Of Fact, Fiction, and Flammarions

This post will lap around the edges of carnival, though nothing really connects its constituent parts beyond a name.

February 26 was the birthday of the intriguing French figure Camille Flammarion (1842-1925), a man of that innocent time when science and pseudo-science could pleasantly live side by side in the human breast without clash or contradiction. On the one hand, Flammarion was the founder in 1887 of the Société astronomique de France. He’d been a hard empiricist for nearly two decades by that point, having begun a career as a computer (tabulator of data) at the Paris Observatory. Many legitimate astronomical discoveries were his and you will find him memorialized in maps of the lunar surface and the asteroid belt.

But Flammarion’s imagination, and the times he lived in, also led him into speculative directions, areas we would now consider science fiction, fantasy, parapsychology, and esoteric religion. He was interested in life on other planets, on natural disasters wrought by comets, the transmigration of the human soul, mediumship, automatic writing, telepathy, hauntings, out-of-body experiences, and so forth. He was both a Theosophist and a close confidante of Allan Kardec, founder of Spiritism. It must be added that Flammarion’s investigations adhered to the scientific method, though his conclusions were sometimes too generous in the direction of credulity.

His younger brother Ernest Flammarion (1846–1936), founded the publishing house Groupe Flammarion. Camille himself wrote about 50 books, including Popular Astronomy (1880, his best selling work), The End of the World (an 1893 novel later made into a film by Abel Gance), and Haunted Houses (1924), which was debunked by Harry Houdini. Flammarion was trained in the art of wood cutting in his youth, which is why some people believe he created the image above, the famous (and oft reproduced) Flammarion Engraving, first used in his 1888 book L’atmosphère: météorologie populaire. The image depicts a man thrusting his head through the firmament of reality for a glimpse at what lies beyond. Like ya do.

Anyway, I’m quite certain I found my way to Flammarion through curiosity about this:

The Great Flamarion (1945) was directed by Anthony Mann, prior to his western period. It stars Erich von Stroheim as a sadistic vaudeville sharpshooter at the apex of an unhappy triangle with his two assistants, played by Mary Beth Hughes and Dan Duryea. It begins and ends in murder. The story was penned by the fascinating Austrian writer Vicki Baum, who also gave us Grand Hotel. She spells the name differently, but I can’t help wondering if it was inspired by the spacey astronomer. (The name has also always suggested fire-eating to me). As carny noir, The Great Flamarion would make a nice pairing with the original Nightmare Alley, or else that other weird Von Stroheim picture The Great Gabbo (1929) in which he plays a demented ventriloquist.

For more on show biz history, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous.