Jules Verne

Jules Gabriel Verne was born on February 8, 1828, in Nantes, a busy port city on the Loire estuary in western France ^[1]. His father, Pierre Verne, was a lawyer who expected his eldest son to inherit the family practice. His mother, Sophie Allotte de la Fuye, came from a Nantes family with shipping and naval connections. The family lived for a time on the Ile Feydeau, an island district in the middle of the river where merchant vessels passed within sight of the house, and the traffic of masts and cargo left a lasting mark on the boy's imagination ^[2].

A story repeated by his early biographers holds that the young Verne tried to run away to sea as a cabin boy on a ship bound for the Indies, only to be caught by his father at a stop downriver. The tale was popularized by his niece Marguerite Allotte de la Fuye in her 1928 family biography, and later scholars have treated it with caution, but it captures the tension that defined his youth: a provincial legal career waiting for him on one side, and the open water on the other ^[2].

Verne studied at local schools in Nantes and performed well without distinction. In 1848, at the age of twenty, he moved to Paris to complete his law degree, arriving in a capital still unsettled by the revolution of that year ^[1]. He passed his examinations and earned his law license in 1851, but by then the theatre had already claimed most of his attention.

In Paris, Verne moved on the edges of literary society. Through family connections he was introduced into salons where he met Alexandre Dumas the elder, whose son, Alexandre Dumas fils, became a friend and early supporter ^[1]. With that encouragement Verne wrote for the stage. His one-act comedy Les Pailles rompues (The Broken Straws) was produced in 1850 at the Theatre Historique, the playhouse associated with the Dumas family ^[3]. He also worked for a period as secretary of the Theatre Lyrique, writing librettos and short plays that earned little money.

To support himself he sold short fiction to the family magazine Musee des familles, including early stories set in Mexico and the Arctic that already combined geography, travel, and technical detail ^[3]. His father pressed him to return to Nantes and take over the law office. Verne refused, and for most of the 1850s he lived on small earnings, supplementing his income after 1856 by working as a stockbroker's agent at the Paris Bourse, a job he held even after his first literary successes ^[1].

The decisive meeting of his career came in 1862, when he brought a manuscript about balloon exploration in Africa to the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel. Hetzel, an experienced editor who also published Victor Hugo and George Sand, saw commercial promise in Verne's blend of adventure narrative and popular science. He asked for revisions, then issued the book in January 1863 as Cinq semaines en ballon (Five Weeks in a Balloon). It sold strongly, and Hetzel signed Verne to a long-term contract requiring several volumes a year ^[4]. The partnership between author and publisher lasted until Hetzel's death in 1886 and shaped nearly everything Verne wrote.

Under contract to Hetzel, Verne produced the series that made him famous: the Voyages Extraordinaires, or Extraordinary Journeys, announced by the publisher as an attempt to summarize the geographical, geological, physical, and astronomical knowledge of the age in narrative form ^[4]. Many of the novels first appeared in installments in Hetzel's Magasin d'education et de recreation, a periodical aimed at families and young readers, before being collected in illustrated volumes that became fixtures of French households.

The run of books Verne published in his first decade with Hetzel is remarkable by any standard. Voyage au centre de la Terre (Journey to the Center of the Earth) appeared in 1864, followed by De la Terre a la Lune (From the Earth to the Moon) in 1865, a story of a projectile fired toward the Moon from Florida by a club of American gun makers ^[1]. Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas), serialized from 1869 to 1870, introduced Captain Nemo and the electric submarine Nautilus, one of the most durable inventions in all of fiction ^[5]. Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours (Around the World in Eighty Days), published in book form in 1873 after a serialization that had newspaper readers following Phileas Fogg's wager day by day, became his greatest popular success and was adapted into a spectacularly profitable stage play in 1874 ^[1].

Any account of Jules Verne achievements has to reckon with both volume and reach. He wrote more than sixty novels in the series, along with plays, short stories, and geographical works, including an ambitious illustrated history of exploration ^[4]. His books were translated quickly, if often badly, into English and many other languages, and UNESCO's Index Translationum has long ranked him among the two or three most translated individual authors in the world ^[6]. Readers looking for basic Jules Verne facts often start with his supposed predictions: electric submarines, a lunar launch from Florida, and news broadcast by machine all appear in his pages. Verne himself resisted the label of prophet, insisting that he extrapolated carefully from science already published in his lifetime, but the anticipations remain striking ^[5].

In May 1856 Verne traveled to Amiens for a friend's wedding and there met Honorine de Viane Morel, a widow of twenty-six with two young daughters. They married in Paris on January 10, 1857 ^[1]. Their only child together, Michel Verne, was born in 1861. Father and son had a stormy relationship for years: Michel's youthful debts and rebellions exasperated Verne, who at one point sent him on a disciplinary voyage to the Indies, though the two were reconciled in later life and Michel eventually edited and completed several of his father's manuscripts ^[2].

Success allowed Verne to indulge the passion of his childhood. He bought a series of boats, each named Saint-Michel, culminating in the steam yacht Saint-Michel III, and cruised the North Sea, the Baltic, and the Mediterranean ^[2]. In 1867 he crossed the Atlantic with his brother Paul aboard the Great Eastern, the enormous iron steamship, and visited New York and Niagara Falls, his only trip to the United States ^[1].

In 1871 the family settled in Amiens, his wife's home city, where Verne kept a disciplined routine of early morning writing and afternoon reading in the town's industrial society library. He entered municipal politics in 1888, winning election to the Amiens city council, and served for fifteen years with particular attention to theatres, fairs, and urban improvements ^[7]. In March 1886 he suffered a violent shock when his nephew Gaston, in a state of mental disturbance, shot him in the leg outside his own front door. The wound never fully healed and left him lame for the rest of his life ^[2].

The late 1880s marked a turn in Verne's circumstances and in his fiction. The shooting, the death of Hetzel a week later in 1886, and the death of his mother in 1887 came in close succession, and biographers generally read the novels that followed as darker in tone ^[2]. Books such as Sans dessus dessous (The Purchase of the North Pole, 1889) treated engineers and their schemes with irony rather than admiration, and Propeller Island (1895) turned a mobile artificial island into a satire of wealth and national rivalry ^[5].

Verne kept writing at a steady pace even as his health declined. Diabetes progressively weakened him and dimmed his sight, and cataracts made reading difficult, yet he continued to deliver manuscripts to Hetzel's son, who had taken over the publishing house ^[1]. He also kept ahead of his contract, leaving a stock of completed and partially completed novels in his desk.

He died at his home on the boulevard Longueville in Amiens on March 24, 1905, at the age of seventy-seven, with his family around him ^[1]. His funeral drew thousands of mourners. After his death, Michel Verne prepared the remaining manuscripts for publication, revising some of them heavily; scholars in the twentieth century later recovered and published several of the original versions, including the long-suppressed early novel Paris in the Twentieth Century, which finally appeared in 1994 ^[8].

Anyone asking who was Jules Verne will find two different reputations, and the gap between them has shaped a century of criticism. In France he came to be studied as a serious literary craftsman, admired by writers from Raymond Roussel to the surrealists, and modern French editions treat his texts with scholarly care ^[5]. In the English-speaking world he was long filed under children's adventure, a judgment fed by Victorian translations that cut passages, mangled the science, and flattened his prose. Since the 1960s, new translations and academic studies have worked to restore what those versions lost ^[6].

His influence on later science fiction is difficult to overstate. Along with H. G. Wells, he is routinely named a founder of the genre, and generations of scientists, engineers, and explorers cited him as an early inspiration. Submariners, rocket pioneers, and polar travelers alike grew up on his voyages, and his name has been attached to everything from a European Space Agency cargo spacecraft, the Jules Verne ATV launched in 2008, to craters on the far side of the Moon ^[6].

The cities of his life maintain his memory. Amiens preserves his longtime home as the Maison de Jules Verne, a museum restored in 2006, and holds his grave in the Cimetiere de la Madeleine beneath a sculpture showing the author rising from the tomb ^[7]. Nantes operates its own Jules Verne museum overlooking the Loire. Film and television have returned to his plots continually, from Georges Melies's 1902 trip to the Moon onward, including the Academy Award winning 1956 production of Around the World in 80 Days ^[1]. Any full Jules Verne biography ends where his books do, with movement: more than a hundred years after his death, his readers are still circling the globe, diving under it, and aiming past it.