The Conspirators of Peace – Economic Policy

In “The Human Comedy”, Balzac imagines with The History of the Thirteen – the segment comprising three short novels: Ferragus, The Girl with the Golden Eyes and The Duchess of Langeais – a conspiracy for good. Consider a secret society, half Freemasonry, half Mafia brotherhood, which instead of imposing itself by force and sowing terror, comes to the aid of the weakest and redresses injustices, but remaining hidden in the shadows.
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In “The Human Comedy”, Balzac imagines with The History of the Thirteen – the segment comprising three short novels: Ferragus, The Girl with the Golden Eyes and The Duchess of Langeais – a conspiracy for good. Consider a secret society, half Freemasonry, half Mafia brotherhood, which instead of imposing itself by force and sowing terror, comes to the aid of the weakest and redresses injustices, but remaining hidden in the shadows. Jean-Baptiste Malet, journalist and winner of the 2018 Albert London Prize for his essay L’Empire de l’or rouge, on the globalized tomato industry, has set out to discover another conspiracy for good. But unlike Balzac, his is not fictitious. La Capitale de l’Humanité (Editions Bouquins) tells the little-known story of the World Center for Communication, a crazy project of an ideal city imagined at the dawn of the 20th century by two American artists Olivia Cushing, playwright, and Hendrik Andersen, sculptor , joined by French architect Ernest Hébrard. The three have a crazy idea: to erect a world capital where all the rays of scientific, intellectual, physical and spiritual life would converge, an ideal city inspired by the great designs of the past destined to become the center of the world and the radiant heart of a peace called to be universal and perpetual. Just that! A utopia to which the protagonists will devote all their beautiful energy, from Rome to New York or Washington via Paris, Salonika and Belgium for more than a decade. However, this megalomaniacal project will not remain a confidential affair, confined to their workshops and their waking dreams. Conducting tireless lobbying, the three idealists will meet heads of state and monarchs from all over the world, they will be supported by a certain number of them but also by philosophers and scientists – such as Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine who are developing same time their Universal Bibliographical Directory, the famous “paper Google” visible at the Mundaneum in Mons – or philanthropic billionaires. Through the journey of these utopians, Jean-Baptiste Malet offers us a dizzying dive into this turbulent beginning of the century where the future – namely our present – is written with passion and fury. The pacifist circles, active as far as Wall Street, the rationalists and the enlightened people, carried this dream of an ideal city to the point that in 1913 it almost seemed to be on the verge of being realized… But a year later, it is the warmongering fever that will set the world ablaze, the start of the war pushing back the project. Magnificently documented and illustrated, the new book by Jean-Baptiste Malet, of impressive erudition, gives us a scalpel autopsy of a utopia in the tormented years preceding the First World War. It devours like a novel as the characters who animate it are romantic – and even terribly romantic – where it is a question of eternal love and fidelity beyond the grave. Beyond that, this book offers a fascinating meditation on the cruel fate of humanist utopias that the very demand for purity renders inoperative, transforming them into dystopias. Cruel irony, the humanist dream cherished by Olivia Cushing and Hendrik Andersen will indeed serve, after the war, as a model for Mussolini for his fascist Rome, embodied by the EUR district in view of the Universal Exhibition of 1942. Another irony, we can still hear the echoes of it lingering in the humanist speeches of the masters of Silicon Valley. But now devoid of any trace of romanticism…