African History Commons^™

Melancholic Mirages: Jules Verne's Vision Of A Saharan Sea, Peter Schulman

World Languages and Cultures Faculty Publications

L’invasion de la mer (The Invasion of the Sea), Verne’s last novel to be published during his lifetime, would appear to be a paradoxical vision of French colonial involvement as it chronicles the attempts of the French army occupying Tunisia and Algeria to capture Tuareg leaders bent on pushing the French out of the Maghreb on the one hand, and thwarting an environmentally disastrous French project on the other. L’Invasion de la mer (The Invasion of the Sea) is a complex, if not melancholic vision of the limits of French expansionism, however. The real-life French army geographer François-Elie Roudaire and …