Background

Jules Gabriel Verne was born on the 8th of February 1828, in Nantes, France, the son of a lawyer, Pierre Verne and his wife, Sophie Allote de la Fuÿe. He had a brother Paul, who was born in 1829 when his family moved to Quai Jean-Bart, and three sisters, Anna, Mathilde, and Marie.

Education

In 1834, Jules Verne studied at boarding school in Nantes. Two years later, he entered École Saint‑Stanislas (now School Saint-Stanislas). His favorite subject at school was geography, so he wanted to describe in his books as many parts of the world as possible. In 1842 - 1844, he attended the Petit Séminaire de Saint-Donatien. In 1844, he joined Lycée Royal (now the Lycée Georges-Clemenceau) in Nantes, where he studied with brother Paul until 1846.

Verne’s father, intending that Jules follow in his footsteps as an attorney, sent him to Paris to study law in 1847. But the young Verne fell in love with literature, especially theatre.

Career

In 1847 Verne went to Paris to study law, although privately he was already planning a literary career. Owing to the friendship he made with Alexandre Dumas the Elder, Verne's first play, Broken Straws, was produced - with some success - in 1850. From 1852 to 1855 he held a steady and ill-paid position as secretary of a Paris theater, the Théâtre Lyrique. He continued to write comedies and operettas and began contributing short stories to a popular magazine, Le Musée des familles.

The circumstance that his wife's brother was a stockbroker may have influenced Verne in making the unexpected decision to embrace this profession. Membership in the Paris Exchange did not seriously interfere with his literary labors, however, because he adopted a rigorous timetable, rising at five o'clock in order to put in several hours researching and writing before beginning his day's work at the Bourse.

Verne's first long work of fiction, Five Weeks in a Balloon, took the form of an account of a journey by air over Central Africa, at that time largely unexplored. The book, published in January 1863, was an immediate success. He then decided to retire from stockbroking and to devote himself full time to authorship. His next few books were immensely successful at the time and are still counted among the best he wrote.

A Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864) describes the adventures of a party of explorers and scientists who descend the crater of an Icelandic volcano and discover an underground world. The Adventures of Captain Hatteras (1866) centers on an expedition to the North Pole (not actually reached by Robert Peary until 1909). In From the Earth to the Moon (1865) and its sequel, Round the Moon (1870), Verne describes how two adventurous Americans - joined, naturally, by an equally intrepid Frenchman - arrange to be fired in a hollow projectile from a gigantic cannon that lifts them out of the earth's gravity field and takes them close to the moon. Verne not only pictured the state of weightlessness his "astronauts" experienced during their flight, but also he had the prescience to locate their launching site in Florida.

Verne wrote his two masterpieces when he was in his 40s. Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (1870) relates the voyages of the submarine Nautilus, built and commanded by the mysterious Capt. Nemo, one of the literary figures in whom Verne incorporated many of his own character traits. Around the World in Eighty Days (1873) is the story of a successful wager made by a typically phlegmatic Englishman, Phineas Fogg, a character said to have been modeled on Verne's father, who had a mania for punctuality. Other popular novels include The Mysterious Island (1875) and Michael Strogoff (1876).

Achievements

• Jules Verne was the first authentic exponent of modern science fiction. Verne is generally considered a major literary author in France and most of Europe, where he has had a wide influence on the literary avant-garde and on surrealism. His reputation is laid upon his great works: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Journey to the Center of the Earth, From the Earth to the Moon and others.

Works

More photos

• book

  • From the Earth to the Moon

    (When the members of the elite Baltimore Gun Club find the...)

    1865
  • Around The Moon

    (Helping to define the science-fiction genre, this classic...)

    1869
  • Texar's Revenge or North Against South

    (Texar and Burbank are bitter enemies, Burbank's northern ...)

    1887
  • Around the World in 80 Days

    (In the story, Phileas Fogg of London and his newly employ...)

    1872
  • 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

    (Professor Aronnax, his faithful servant, Conseil, and the...)

    1870
  • Propeller Island

    (Propeller Island is a science fiction novel about a massi...)

    1895
  • The Vanished Diamond

    (Victor Cyprien, a French engineer currently living in the...)

    1884
  • The Chase of the Golden Meteor

    (The approaching disaster is brought on by the machination...)

    1908
  • Robur the Conqueror

    (At the Weldon Institute in Philadelphia, a mob of zealous...)

    1886
  • Journey to the Center of the Earth

    (The story involves German professor Otto Lidenbrock who b...)

    1864
  • The Adventures of Captain Hatteras

    (In the novel, First Mate Shandon receives a mysterious le...)

    1866
  • The Steam House

    (Here we have the story of the Sepoy Mutiny in India, and ...)

    1880
  • The Mysterious Island

    (In The Mysterious Island, a group of men escapes imprison...)

    1874
  • The Carpathian Castle

    (The mysterious castle is finely set among the cliffs in a...)

    1892
  • Tribulations Of A Chinaman In China

    (Kin-Fo is an extremely wealthy man who certainly does not...)

    1879
  • Captain Grant's Children

    (A message in a bottle relays an urgent plea from the long...)

    1867
  • The Purchase Of The North Pole

    (The Purchase Of the North Pole is a sequel to From the Ea...)

    1889
  • Travel Scholarships

    (A suspense-filled adventure tale about piracy on the high...)

    1903
  • The Will of an Eccentric

    (The year is 1897 and eccentric millionaire William J. Hyp...)

    1899
  • An Antarctic Mystery

    (The story is set in 1839. The narrator is a wealthy Ameri...)

    1897
  • Paris in the Twentieth Century 1994
  • Five Weeks in a Balloon 1863
  • Michel Strogoff 1876
  • Dick Sand, A Captain at Fifteen 1878
  • The Adventures of Three Englishmen and Three Russians in South Africa 1872
  • The Archipelago on Fire 1884
  • Backwards to Britain 1989
  • The Begum's Fortune 1879
  • Captain Antifer 1894
  • Claudius Bombarnac 1892
  • Clovis Dardentor 1896
  • The Danube Pilot 1908
  • Facing the Flag 1896
  • The Village in the Treetops 1901
  • Two Years' Vacation 1888
  • The Survivors of the Chancellor 1875
  • The Survivors of the Jonathan 1909

Religion

Verne was raised Catholic, but the degree of his devotion is a matter of debate. He described himself as a believer. But he apparently also stopped attending mass several decades before his death, causing some to speculate that he ended his life as an agnostic. It is also said, that he became a deist in his later years.

Politics

Verne’s political views muddled between left and right. He supported the leftist, pro-labor Revolution of 1848, but then opposed an uprising the next year in favor of the more conservative government. When Louis Napoleon named himself emperor, Verne was at first skeptical, but eventually supported the regime and rejected the socialist Paris Commune of 1871. In 1888, he ran for town council as a leftist, and in the following decade, he stood on the side of antisemitic conservatives during the Dreyfus Affair.

Perhaps his political beliefs can be summed up from a campaign speech he made during his leftist run for office. He said, that in social matters his taste is order, in politics his hope is to create within the present government a reasonable party that balances respect for justice and religious belief with consideration for people, the arts, and life itself.

Views

One noteworthy feature of all Verne's work is its moral idealism, which earned him in 1884 the personal congratulations of Pope Leo XIII.

His interest in scientific progress was tempered by his robust religious faith, and in some of his later novels (such as The Purchase of the North Pole, 1889), he showed himself aware of the social dangers of uncontrolled technological advance.

Quotations: "The earth does not need new continents, but new men."

"We may brave human laws, but we cannot resist natural ones."

"Solitude, isolation, are painful things and beyond human endurance."

"Ah! Young people, travel if you can, and if you cannot - travel all the same!"

"Imagine a society in which there were neither rich nor poor. What evils, afflictions, sorrows, disorders, catastrophes, disasters, tribulations, misfortunes, agonies, calamities, despair, desolation and ruin would be unknown to man!"

"If Providence has created the stars and the planets, man has called the cannonball "into existence."

"The sea is only the embodiment of a supernatural and wonderful existence."

"I believe cats to be spirits come to earth. A cat, I am sure, could walk on a cloud without coming through."

"The Yankees, the first mechanicians in the world, are engineers - just as the Italians are musicians and the Germans metaphysicians - by right of birth. "Nothing is more natural, therefore, than to perceive them applying their audacious ingenuity to the science of gunnery."

"Trains, like time and tide, stop for no one."

"It may be taken for granted that, rash as Americans usually are, when they are prudent, there is a good reason for it."

"A man of merit owes himself to the homage of the rest of mankind who recognize his worth."

"In presence of Nature's grand convulsions, man is powerless."

"In spite of the opinions of certain narrow-minded people, who would shut up the human race upon this globe, as within some magic circle it must never outstep, we shall one day travel to the moon, the planets, and the stars, with the same facility, rapidity, and certainty as we now make the voyage from Liverpool to New York!"

"Well, my friend, this earth will one day be that cold corpse, it will become uninhabitable and uninhabited like the moon, which has long since lost all its vital heat."

"Everything great in science and art is simple. What can be less complicated than the greatest discoveries of humanity, gravitation, the compass, the printing press, the steam engine, the electric telegraph?"

"Nothing is more dreadful than private duels in America. The two adversaries attack each other like wild beasts. Then it is that they might well covet those wonderful properties of the Indians of the prairies - their quick intelligence, their ingenious cunning, their scent of the enemy."

"The sea is the vast reservoir of Nature. The globe began with sea, so to speak; and who knows if it will not end with it?"

"The sea is everything. It covers seven-tenths of the terrestrial globe. Its breath is pure and healthy. It is an immense desert, where man is never lonely, for he feels life stirring on all sides."

"It is certain that the inanimate objects by which you are surrounded have a direct action on the brain."

"The possession of wealth leads almost inevitably to its abuse. It is the chief, if not the only, cause of evils that desolate this world below. The thirst for gold is responsible for the most regrettable lapses into sin."

"With happiness as with health: to enjoy it, one should be deprived of it occasionally."

"On the morrow, the horizon was covered with clouds, a thick and impenetrable curtain between earth and sky, which unhappily extended as far as the Rocky Mountains. It was a fatality!"

"However strong, however imposing a ship may appear, it is not 'disgraced' because it flies before the tempest. A commander ought always to remember that a man's life is worth more than the mere satisfaction of his own pride. In any case, to be obstinate is blameable, and to be wilful is dangerous."

Personality

Verne's personality was complex. Though capable of bouts of extreme liveliness and given to joking and playing practical jokes, he was basically a shy man, happiest when alone in his study or when sailing the English Channel in a converted fishing boat. Verne had a natural tendency toward depression.

Physical Characteristics: In 1886 Verne was the victim of a shooting accident, which left him disabled. The man that shot him proved to be a nephew who was suffering from mental instability. In 1902 he became partially blind and he died on the 24th of March, 1905 in Amiens.

Quotes from others about the person

• "We are all, in one way or another, the children of Jules Verne." - Ray Bradbury
  
  "Verne's prose is lean and fast-moving in a peculiarly modern way." - Michael Crichton

Interests

• geography, science, technologies, music

Connections

During a visit to Amiens in May 1856, Verne met and fell in love with the widowed daughter of an army officer, Madame Morel (née Honorine de Viane), whom he married the following January. His son, Michel Verne, oversaw publication of the novels Invasion of the Sea and The Lighthouse at the End of the World after Jules's death.

Father:

Pierre Verne

Mother:

Sophie Allote de la Fuÿe

Sister:

Marie Verne

Sister:

Mathilde Verne

Sister:

Anna Verne

grandmother:

Dame Sophie Allotte de la Fuÿe

Son:

Michel Jean Pierre Verne

Michel Jean Pierre Verne was a French author and editor. Among his writings are La Destinée de Jean Morénas, L'Éternel Adam, that was translater as The Eternal Adam, Short Story, Un Express de L'Avenir, A Great Transatlantic Subway, In the Year 2889 and Survivors of the Jonathan.

Brother:

Paul de Vern

Wife:

Honorine Hebe du Fraysse de Viane Morel Verne

Friend:

Alexandre Dumas

References

• Jules Verne: The Biography of an Imagination
  2013
• Jules Verne: The Definitive Biography Butcher examines the forgotten nitty-gritty of Verne’s life, his appearance, his schoolmates, the size of his bedroom, who he talked to and slept with, who he fell out with and was sued by, the fibs he told, how he got to work, how much he made, what he did on his days off, where he went, what he studied, what he read, whether he was a good husband and father, in sum, all the behavior that points to personality, as only a family member can know it.
  2006
• Jules Verne: A Biography In Jules Verne: A Biography Verne's grandson draws on family archives and personal scholarship for a critical life of the great French science-fiction and adventure novelist, placing his works in the context of contemporaneous world events and developments.
  1973
• Who Was Jules Verne?
  2016
• Jules Verne In this book, Herbert R. Lottman draws on the unpublished correspondence between the renowned science fiction author and various friends and family members and recreates Verne's life from his youth in Nantes to his self-imposed exile outside of Paris as an adult.
  1996