JULES VERNE ❘ PEOPLE
Captain at Fifteen, in which a teenage boy becomes the commander of a ship after its captain and crew are murdered. The ship’s conniving cook then lures him and a group of castaways off their route and into Africa, where he attempts to sell them into slavery. This theme is controversial for Verne. His wealthy ancestors were leading lights in the shipbuilding industry, and therefore indirectly complicit in slave trafficking. Nantes allegedly transported more than half a million people from African ‘slave forts’ to colonies in the Caribbean, to harvest sugar cane and cacao which would be transported back to France.
In sentiment at least, Verne condemned
slavery, although he clashed with Hetzel when the publisher argued that Captain Nemo should be made an enemy of the slave trade. Verne’s vision of Nemo was one of a vengeful scientist seeking to settle the score against the Russians who had slaughtered his family during the January Uprising. Yet profit-hungry Hetzel feared alienating his lucrative Russian audience. Hetzel also rejected Verne’s thriller The Mysterious
“IN TWENTY THOUSAND LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA, HE PREDICTED THE SUBMARINE BEFORE IT HAD BEEN INVENTED”
for a near non-existent salary and then, with 10 chums, launched the self-deprecating Onze Sans Femmes bachelors’ supper club. Even after his eventual marriage, Verne read, wrote and travelled voraciously.
BIG BREAK In 1862, Verne had a literary breakthrough when Pierre-Jules Hetzel – the publisher of George Sand, Balzac and Victor Hugo – released his novel, Five Weeks in a Balloon. A series called the Voyages Extraordinaires followed, in which Verne revisited his fascination with adventures at sea, while outlining “all the geographical, geological, physical, and astronomical knowledge amassed by modern science” and “recounting the history of the universe”. Thanks to Verne’s imagination and rigorous academic research, he realised these lofty ambitions. He wrote novels including Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea, in which he accurately predicted the submarine before it had even been invented. He also relived childhood escape fantasies in A
Island, but disagreements did not mar his popularity. Verne was admired by many, including Jean-Paul Sartre, and legend has it that without Verne, novels like Bram Stoker’s Dracula might never have existed, as his novel The Carpathian Castle sparked Stoker’s imagination.
Following a brief political career and assassination attempt by his mentally unwell nephew, Verne died in Amiens in 1905 from complications caused by his diabetes. The tales of his worldwide voyages and literary successes – not to mention a childhood that fuelled his love of the ocean – can be found in Nantes today at the museum dedicated to him. Those interested in following in Verne’s footsteps can also visit the Memorial to the Abolition of Slavery in Nantes, which documents a controversial past that both inspired the writer’s work and involved his ancestors. His former boarding school is now a restaurant, Bistro Régent, and there are historical associations aplenty elsewhere in the city for those adventurous enough to seek them out. FT
Apr/May 2020 FRANCE TODAY ❘ 57
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