Verne Senior and Junior and Nation Building in En Magellanie and Les Naufragés du Jonathan

Comparing En Magellanie, a novel written by Jules Verne, with Les Naufragés du Jonathan, a rewriting by his son Michel, reveals significant political and economic differences. If the plots seem identical, the happy insularity imagined in 1897 by the father is dramatized and darkened by gesturing, in 1909, toward commercial competition and the violence of the external world, as if utopian dreaming had come up in the meantime against the rough realities of history.