Jules Verne

• 1. Introduction

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  Jules Verne has been the second most-translated author in the world since 1979, ranking below Agatha Christie and above William Shakespeare. That is a strange place for a man whose English readers, for over a century, were handed something other than what he wrote. The French novelist, poet, and playwright was born on the 8th of February 1828 and died on the 24th of March 1905. Yet in the Anglosphere he was long filed away as a writer of children's books or genre fiction. In France and across most of Europe, the same man shaped the literary avant-garde and surrealism. How does one author become two so different reputations? Why did the country of his birth take decades to study him seriously? And what did Verne himself, who once said his great regret was never taking a place in French literature, make of all this? The answers run through a publisher's office, a faithless translation, a moon voyage, and a series of novels that tried to depict the entire earth.

• 2. Boyhood On The Loire

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  On the 8th of February 1828, Verne was born on Île Feydeau, a small artificial island on the river Loire within the town of Nantes. The house belonged to his maternal grandmother, Dame Sophie Marie Adélaïde Julienne Allotte de La Fuÿe. His father, Pierre Verne, was an avoué originally from Provins. His mother, Sophie, came from a Nantes family of navigators and shipowners, of distant Scottish descent.

  In 1834, at the age of six, Verne was sent to a boarding school run by Madame Sambin, the widow of a naval captain who had vanished some thirty years before. She often told her students that her husband was a shipwrecked castaway who would return like Robinson Crusoe from his desert island. That image of the robinsonade stayed with Verne for life and surfaced in novels such as The Mysterious Island, The Castaways of the Flag, and The School for Robinsons.

  In 1836, Pierre Verne bought a vacation house in the village of Chantenay on the Loire. In his memoir Souvenirs d'enfance et de jeunesse, published in 1890, Verne recalled a deep fascination with the river and the merchant vessels crossing it. He also took vacations at Brains with his uncle Prudent Allotte, a retired shipowner who had sailed around the world and served as mayor of Brains from 1828 to 1837. Uncle and nephew played endless rounds of the Game of the Goose, and both the game and the uncle's name later turned up in two novels, The Will of an Eccentric and Robur the Conqueror.

  Legend has it that in 1839, at the age of eleven, Verne slipped aboard the three-mast ship Coralie as a cabin boy, meaning to sail to the Indies and bring back a coral necklace for his cousin Caroline. The story says his father caught him at Paimbœuf and made him promise to travel only in his imagination. It is now known that this is an exaggerated tale invented by Verne's first biographer, his niece, though it may have grown from a real incident.

• 3. Loves Lost And Lawbooks

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  On the 29th of July 1846, Verne received the grade Good Enough on his baccalauréat at Rennes. His father took it for granted that the firstborn son would inherit the family law practice rather than chase money in literature. Verne had other ideas. By 1847, at nineteen, he was writing long works in the style of Victor Hugo, completing two verse tragedies, Alexandre VI and La Conspiration des poudres.

  His cousin Caroline, whom he loved, married Émile Dezaunay, a man of forty, on the 27th of April 1847. Back in Nantes preparing for his second year of law, Verne met Rose Herminie Arnaud Grossetière, a young woman a year his senior, and fell intensely in love. He wrote and dedicated some thirty poems to her, including La Fille de l'air, which describes her as blonde and enchanting, winged and transparent.

  On the 19th of July 1848, Grossetière's parents married her instead to Armand Terrien de la Haye, a rich landowner ten years her senior. The sudden marriage sent Verne into deep frustration, and he wrote a hallucinatory letter to his mother under the pretext of a dream. The scholar Christian Chelebourg traced a recurring pattern in Verne's fiction to this wound, a so-called Hermione complex, pointing to young women married against their will: Gérande in Master Zacharius, Sava in Mathias Sandorf, and Ellen in A Floating City. The grudge also reached his hometown, which he attacked in his poem La sixième ville de France.

• 4. Paris And The Stage

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  In July 1848, Verne returned to Paris, where his father intended him to finish law and take up the profession. He rented a furnished apartment on the Rue de l'Ancienne-Comédie, sharing it with another Nantes student, Édouard Bonamy. He arrived amid the French Revolution of 1848, after Louis Philippe I had been overthrown and a provisional government of the Second Republic had taken power on the 24th of February. In June, barricades rose and Louis-Eugène Cavaignac was sent to crush the insurrection.

  Verne used family connections to enter Paris society, frequenting literary salons including those of Mme de Barrère, a friend of his mother's. He later recalled being greatly under the influence of Victor Hugo, able to recite whole pages of Notre Dame de Paris by heart. A neighbor on the same floor, a young composer named Aristide Hignard, became a good friend, and Verne wrote several texts for him to set as chansons. He graduated with a licence en droit in January 1851.

  In 1849, through the chirologist the Chevalier d'Arpentigny, Verne met Alexandre Dumas. He grew close to the writer's son, Alexandre Dumas fils, who helped revise his stage comedy Les Pailles rompues. The play was produced at the Théâtre Historique in Paris, opening on the 12th of June 1850.

  Verne's health gave him constant trouble. His letters reported violent stomach cramps, which modern scholars suspect were colitis. In 1851 he suffered the first of four attacks of facial paralysis, later understood to come from inflammation in the middle ear, a cause unknown to him in his lifetime. Required to enlist in the army that year, he was spared by the sortition process, to his relief, and his antiwar sentiments never softened.

• 5. Inventing The Roman De La Science

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  In 1851, Verne met Pierre-Michel-François Chevalier, known as Pitre-Chevalier, editor of the magazine Musée des familles. He published Verne's short historical adventure The First Ships of the Mexican Navy in July 1851, then A Voyage in a Balloon that August. Verne later called the second story the first indication of the line of novel that he was destined to follow.

  At the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Verne fed his passion for geography and recent discoveries, copying facts onto notecards, a system he kept for the rest of his life. There he met the geographer and explorer Jacques Arago, who kept traveling despite losing his sight completely in 1837. Arago's witty travel accounts pointed Verne toward the genre of travel writing. Verne began forming the idea of a Roman de la Science, a novel of science that could absorb the factual research he loved, and the elder Dumas encouraged the project.

  In April and May 1854, the Musée published Master Zacharius, an E. T. A. Hoffmann-like fantasy condemning scientific hubris, followed by A Winter Amid the Ice, a polar adventure that anticipated many later themes. Verne's work for the magazine ended in 1856 after a serious quarrel with Pitre-Chevalier, a break he kept until 1863.

  In May 1856, Verne traveled to Amiens as best man at a friend's wedding and was drawn to the bride's sister, Honorine Anne Hébée Morel, a widow aged twenty-six with two young children. They married on the 10th of January 1857. He took a full-time job as an agent de change on the Paris Bourse, waking early each morning to write before work. A sea voyage with Hignard in July 1858, his first trip outside France, carried him from Bordeaux to Liverpool and Scotland, and became the backbone of Backwards to Britain. He missed the birth of his only biological son, Michel, on the 3rd of August 1861.

• 6. The Hetzel Partnership

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  In 1862, through their mutual acquaintance Alfred de Bréhat, Verne met the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel. Hetzel already published Honoré de Balzac, George Sand, and Victor Hugo, and wanted a family magazine that combined entertaining fiction with scientific education. He accepted Verne's manuscript, suggested improvements, and Verne returned the final draft, now titled Five Weeks in a Balloon, within two weeks. It was published on the 31st of January 1863.

  Hetzel drew up a long-term contract: three volumes of text per year, each bought outright for a flat fee. When The Adventures of Captain Hatteras appeared in book form in 1866, Hetzel announced in a preface that Verne's works would form a sequence called the Voyages extraordinaires, with the aim of outlining all the geographical, geological, physical, and astronomical knowledge amassed by modern science. Verne later confirmed the mission, but added that the Earth is very large and life is very short, joking that completing the work would require living to at least one hundred.

  The publisher shaped the books directly. When Hetzel disliked the original ending of Captain Hatteras, which killed the title character, Verne wrote a new conclusion in which Hatteras survived. Hetzel rejected Paris in the Twentieth Century outright as too pessimistic and subversive for a family magazine, and that manuscript was finally published in 1994. Around 1869 the two clashed over Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas. Verne had conceived Captain Nemo as a Polish scientist avenging his family against the Russians of the January Uprising. Hetzel, protecting the Russian market, demanded Nemo become an enemy of the slave trade, and Verne compromised by leaving Nemo's past mysterious. After that fight, Verne grew cooler and often rejected Hetzel's suggestions outright.

  Verne now published two or more volumes a year, among them Journey to the Center of the Earth, From the Earth to the Moon, and Around the World in Eighty Days, which first appeared in Le Temps in 1872. Most of his wealth came from the stage adaptations of Around the World in Eighty Days in 1874 and Michel Strogoff in 1876, written with Adolphe d'Ennery. In 1867 he bought a small boat, the Saint-Michel, which he replaced with the Saint-Michel II and Saint-Michel III as he grew wealthy and famous.

• 7. Darker Years In Amiens

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  On the 9th of March 1886, as Verne returned home, his twenty-six-year-old nephew Gaston shot at him twice with a pistol. The first bullet missed, but the second entered Verne's left leg and left him with a permanent limp. The incident was kept out of the media, and Gaston spent the rest of his life in a mental asylum.

  The same year brought the death of Hetzel, and after losing both his mother and his publisher, Verne began publishing darker works. Raised as a Catholic, he gravitated toward deism, and some scholars find that philosophy in novels that invoke God or divine providence yet rarely mention Christ. In 1888 he entered politics, elected town councillor of Amiens, where he championed improvements during fifteen years in office.

  France honored him along the way. Verne was made a knight of the Legion of Honour on the 9th of April 1870, and promoted to Officer on the 19th of July 1892. His family life was less serene: his son Michel married an actress against his wishes, had two children by an underage mistress, and buried himself in debt, though the two grew closer as Michel aged.

  On the 24th of March 1905, ill with chronic diabetes and complications from a stroke that paralyzed his right side, Verne died at his home in Amiens at 44 Boulevard Longueville, now Boulevard Jules-Verne. His son Michel oversaw the posthumous publication of Invasion of the Sea and The Lighthouse at the End of the World, and the Voyages extraordinaires continued at two volumes a year. Michel had made extensive changes to these stories, and the original versions were eventually issued by the Société Jules Verne at the end of the 20th century. In 1989, Verne's great-grandson discovered the unpublished Paris in the Twentieth Century.

• 8. Two Reputations And A Moon

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  Théophile Gautier and George Sand were among Verne's earliest admirers, yet his very popularity worked against him. As the stage version of Around the World in Eighty Days drew crowds, many critics decided a commercially popular author could only be a genre storyteller. Émile Zola dismissed him, the Académie Française never nominated him, and Verne himself said the great regret of his life was that he had never taken any place in French literature.

  In English-speaking countries the damage came through translation. Verne's novels were marketed almost exclusively to young audiences, and the early translations were filled with omissions, errors, and alterations. The British writer Adam Roberts wrote in The Guardian that he realized he had not been reading Jules Verne at all. The American novelist Michael Crichton singled out the notorious 1872 Griffith and Farran version of Journey to the Center of the Earth, which renamed characters and added whole pages of invention.

  France rehabilitated him first. A Jules Verne cult of scholars and young writers founded the Société Jules Verne, and in the 1960s and 1970s figures such as Roland Barthes, whose essay The Nautilus and the Drunken Boat read the Voyages extraordinaires as pure literature, lifted his standing. The wave peaked in his sesquicentennial year, 1978, when Journey to the Center of the Earth entered the agrégation reading list. More accurate English translations have appeared since 1965, though the deficient public-domain versions keep being reprinted.

  Verne resisted the labels pinned to him. He insisted his novels were not scientific, saying I have invented nothing, and explained that he wrote Five Weeks in a Balloon as a story about Africa rather than about ballooning. He denied being a prophet, calling any link between scientific progress and his work mere coincidence. Ray Bradbury summarized his reach in a single line: We are all, in one way or another, the children of Jules Verne. The Moon would prove the point. During the Apollo 11 return flight on the 23rd of July 1969, Neil Armstrong noted that a century earlier Verne had written of a spaceship named Columbia that left Florida and landed in the Pacific. In 2026, at the splashdown of Artemis II, NASA commentator Rob Navias said the new chapter ran from the pages of Jules Verne to a modern-day mission to the Moon.