain his investment in a ‘great man’ model of history.