Jules Verne

Jules Verne: The Clerk Who Mapped the Future

"I have invented nothing," Jules Verne said, and he meant it as a boast about method rather than a disclaimer. Everything in the novels came out of notecards copied from books, newspapers and scientific reports in the reading rooms of the Bibliothèque nationale. He built the submarine, the moon shot and the round-the-world sprint out of the periodical press of his own decade. Since 1979 he has been the second most translated author on earth, ranking below Agatha Christie and above Shakespeare.

Nantes, the Loire, and a Lawyer's Son

Jules Gabriel Verne was born on 8 February 1828 on the Île Feydeau in Nantes, at 4 Rue Olivier-de-Clisson, his maternal grandmother's house. His father Pierre was an *avoué* — a solicitor — from Provins; his mother Sophie came from a Nantes shipping family with Scottish ancestry. Nantes was a working Atlantic port, and the traffic on the Loire is the first thing every account of his childhood reaches for. He was the eldest of five and was sent at nine to board at Saint Donatien.

Refusing the Practice

The plan was that the eldest son would take the family practice. Verne passed his first-year law examinations in Paris in 1847 and took his *licence en droit* in January 1851. A year later his father offered him the Nantes practice outright, and Verne refused it in a letter that reads like a man discovering his own biography in real time: "Am I not right to follow my own instincts? It's because I know who I am that I realize what I can be one day." His father cut off his allowance.

He had been living the Parisian literary life since 1848, frequenting the salons of Mme de Barrère and others. Around 1849 he met Alexandre Dumas *père* and became a real friend of Dumas *fils*, who got his comedy *Les Pailles rompues* staged at the Théâtre Historique on 12 June 1850 and then found him a secretarial post at the Théâtre Lyrique, where Verne wrote comic operas with Aristide Hignard and Michel Carré. None of it paid.

The Bourse and the Library

In 1856 he met Honorine Anne Hébée Morel, a widow with two daughters, at a wedding in Amiens, and married her the following year. To fund a household he became an *agent de change* on the Paris Bourse, working with the broker Fernand Eggly from 1857. He hated it. He wrote before dawn each morning and spent his free hours at the Bibliothèque nationale, copying scientific and historical material onto notecards — a filing system he maintained for the rest of his life and which is the single most important fact about how the novels were made.

Hetzel

In 1862, through the writer Alfred de Bréhat, Verne was introduced to the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel, who was assembling a family magazine. Hetzel found Verne's balloon manuscript too dry, told him so, and Verne rewrote it in a fortnight. *Five Weeks in a Balloon* was published on 31 January 1863 and made him. Hetzel then offered a long-term contract: three volumes of text a year for a flat annual fee. It was not a generous deal, but it gave Verne what he had never had — a guaranteed audience, a guaranteed outlet, and an editor with commercial judgement. Most of the *Voyages extraordinaires* appeared first in Hetzel's *Magasin d'Éducation et de Récréation* and then as books, more than fifty of them.

Sixty Volumes

*Journey to the Centre of the Earth* (1864), *From the Earth to the Moon* (1865), *Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas* (1870), *Around the World in Eighty Days* (1872), *The Mysterious Island* (1875), *Michael Strogoff* (1876). The formula is consistent: a plausible machine, a competent crew, a route drawn on a real map, and enough verified detail that the impossible part slides past unchallenged. Hetzel's one significant veto was *Paris in the Twentieth Century*, written in 1863 and rejected as too pessimistic about technological progress — glass towers, high-speed trains, petrol cars, calculating machines and a worldwide communications network, all of it in the service of a bleak conclusion. It was thought lost after Verne's death until his great-grandson found it in 1989; it was published in 1994.

What He Got Right, and the Prophecy Problem

The prophecy industry around Verne is largely retrospective. He himself denied inventing anything, and modern scholars are firm about it: Theodore L. Thomas observed that readers "remember things from it that are not there," childhood memory supplying detail the text never contained. What Verne genuinely did was extrapolate rigorously from published science — which is why the moon-launch arithmetic in *From the Earth to the Moon* is close enough to be interesting, and why the Nautilus reads as engineering rather than magic. Some of the numerical precision was destroyed in English: early translators converted his figures into what one modern critic called mathematical gibberish.

The Bullet, and the Darkening

On 9 March 1886, as Verne came home, his 26-year-old nephew Gaston shot at him twice. The second bullet lodged in his left leg and left him permanently lame. Gaston spent the rest of his life institutionalised and the press said nothing. Hetzel died the same year; Verne's mother died in 1887. The late novels are noticeably darker and more sceptical about progress than the ones that made his name. He served as a town councillor of Amiens from 1888 for fifteen years, pushing municipal improvements, and was made a Knight of the Legion of Honour in 1870 and an Officer in 1892.

Why Jules Is Called a Genius

The word is warranted for a narrow and demonstrable achievement: Verne invented a way of making the not-yet-real feel procedurally credible, and it is the load-bearing technique of an entire genre. The method is documentary — his notecards, his relentless specificity about pressure, tonnage, latitude, fuel — deployed inside adventure narrative so that the reader accepts the machine because everything surrounding it checks out. That is a genuine formal invention, and it is why he is named a father of science fiction alongside H. G. Wells and Hugo Gernsback. The claim rests on craft and research discipline rather than on prophetic insight or philosophical depth, and it should be stated that way.

The counter-case has two parts and both are legitimate. The first is that his prophetic reputation is inflated by readers' memories rather than his text, and he said so himself. The second concerns literary standing, and geography decides it. In France the rehabilitation is complete: Roland Barthes's essay *Nautilus et Bateau Ivre* treated the *Voyages* as serious literature, *Journey to the Centre of the Earth* entered the university *agrégation* reading list by 1978, and Verne now sits in the French canon. In English he spent a century dismissed as a children's writer — partly deserved, since Reverend Lewis Page Mercier and his successors cut passages critical of the British Empire, mangled his measurements, and produced what Michael Crichton called clunky, choppy, tone-deaf prose. Serious anglophone translations and studies have appeared only since the mid-1980s. Verne felt the injury acutely: "The great regret of my life is that I have never taken any place in French literature."

Legacy

Verne died on 24 March 1905 at his house on the Boulevard Longueville in Amiens, aged 77, of chronic diabetes and the effects of a stroke. His son Michel oversaw the posthumous novels and rewrote them heavily; the Jules Verne Society has since restored the originals. He remains the most translated French author in the world, and the shape he gave the adventure novel — the credible vessel, the verified route, the impossible destination — is still the default architecture of science fiction, more than a century after the last card went into the index.

Achievements

• Officer of the Legion of Honour — 1892
• Montyon Prize — 1872
• Knight of the Legion of Honour — 1870
• Notable work: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
• Notable work: A Journey to the Centre of the Earth
• Notable work: From the Earth to the Moon
• Notable work: Around the World in Eighty Days
• Genres: science fiction, theatre and speculative fiction