Cyrano de Bergerac: the original flat-earther

For Cyrano de Bergerac, the space race began in 1657. The 17th Century French novelist, playwright and duelist – and lovelorn inspiration for Edmond Rostand’s play of the same name, now adapted by Joe Wright in his new film Cyrano – made two attempts to slip the surly bonds of earth. The first was a damp squib. Strapping bottles of fresh dew to his body, he launched himself skyward only to crash back to earth. But his second try got lift-off: his homemade flying machine souped up with rockets, Cyrano blasted his way to the moon.

His account, of course, was a tall tale. In fact, The Other World: Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon, and its companion book, The States and Empires of the Sun, are some of the earliest works of science-fiction. As with later writers, such as Jonathan Swift and Aldous Huxley, the fiercely free-thinking Cyrano used the topsy-turvy world of speculative literature to interrogate the fallacies of his own society. So in a dangerous satire of the Catholic Inquisition, the narrator is put on trial by a court of birds for the crime of being human.

He also encounters a nobleman who wears a penis rather than a sword at his side: the original “make love, not war”. And, most outrageously, Cyrano sends up muzzy-headed Christine doctrine by proposing, in line with St Augustine, that “the earth was flat as a stove lid and that it floated on water like half a sliced orange”.

“You can’t say he promulgated flat-earth theory, because in the era Cyrano was writing, no one believed in it,” explains Ishbel Addyman, author of Cyrano: The Life and Legend of Cyrano de Bergerac. “I think the thing which really inspired him was to challenge Biblical authority, because in every area of his life he resisted and challenged authority.”

For Cyrano, flat-earthism was a useful stick with which to poke Church officialdom in the eye. Yet flat-earth theory has a long, inglorious history. It’s the ugly sibling of scientific progress; the equal and opposite reaction to enlightenment. After all, no serious thinkers have made the case that the earth was flat since at least 240BC, when the Greek mathematician Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the globe as between 24,000-29,000 miles. (It is actually about 24,900 around the equator.) Why, then, has flat-earthism endured?

“The absolutely huge majority of literate medieval people believed [the earth] to be round,” says Jeffrey Burton Russell, an expert on superstition and flat-earth theory. “So the really interesting question is when and why have modern people falsely accused medieval thinkers of believing in a flat earth, when upwards of 90 per cent did not?”

Russell argues the thrill of condescension has played a part. The often-repeated myth that Christopher Columbus feared he would sail off the edge of the world is “a good story to convince kids that they are more intelligent than people in the past”. (Columbus’s mistake was actually to believe the earth is much smaller than it is.) This explains, too, why flat-earthism appears in Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason (1794), a trenchant critique of Christian superstition. And why it crops up in Washington Irving’s fictionalised, four-volume biography of Columbus, published in 1828. Flat-earthism, in other words, was simply too juicy a story to give up.

But, as in Cyrano’s time, it was also a bellwether of intellectual unease. As society’s fundamental understandings shift, flat-earthism reliably rears its oblong head. This was especially the case during the mid-Victorian heyday of discovery. If the theory of evolution had Charles Darwin, then flat-earthism had an equally zealous champion in Samuel Rowbotham. A utopian socialist and quack doctor – he narrowly avoided prosecution for poisoning one of his 15 children with a phosphorus cure – Rowbotham grew up among the vast horizons of the Cambridgeshire fens.

And through a series of idiosyncratic experiments on its rivers, he grew convinced that the earth was flat. He began preaching the good news, charging punters a healthy fee to hear him expound the theory of “Zetetic Astronomy” – from the Greek zētētikos, “to enquire” – which argued that physical senses were more accurate than mathematical calculations. Rowbotham was a successful evangelist and his lectures attracted large crowds, especially after the publication of his succinctly-titled 1864 book The Earth is Not a Globe.

But the reputation of the Universal Zetetic Society – later called The Flat Earth Society – was dented when Alfred Russel Wallace, a naturalist and colleague of Darwin, wagered John Hampden, one of Rowbotham’s followers, ￡500 to successfully repeat Rowbotham’s observations. He couldn’t. The so-called “Bedford experiments” were a dud. But that didn’t stop Hampden trying to sue Wallace for libel and, when that failed, threatening to kill him. Though the Flat Earth Society limped on until 2001, when its president Charles Kenneth Johnson died, by the 21st Century, history’s most infamous alternate cosmology looked in terminal decline.

No longer. Ricocheting through the cloistered ecosystems of the internet, flat-earthism is back. A 2018 YouGov survey of more than 8,000 American adults suggested that one in six are not entirely certain the earth is round. It even has its contemporary Rowbothams: in 2016, the American rapper B.o.B took on celebrity astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson in a Twitter spat about the curvature of the earth. It culminated in B.o.B releasing a three-minute diss track, Flatline. Undaunted, Tyson shot back with his own – slightly less catchy – single, Flat to Fact.

“Flat-earthism is like the history of science turned on its head,” argues Christine Garwood, author of Flat Earth. “It’s the ultimate conspiracy theory – it gets to the heart of human psychology and why people believe the things they do. There are echoes of it everywhere in the anti-vax, anti-science movements. It’s about how do you gain authority and knowledge, and who do you trust?”

One of today’s most prominent modern flat-earthers is YouTuber Mark Sargent. Before the platform began flagging his output as conspiracism, his channel, Flat Earth Clues, regularly attracted millions of views; and he was the star of Daniel J Clark’s 2018 Netflix investigation of the modern flat earth community, Behind the Curve. Sergeant is dismissive of the technophobic “fuddy-duddy” Flat Earth Society. His slickly charismatic videos – whatever else he is, Sargent is quite the talker – expound a theory of Truman Show-style “snow globe earth”, with the planet a flat disc encircled by an impenetrable dome of glass. The 1960s rocket tests, he claims, were an attempt to punch through this barrier.

“I got into flat-earthism in 2014 because I had done just about every other conspiracy and I was bored,” he tells me over Zoom. “I wanted real solid answers to things, and there were too many loose ends. Flat earthism means that we’re not just on this tiny rock flying through space, and your life means nothing. If you were 90 per cent into God, then this takes you to 97 per cent.”

A distance of four centuries separates Cyrano and Sargent. Yet it’s easy to imagine what Cyrano, the scourge of credulous and woolly thinking, would have made of the YouTuber’s claims. Yet perhaps they are not so far apart. After all, in his life and work Cyrano celebrated the potency of human reasoning and discovery – as well as the notion that, far from being the measure of all things, humanity is only a bit-part player in an universe of almost infinite complexity and grandeur.

Or as Sargent puts it: “Whoever built this place, it wasn’t us.”

Cyrano is in cinemas now