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Facing the Flag

Facing the Flag
HetzelFaceAuDrapeau.jpg
Author Jules Verne
Original title Face au drapeau
Translator Cashel Hoey
Illustrator Léon Benett
Country France
Language French
Series The Extraordinary Voyages #42
Genre Adventure novel
Publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel
Publication date
1896
Published in English
1897
Media type Print (Hardback)
Preceded by Propeller Island
Followed by Clovis Dardentor

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 (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.

Thomas Roch, a brilliant French inventor, has designed the Fulgurator, a weapon so powerful that "the state which acquired it would become absolute master of earth and ocean." However, unable to sell his unproven idea to France or any other government, Roch begins to lose his sanity, becoming bitter, megalomaniacal and paranoid. The United States Government reacts by tucking him away at a luxurious asylum in New Bern, North Carolina, where he is visited by one "Count d'Artigas"—actually Ker Karraje, a notorious pirate of Malagasy origin. His heterogeneous crew is drawn from "escaped convicts, military and naval deserters, and the scum of Europe."

Karraje and his crew lead double lives. Karraje goes around openly, under the alias of "Count d'Artigas", a pleasure loving, slightly eccentric but eminently respectable member of nobility. He is a regular visitor to the ports of the East Coast aboard his schooner Ebba. To outward appearances, Ebba has no other means of propulsion than its sails, but in fact it is pulled by an underwater tug. By this means, Karraje and his crew can pull up to becalmed sailing vessels without raising suspicion and board them without warning. They then rob and massacre the crews, scuttling the ships, adding to the statistics of "unexplained disappearances".


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