Jules Verne
1828-1905
A Century of FantaScience

Jules Verne has always triggered my fantasies, and when a little girl I dreamed of adventuring the world like he did in his fantastic fiction stories.  I did come to travel the world, not in eighty days like Verne, but in eighty months -- but that's a different story ... :)  In the centenary of his death I have found it appropriate to set up a small philatelic web page about him.  

Jules Verne was born and raised in the port of Nantes. His father was a prosperous lawyer. To continue the practice, Verne moved to Paris, where he studied law. His uncle introduced him into literary circles and he started to publish  plays under the influence of such writers as Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas (the Younger), whom Verne also knew personally. Verne's one-act comedy The Broken Straws was performed in Paris when he was 22, and in spite of busy writing, Verne managed to pass his law degree. 

Jules Verne is regarded as the founder of modern science fiction -- or FantaScience, term coined by San Marino in 1998. 

Laying a carefully documented scientific foundation for his fantastic adventure stories, he forecast with remarkable accuracy -- nearly prophecy -- many scientific achievements of the 20th century. He anticipated flights into outer space, submarines, helicopters, air conditioning, guided missiles, and motion pictures long before they were developed. Beginning with A Trip to the Moon, by the pioneer French film director Georges Méliès, Verne's works have been the source of many films. He was awarded the Légion d'Honneur in 1892.  France 1961. Georges Méliès. Birth centenary.

In 1854 Charles Baudelaire translated Edgar Allan Poe's works into French. Verne became one of the most devoted admirers of the American author, and wrote his first science fiction tale, A voyage in Balloon (1851), under the influence of Poe. Later Verne would write a sequel to Poe's unfinished novel, "Narrative of a Gordon Pym", entitled The Sphinx of the Ice-Fields (1897). 

In 1856, at the age of 28, Verne had married Honorine de Viane, a young widow, acquiring two step-children. He lived with his family in a large provincial house and yachted occasionally. Verne spent an uneventful, bourgeois life from the 1860s. He traveled with his brother Paul in 1867 to the United States, visiting the Niagara falls. When he made a boat trip around the Mediterranean, he was celebrated in Gibraltar, North Africa, and in Rome, where Pope Leo XIII blessed his books. In 1871 he settled in Amiens and was elected councilor in 1888. Verne survived there in 1886 a murder attempt. His paranoid nephew, Gaston, shot him in the leg and the author was disabled for the rest of his life. Gaston never recovered his sanity. 

In Hector Servadac (1877) a comet takes Hector and his servant on a trip around the Solar System. In a tongue-in-cheek episode they discover a fragment of the Rock of Gibraltar, occupied by two Englishmen playing chess. 

Verne's novels gained soon a huge popularity throughout the world. Without the education of a scientist or experiences as a traveler, Verne spent much of his time in research for his books. In the contrast of fantasy literature, exemplified by Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland" (1865), Verne tried to be realistic and practical in details. However, when the logic of the story contradicted contemporary scientific knowledge, Verne did not keep to the facts and probabilities too slavishly. 

The Mysterious Island was about industrial exploits of men stranded on an island. In these works, filmed several times, Verne combined science and invention with fast-paced adventure. Some of Verne's fiction has also become a fact: his submarine Nautilus predated the first successful power submarine by a quarter century, and his spaceship predicted the development a century later. The first all-electric submarine, built in 1886 by two Englishmen, was named "Nautilus" in honor of Verne's vessel. The first nuclear-powered submarine, launched in 1955, was named "Nautilus", too. 

Verne's major works were written by 1880. In later novels the author's pessimism about the future of human civilization reflected the doom-laden fin-de-siècle atmosphere. In his tale The Eternal Adam a far-future historian discovers the 20th-century civilization was overthrown by geological cataclysms, and the legend of Adam and Eve becomes both true and cyclical. In Robur the Conqueror (1886) Verne predicted the birth of heavier-than-air craft, but in the sequel, Master of the World (1904), the great inventor Robur suffers from megalomania, and plays cat-and-mouse game with authorities. 

To the horror of his family, Verne admired the Russian Prince Pyotr Kropotkin (1842-1921), who devoted himself to a life as a revolutionary, and whose character possibly influenced the noble anarchist of "Survivors of the Jonathan" (1909). Kropotkin wrote of an anarchy based on mutual support and trust. Verne's interest in socialistic theories was already seen in Mathias Sandorf (1885).

For over 40 years Verne published at least one book per year on a wide range of subjects. Although Verne wrote about exotic places, he traveled relatively little -- his only balloon flight lasted only twenty-four minutes. Verne's works have inspired a number of film makers from Georges Méliès "A Trip to the Moon", 1902) and Walt Disney "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, 1954) to such Hollywood directors as Henry Levin "Journey to the Center of the Earth", 1959) and Irwin Allen "Five Weeks in a Balloon", 1962). 

Also the Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico was a great admirer of Verne and wrote on him in the essay 'On Metaphysical Art': 

But who was more gifted than he in capturing the metaphysical element of a city like London, with its houses, streets, clubs, squares and open spaces; the ghostliness of a Sunday afternoon in London, the melancholy of a man, a real walking phantom, as Phineas Fogg appears in "Around the World in Eighty Days"?  The work of Jules Verne is full of these joyous and most consoling moments; I still remember the description of the departure of a steamship from Liverpool in his novel "The Floating City". 

Verne died in Amiens on March 24, 1905. Verne's oeuvre include 65 novels, some twenty short stories and essays, thirty plays, some geographical works, and opera librettos. According to the UNESCO-statistics, he is the most translated novelist in the world, in 148 languages. 

Sources and links:

• Microsoft Encarta 2002.
• Encyclopedia Britannica 2002.
• Wikipedia -- Jules Verne. 
• UNESCO statistics of most translated writers.
• A complete collection of Jules Verne Stamps 
  containing 100+ pages with a total of 415 full
  colour stamps, sheets and first day covers from
  51 countries. 

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