Davanti alla bandiera

This essay is inspired by a minor Verne’s novel, Face au drapeau (1896), in order to analyze its implicit symbolic-political dimension. The story narrated, in surprisingly modern terms, places the problem of the absolute weapon, that overcomes any available defenses and overturns the traditional logic of warfare. According to the novel, science, in alliance with criminal racketeering, tramples the national political dimension, in the direction of a complete destruction that would make impossible the war. Opposingly to this narrative development, Verne proposes the symbolic value of the flag, as a catalyst of national identities and, in the spirit of patriotic idealism, implicitly enhances the war as a supreme consecration of political affiliations. A dual “prophecy”, therefore: the historical dimension opened by atomic weapons is put forward about fifty years, and the logic that will bring to the First World War is put forward precisely twenty years.