Jules Verne, born February 8, 1828 in Nantes, died March 24, 1905 in Amiens, was a French writer, much of whose work is devoted to adventure and science fiction novels (called in the time of Jules Verne science fiction novel). The year 2005 was declared "Jules Verne Year", on the occasion of the centenary of the death of the author.
Young years
Jules Verne was born in Nantes, in the district of Île Feydeau, on February 8, 1828. He was the son of Pierre Verne (originally from Provins), exercising the profession of solicitor, and Sophie Allote de la Fuÿe, d bourgeois Nantes family of navigators and shipowners. Jules Verne was the eldest of a family of five children, including his brother Paul (1829-1897) and three sisters:Anna, born in 1836, Mathilde, born in 1839, and Marie, born in 1842. in Brains.
The legend says that in 1839, at the age of 11, little Jules would have embarked on a long haul to India, as a ship's boy. His father would then have picked him up in extremis in Paimbœuf. It is said that Jules Verne confessed that he had left to bring a coral necklace to his cousin, Caroline Tronson, with whom he was in love. Roughly reprimanded by his father, he would have promised to travel only in dreams.
But this is only a legend embellished by the family imagination. In his Memories of Childhood and Youth, we learn that he only escaped, boarded a sailboat, explored it, turned the rudder, etc., this in l absence of a guard. This will earn him the disapproval of the captain.
Literary beginnings
He studied rhetoric and philosophy at the Nantes high school, then studied law after the baccalaureate. He begins to write, poems, a tragedy in verse. He will finish his law in Paris in November 1848, much more interested in the theater. There he met Alexandre Dumas, who agreed to stage his play Les Pailles rompues in 1850 at his Théâtre- historique, where it was performed twelve times. Despite the relative success of the work, Jules Verne, who had just finished his law, refused to succeed his father as attorney. He frequents the National Library, being fascinated by science and its most recent discoveries and befriends a former explorer, Jacques Arago, who has become blind.
He published his first short stories in the magazine Le Musée des familles:The First Ships of the Mexican Navy and A Drama in the Air in 1851. In 1852, Jules Verne was hired as secretary at the Théâtre-lyrique. He published Martin Paz, Maître Zacharius, Un Hivernage dans les glaces, as well as the play Les Châteaux en Californie and continued his theatrical work, with, in particular, Colin-Maillard, an operetta written with his friend Michel Carré to music by Aristide. Hignard. Represented in 1853, the work had a relative success (forty performances).
In 1856, he met his future wife, Honorine Morel, a twenty-six-year-old from Amiens, widow of Fraysne de Viane, and already the mother of two children. Jules Verne's only child, Michel, was born on August 3, 1861.
Extraordinary journeys
In 1862, Jules Verne submitted his novel Five Weeks in a Balloon to the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel (1814-1886), which was published in 1863 and met with immense success beyond the French borders. He then signed a contract with Pierre-Jules Hetzel that bound him for 20 years with the publisher, in which he undertook to provide novels, in particular for the magazine Le Magasin d’éducation et de récréation intended for young people. It is in this journal that the Adventures of Captain Hatteras will appear before being published as a novel. In fact, Verne worked for forty years on his Extraordinary Voyages, which would number fifty-four volumes. Still in 1863, Jules Verne wrote Paris in the 20th Century, which would not appear until 1994.
In 1864, Jules Verne devoted a book to Edgar Poe (Edgar Poe and his works), he published the novels The Adventures of Captain Hatteras and Voyage to the Center of the Earth, left his job as a stockbroker, and moved to Auteuil. On March 16, 1867, in the company of his brother Paul, he embarked on the Great Eastern in Liverpool for the United States, he will draw from his crossing the novel A floating city (1870). Jules Verne bought his boat the Saint-Michel in 1868, a fishing boat fitted out for yachting, he made it his office.
Mobilized as a coast guard at Le Crotoy during the 1870 war, Jules Verne nevertheless continued to write. He moved to Amiens, his wife's birthplace, in 1872, published Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours, acquired the Saint-Michel II in 1874. He gave a sumptuous costume ball in Amiens in 1877 , with the participation of his friend Nadar, who served as a model for Michel Ardan, hero of his novels From the Earth to the Moon and Around the Moon. From June to August 1878, Jules Verne sailed from Lisbon to Algiers on the Saint-Michel III, then to Scotland, Norway and Ireland in 1880. He made a grand tour of the Mediterranean with his wife in 1884.
The last years
In 1886, Jules Verne's nephew, Gaston, who had apparently come to ask him for money, fired two revolver bullets at the writer, which injured his legs and caused him to permanently limp. In 1888, Jules Verne was elected to the municipal council of Amiens on a republican list (moderate left), he would sit there for fifteen years. He suffered from cataracts in 1900.
At the beginning of 1903, Jules Verne chaired the Esperantist group of Amiens. An ardent defender of this very young international language, he promised his friends to write a novel in which he would describe the merits of Esperanto. Dead prematurely, his book will not be completed. The draft will be taken over by his son Michel, but the final work (L'Étonnante Aventure de la mission Barsac) will not allude to Esperanto...
However, manuscripts found later, make us discover the true title of this novel (Study trip) and that Esperanto was to hold a central place in it. He made one of his heroes, "The Spy", say:"Esperanto is the surest, the fastest vehicle of civilization. He had also said, in his entourage:"The key to a common language lost in the tower of Babel can only be restored by the use of Esperanto".
Ill with diabetes, Jules Verne will die on March 24, 1905 in Amiens in his house at 44, boulevard Longueville (today boulevard Jules-Verne). He is buried in La Madeleine cemetery in Amiens.
Several books by Jules Verne will appear after his death, published by his son Michel Verne, who will take the responsibility of revising certain manuscripts.
Inheritance
Jules Verne leaves behind a body of work rich in extraordinary creativity. He is one of the first authors to successfully combine science fiction, adventure and fantasy. His interest in science and the fact that he addresses in his novels themes that will materialize during the course of the 20th century (journey to the moon, submarine, etc.) give him the status of a visionary. His novels would frequently be adapted for film, their high-profile narrative lending itself perfectly to Hollywood productions. His characters are icons of the popular imagination (such as Phileas Fogg, Captain Nemo or Michel Strogoff).
Work
Novels
* 1855:Wintering in the ice
* 1859:Journey backwards through England and Scotland
* 1862:The Count of Chanteleine
* 1863:Five weeks in a balloon
* 1863:Paris in the 20th century (published only in 1994)
* 1864-67:The Adventures of the Captain Hatteras
* 1864:Journey to the Center of the Earth
* 1865:From the Earth to the Moon
* 1865:The blockade runners [1]
* 1866-68:The Children of Captain Grant
* 1869:Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
* 1869:Around the Moon
* 1870:Uncle Robinson (published only in 1993)
* 1870-74:The Chancellor
* 1870:Adventures of three Russians and three English in southern Africa
* 1 871:A floating city
* 1871-72:The Land of Furs
* 1873:Around the World in Eighty Days
* 1873-75:The Mysterious Island
* 1876:Michael Strogoff
* 1874-76:Hector Servadac
* 1876-77:The Black Indies
* 1877-78:A fifteen-year-old captain
* 1878:The Tribulations of a Chinese in China
* 1879:The Five Hundred Million Begum
* 1879:The Steam House
* 1880:The Jangada
* 1881:The Robinsons School
* 1881:The Green Ray
* 1882:Kéraban-le-Têtu
* 1883:Archipelago on fire
* 1883:The Southern Star
* 1883-84:Mathias Sandorf
* 1884:L 'Wreck of the "Cynthia" (written in collaboration with André Laurie)
* 1885:Robur the conqueror
* 1885:A lottery ticket
* 1885-86:North against South
* 1885:The Way of France
* 1886-87:Two years of vacation
* 1887-88:Family-without-a-name
* 1888:Upside down
* 1889:The Carpathian Castle
* 1889:César Cascabel
* 1890:Mistress Branican
* 1891:Claudius Bombarnac
* 1891:P'tit-Bonhomme
* 1891:The Day of an American Journalist in 2889
* 1892:Wonderful adventures of Master Antifer
* 1893:Propeller Island
* 1893:A drama in Livonia (reviewed in 1903 and published in 1904)
* 1894:The Superb Orinoco
* 1894:Facing the flag
* 1895:Clovis Dardentor
* 1895:The Sphinx ice
* 1896:The Aerial Village (published in 1901 under the title La Grande Forêt)
* 1896:Second homeland
* 1897:The Testament of an Eccentric
* 1897-98:In Magellania, the son of Jules Verne modified his father's manuscript and published it under the name of Les Naufragés from “Jonathan”
* 1898:The Secret of Wilhelm Storitz (revised in 1901 and published only in 1985)
* 1898:La Chasse au meteor
* 1898:The Kip Brothers
* 1899:The Stories of Jean-Marie Cabidoulin
* 1899:Travel scholarships
* 1899-1900:Le Volcan d'or (published only in 1989)
* 1 901:The Beautiful Yellow Danube
* 1901:The Lighthouse at the End of the World
* 1901:The Meteor Hunt
* 1901:The Pilot of the Danube
* 1902:The Invasion of the Sea
* 1902-03:Master of the World
Short stories
* 1874:Doctor Ox
* 1910:Yesterday and tomorrow
* 1910:The Eternal Adam
Fantasy tale
* 1854:Master Zacharius or the watchmaker who had lost his soul
Quote
“When I described them as realities, these things were already half uncovered. I simply drew a fiction which later became a fact, and my object in doing so was not to prophesy, but to impart to youth a knowledge of geography in as interesting an guise as I could compose !!! »
Quoted by Patrick Poivre d'Arvor, in The world according to Jules Verne.
PPDA adds (the first person designates Jules Verne)
“But I must admit that I believed, as a faithful reader of Auguste Comte and a good supporter of positivism, in progress, in the capacity of science to meet the expectations and ideals of men. I wanted to report it, very minutely, hour by hour, time zone by time zone, in a very detailed count of time which probably adds to my supposed science an additional element of precision and which I am told was impressed. , more than one ! »