Imagine you're following the career of this incredibly
brilliant, critically acclaimed indie filmmaker.
Right, someone who makes those really deep philosophical
movies. Exactly. They write these beautifully
complex stories that explore the human condition,
the psychological weight of isolation, and even
the dangers of unhinged technology. Like an auteur
who agonizes over every single stylistic choice
and thematic nuance. Yeah. But then, because
of some bizarre distribution deals, some really
heavy -handed studio interference, and terrible
international marketing, history just completely
rewrites their legacy. Oh, that is the worst.
Right. And a hundred years later, this brooding,
philosophical artist gets misremembered almost
exclusively as a creator of, like, goofy, light
-hearted Saturday morning cartoons. It sounds
absurd when you lay it out like that, but I mean,
the machinery of public perception is incredibly
powerful. It really is. Once a culture decides...
what an artist is supposed to be, that label
just completely eclipses the reality of the actual
person making the art. Okay, let's unpack this
because welcome to today's deep dive. Today we're
diving into a massive stack of literary critiques,
historical biographies, and recovered personal
letters to figure out who one of history's most
famous authors actually was. We really are. Our
mission today is to look at the extraordinary
life and honestly the heavily, heavily misunderstood
legacy. of Jules Verne. Yeah, we are going to
deconstruct this stubborn myth of Verne as this
magical prophet of the future who just, you know,
gazed into a crystal ball. Spoiler alert, he
didn't. He absolutely didn't. And more importantly,
we're going to reveal how extreme commercial
pressures and some genuinely horrific English
translations completely mangled the reputation
of a man who desperately wanted to be taken seriously
as a literary artist. Because when you hear his
name, you instantly think of the guy who wrote
twenty thousand leads under the seas and around
the world in eighty. days the ultimate swashbuckling
adventurer right but to see where this cartoonish
adventurous spirit actually originated and to
understand how it was fueled by early trauma
and heartbreak we have to go back to the beginning
we do we're starting in not france in 1828 you
really have to picture 1830s not to understand
his worldview it wasn't just some generic provincial
town yeah not at all it was this massive bustling
port city right on the river Loire. And young
Jules Verne spent his childhood essentially just
staring out at the water, deeply fascinated by
these massive merchant ships coming and going.
Ringing in goods and stories from all over the
globe, right? Exactly. That maritime environment
instilled this deep, intense wanderlust in him.
And his early schooling took that wanderlust
and gave it a very specific, quirky, psychological
shape. Oh, the boarding school story. Yes. When
he was six, he was sent to this boarding school
run by a woman named Madame Sambin. She was quite
a character. She really was. She was the widow
of a naval captain who had disappeared at sea
roughly 30 years prior. But the thing is, she
refused to accept that he was dead. Which is
heartbreaking. It is. She used to tell her students
that her husband was a shipwrecked castaway living
in this desert island paradise and that he would
eventually return, just like Robinson Crusoe.
That is such a crucial, poignant detail. I mean,
imagine being a six -year -old boy hearing that
story from your teacher. It would stick with
you forever. It did. It planted the seed for
what the French call Robinsonades, which are
stories specifically about castaways surviving
on deserted islands. Right, like a whole subgenre.
Exactly. And that theme absolutely dominates
his later masterpieces, like The Mysterious Island
and The School for Robinsons. But he didn't just
write about survival, did he? he was captivated
by the actual mechanics of it. He was obsessed
with the idea of taking the chaos of a shipwreck
and using human intellect to build a perfectly
ordered world from scratch. Right, he doesn't
just have his characters find a convenient cave
and like eat coconuts. Definitely not coconuts.
In the mysterious island, he literally walks
you through the chemical process of rendering
animal fat into glycerin and then mixing it with
nitric acid to manufacture homemade nitroglycerin
just so they can blow up a gran - cliff to make
a shelter. Gets intense. He grounds the fantasy
of survival in rigorous methodical science. Which
is exactly why the myths about his own childhood
are so frustrating to scholars. Yes, because
if you know anything about Jules Verne, you've
probably heard this incredibly famous legend.
The cabin boys. The cabin boy story. The legend
goes that when he was 11 years old, he secretly
sneaked onto a three -mast ship called the Coralie
as a cabin boy. Right, to sail to the Indies.
Yeah, supposedly to bring back a coral necklace
for his cousin Caroline. But his dad caught him
at the very last second, dragged them off the
boat, and made him promise to travel only in
his imagination. It is a brilliantly constructed
piece of PR. It really sounds like a movie trailer.
It perfectly fits the public image of a daring,
adventurous young author whose spirit was just
too big for his hometown. Too bad it's completely
fabricated. Entirely made up. Wait, entirely?
Yes, it was invented decades later by Verne's
first biographer. Who was his niece, right? Marguerite,
yeah. She deliberately embroidered his life to
fit the public's perception of him, essentially
just feeding the commercial myth -making machine
that his publisher had built. Wow. Well, I have
to push back on that romanticized image of the
young swashbuckling writer anyway, because the
reality of his early life is actually kind of
miserable. It was very restrictive. Right. He
wasn't a daring cabin boy. He was a frustrated,
heartbroken law student rebelling against a very
domineering dad. His father, Pierre, was a strict
bourgeois lawyer. Who demanded that Jules, as
the oldest son, inherit the family law practice.
The pressure to conform to this stifling upper
middle class existence was immense. And on top
of that, he suffered a devastating romantic rejection
that really broke him. Oh yeah, Rose Hermione.
Yes. He was intensely in love with this young
woman in Nantes named Rose Hermione. He wrote
her dozens of these agonizingly earnest poems.
But in that era, marriage was largely an economic
transaction, wasn't it? Absolutely. Her parents
looked at this daydreaming young law student,
decided he had no financial future, and married
her off to a rich landowner who was ten years
older than her. Verne was absolute crushed. He
wrote this hallucination of a letter to his mother,
half drunk. By the way, describing his misery
in incredibly dark terms. It was a very dark
period for him. And if you look closely at his
bibliography, this early heartbreak permanently
scarred his writing. It sparked what literary
scholars call Hermione complex. The mechanics
of that complex are fascinating really. Throughout
his novels you constantly see young vibrant women
who are trapped in social cages. Always being
married off against their will. Frequently married
off against their will to Older, wealthy men,
yes. He was processing his own trauma by repeatedly
putting variations of Hermione into his fiction.
And it also gave him this lifelong anti -establishment
streak. It really fueled his rebellion. He developed
an intense aversion to the traditional paths
expected of him. And he harbored a real burning
grudge against the bourgeois society of Nantes
that had looked at him and deemed him unworthy.
So to escape that suffocating environment, he
runs away. But how did a depressed provincial
student actually manage to break into the elite
Parisian literary scene? Well, that refusal to
conform drove him to Paris in July of 1848, which
was an incredibly volatile time. He arrives right
in the middle of a literal revolution. Talk about
bad timing. Or maybe good timing. The barricades
had just gone up a month prior, blood was being
washed off the cobblestones, and the entire social
order was shifting. So he moves to this chaotic
Paris, uses some of his uncle's connections to
get into these fancy literary salons, and he
actually starts hanging out with Alexandre Dumas
-Fields. The Bohemian son of the famous author
of The Three Musketeers. Right. They even write
a stage comedy together. And finally, he tells
his dad flat out. I am not taking over your dusty
law practice. I can only find success in literature.
But as any aspiring artist knows, passion alone
does not pay the rent. That is the universal
truth. Even though he was writing plays and churning
out popular science articles for family magazines,
his financial situation was incredibly precarious.
He was essentially starving for his art. Here's
where it gets really interesting. Vern goes to
a wedding in Armenian and falls in love with
the bride's sister. a 26 -year -old widow with
two kids named Onoreen. He needed to prove he
was stable. Exactly. To win her family's favor,
he realizes the Bohemian playwright lifestyle
just isn't gonna cut it. He needs a real, steady,
respectable income. So he pivots completely.
So... The man we know as this great literary
visionary takes a full time job as the stockbroker
and agent to change on the Paris force. The contrast
between those two worlds is just jarring. I mean,
the 19th century Paris force was essentially
a screaming pit of men in top hats, chaotic and
entirely focused on cold, hard capital. Basically
becomes a modern side hustler. He really does.
Imagine the physical toll of this. He would wake
up at five in the morning every single day to
write and do research in the silent cavernous.
halls of the National Library. Before anyone
else was awake. He'd pour over geography and
science texts, obsessively copying facts onto
little index cards. And then, mid -morning, he'd
put on his suit and go to Wall Street, basically,
to scream trades on the stock exchange floor.
And he wasn't even that good at it. No. By all
accounts, his colleague said he was much better
at witty repartee and cracking jokes than he
was at actually doing the business of trading.
But those early mornings in the library were
the crucible for his genius. It was there he
met Jacques Arago, this brilliant, completely
blind explorer. Wow, a blind explorer. Think
about the poetry of that. A blind man teaching
Jules Verne how to see the world. Arago had traveled
the globe before losing his sight and wrote these
incredibly witty, detailed travel accounts. That
friendship really pushed Verne toward travel
writing, didn't it? It did. He started formulating
an idea for a new kind of book, a novel of science.
He wanted to take all those dry, factual, geographical
details he was hoarding on his index cards and
weave them into a fictional adventure. And that
leads to the ultimate turning point of his life,
meeting the publisher Pierre Jules Hensel. Hetzel
was an absolute heavyweight in the Parisian literary
scene. We're talking about the guy who published
Balzac, Victor Hugo, George Sand. So Verne brings
him a rough manuscript about a balloon journey
across Africa. And Hetzel sees the potential.
Hetzel gives him some notes. Verne revises it
in a frenzy over two weeks. And in 1863, Five
Weeks in a Balloon is published to massive success.
What's fascinating here is Hetzel's brilliant,
but highly controlling vision. He was a very
demanding boss. Very. Hetzel was launching a
family magazine, the magazine d 'éducation et
de récréation. He was essentially building the
19th century equivalent of a modern algorithmic
subscription service. Like Netflix for Victorian
families. Basically. He needed reliable, morally
uplifting educational content that families would
pay for month after month. And he saw in Verne
the absolute perfect vehicle for this master
plan. So he locks him in. He locked Vern into
a long term contract where Vern had to produce
three volumes a year for a flat fee. And thus
the famous Voyages Extraordinaire series was
born. Think of Hetzel like a modern cinematic
universe producer like Kevin Feige from Marvel.
That's a great comparison. Hetzel had a very
specific formula and he expected his creators
to stick to it. His stated goal for Verne was
terrifyingly ambitious. He wanted him to outline
all modern geographical, geological, physical,
and astronomical knowledge amassed by science
and weave it into entertaining stories. Verne
agreed, but he fully understood the impossible
scope of what he was signing up for. How could
you even do that? You couldn't. He once noted
that to actually leave a completed work behind
that covered the whole earth and universe, a
man would need to live to be at least 100 years
old. Now, to be fair, Hetzel gave Verne wealth.
He gave him international fame. He gave him a
yacht. A literal yacht. Yeah, Verne bought a
boat called the Saint Michelle and sailed around
Europe as his books blew up. But that success
came with immense creative compromising. Massive
compromise. And those compromises would alter
Verne's legacy forever. The relationship between
the artist and the publisher started out friendly,
but grew incredibly tense over time. Because
Hetzel was always thinking about the bottom line.
Always. He was aiming for a lucrative, family
-friendly market, which meant he frequently forced
Vern to change endings to make them more palatable.
Right, like in the adventures of Captain Hatteras.
Exactly. Vern originally wrote a deeply tragic
climax where the title character dies. Hetzel
said absolutely not. The hero has to survive
for the family audience. So Verne just had to
cave. He was forced to rewrite it, yes. And Hetzel
outright rejected an entire manuscript called
Paris in the 20th century. This is a massive
aha moment in Verne's history. It really changes
how you view him. Verne wrote this story in 1863,
said 100 years in the future. In 1960, it had
glass skyscrapers, gas -powered cars, a global
telegraph network that basically functioned like
the internet, and execution by electric chair.
He saw it all coming. He did, but the world was
miserable. It was a deeply pessimistic dystopia
where technological progress had completely killed
the arts and humanities. People were depressed
and alienated. And Hetzel's reaction to that
manuscript was visceral. He thought it was way
too subversive, depressing, and cynical for his
wholesome family magazine. He didn't want to
bum out the subscribers. Right. He called it
tabloid journalism and literally told Verne to
lock it in a safe. And he listened. And it stayed
there. The manuscript wasn't discovered and published
until 1994, over a century later. That is just
wild. But the most famous creative clash, I think,
was over 20 ,000 leagues under the seas. Oh,
the Captain Nemo debate. Yeah. Verne had initially
conceived of his famous submariner, Captain Nemo,
as a Pollock scientist. His motivations were
deeply political. Nemo was sinking ships seeking
vengeance against the Russians who had slaughtered
his family during the January uprising. But Hetzel
looked at the geopolitics and the sale sheets.
The spreadsheets ruined art again. Always. The
Russian Empire was a massive market for French
books. Hetzel basically said, we cannot make
the Russians the bad guys and alienate our biggest
buyers. So what do you want? He demanded Vern
make Nemo an enemy of the slave trade instead.
And Vern hated that. Vern fought him tooth and
nail. He felt it ruined the character's core
motivation. Finally, they reached a standoff
compromise where Captain Nemo's past is just
left entirely mysterious. Which works. But it
was a massive artistic concession. And as bad
as Hetzel's meddling was, it was a drop in the
bucket compared to the utter tragedy of the English
translation. Oh, the translations are a nightmare.
British and American publishers saw this massive
hit happening in France and just scrambled to
rush his books into print in English to make
a quick buck. It didn't care about the art. Not
at all. And they made a deliberate, calculated
business decision to market his books. only to
kids. This is where the real lasting damage to
his legacy was done. In Victorian England, education
and entertainment were heavily compartmentalized.
You couldn't really mix them. No, you either
read dense scientific texts or you read simple
adventure yarns. The English publishers looked
at Verne's mix of science and adventure and decided
it was just too complicated. So they dumbed it
down. They treated the books as cheap, juvenile
pulp. They hired translators who worked in extreme
haste, paying them by the word. To give you an
idea of how bad it was, these translators, like
Louis Page -Mercier, who was notoriously reviled
by Verne scholars, literally took scissors to
the text. Fiscal scissor! They stripped out the
complex science, they dumbed down the vocabulary,
and they removed any political nuance that might
offend British sensibilities. It was literary
butchery. The modern author Michael Creighton,
the guy who wrote Jurassic Park, was absolutely
outraged by this. He noted that Verne's original
French prose is lean, fast -moving, and very
modern. It is beautifully written. But Creighton
pointed out that these translators provided,
quote, clunky, choppy, tone -deaf prose. They
blithely altered the text, giving characters
new names, and sometimes added whole pages of
their own invention. If a paragraph had too much
math or physics, they just deleted it. Okay,
I have to ask on behalf of anyone listening right
now who is confused by this. If English readers
were fed this choppy tone -deaf prose that completely
erased his beautiful style and complex science,
how on earth did Jules Verne become the second
most translated author in the entire world? It
seems impossible, doesn't it? Right. Since 1979,
he's ranked right between Agatha Christie and
William Shakespeare. How does a botched, heavily
censored translation become that globally popular?
If we connect this to the bigger picture, it
perfectly explains the complete bifurcation of
his legacy, the pure narrative thrust of his
stories, a submarine journey, a trip around the
world traveling to the center of the earth, those
conceptual hooks. are so universally compelling
that they survived even the worst translations.
The ideas were just too good. Exactly. The bare
bones of the plot were enough to hook the English
-speaking world. But while English audiences
were getting bad comic book style summaries,
the French were reading a brilliant, sophisticated,
stylistic artist. That split identity between
being dismissed as a popular children's entertainer
in the Anglosphere, while desperately wanting
to be considered a serious artist in his homeland,
really plagued him. It haunted him his whole
life. He once gave an interview late in life
where he said, the great regret of my life is
that I have never taken any place in French literature.
It's heartbreaking. He saw himself as an artist
in pursuit of an ideal, but the critical establishment
of his time heavyweights like Emile Zola snubbed
him. Because of the genre. Because he wrote popular
science fiction, yeah, he wasn't even nominated
for the Academy Fonses. And the irony is, as
he aged, his reality grew much darker and more
restrictive than any of his fictions. The later
years of his life are incredibly tragic. Think
about the irony here. The man who wrote about
boundless exploration and traversing the globe
spent his final years physically trapped. The
incident with his nephew? Yeah. In 1886, as he
was walking home, his 26 -year -old nephew Gaston,
who suffered from severe mental illness, shot
at him twice with a pistol. Out of nowhere! One
bullet hit Vern in the left leg. The bullet could
never be removed, leaving him with a painful
permanent limp for the rest of his life. Gaston
spent the rest of his life in an asylum. And
shortly after that trauma, both his mother and
his controlling publisher Hetzel died. So his
whole world just collapsed. Without Hetzel there
to enforce the cheerful family magazine mandate,
Vern's later works became noticeably darker,
more cynical, and much more critical of human
nature. And his health was fading fast, too.
His health rapidly declined. He suffered from
chronic diabetes, excruciating stomach cramps
that he had had since his youth, and he lived
with the terror of facial paralysis. That sounds
awful. When he finally died in 1905, it was from
diabetes and complications from a stroke that
paralyzed his right side. And even in death,
his work wasn't safe from being tampered with.
Oh, his son, Michelle. Yeah, his son, Michelle,
who he had a very strained relationship with
early on, took over his posthumous manuscripts.
Michelle made it. extensive entirely unapproved
changes to his father's final stories before
publishing them. He could have helped himself.
He rewrote chapters, added characters, and changed
tones. The original versions weren't restored
until the late 20th century. It's a legacy built
on layers of alteration by his publisher, by
his translators, and finally by his own son.
It's unbelievable. But perhaps the most persistent
myth we need to dismantle before we wrap up is
the idea of Jules Verne as a magical prophet
of the future. Yes, because people always point
to and say he predicted submarines. He predicted
the moon landing. He's a psychic visionary. Verne
flatly denied it. He famously said, I have invented
nothing. He hated that label, didn't he? He was
actually quite annoyed by the title of Profit.
He said any connection between scientific developments
and his work was mere coincidence. But what does
this all mean? Honestly, knowing he just aggressively
scraped data from 5 .0 AM library sessions kind
of ruins the magic for me. You think so? I mean,
it makes him sound less like a visionary genius
and more like a 19th century Wikipedia crawler.
Does that diminish his legacy? Not at all. In
fact, his synthesis of information is actually
far more impressive than magical prophecy. Oh,
so. Well, data without narrative is just a textbook.
Anyone can make a wild guess about the future.
But Verne took the hard, dry facts of thermodynamics,
geography, and engineering and gave them a soul.
He made them exciting. He wove them into narratives
that felt entirely plausible. He taught generations
how to dream using the actual building blocks
of real science. That makes a lot of sense. It's
why his work directly inspired real world pioneers.
Like Yuri Gagarin, the first human in space.
Wernher von Braun, the aerospace engineer. The
polar explorer Richard E. Byrd. They didn't cite
a textbook as their inspiration. They specifically
cited Jules Verne. Exactly. Ray Bradbury summed
it up perfectly when he said, we are all, in
one way or another, the children of Jules Verne.
And he essentially spawned the entire steampunk
genre just by glamorizing 19th century technology.
And thankfully, he finally got his literary vindication.
In the 1960s and 70s, a massive Jules Verne cult
emerged in France. The critics finally came around.
They did. Heavyweight literary critics and philosophers
like Roland Barthes and Michel started rigorously
studying his texts. They finally recognized what
the English translations had obscured. His stylistic
innovations. His innovations, his deep thematic
resonance, and his complex views on humanity,
they elevated him to his rightful place in the
legitimate French literary canon. Which is amazing.
So to quickly recap this incredible journey,
we started with a heartbroken provincial law
student staring out at ships on the River Loire.
A long way from where he ended up. He defies
his domineering father, becomes an overworked
stockbroker, leading a grueling double life,
and transforms into a commercially controlled
superstar. With a yacht. With a yacht. A man
whose true literary genius, psychological depth,
and complex worldview were hidden from English
readers for an entire century beneath bad translations
and greedy marketing. It's a powerful reminder
of how fragile an artist's legacy really is and
how heavily it relies on the people who package,
translate, and distribute their work. Which brings
me back to you listening right now. Think about
the classic books or the childhood heroes or
the foundational stories you hold dear. The ones
that really shaped you. Are you remembering the
true complex story or are you remembering an
abridged culturally altered version handed down
to you by someone who is just trying to sell
a product? It is a question worth asking every
time we consume a piece of classic media. What
was left on the cutting room floor and who decided
to cut it? And I want to leave you with one final
thought to mull over. Consider the fact that
his publisher, Hetzel, completely rejected Verne's
manuscript, Paris in the 20th century, because
its pessimistic view of technological progress
was deemed too subversive and depressing for
families to read. That decision changed everything.
If the man who is universally hailed today as
the enthusiastic visionary father of science
fiction was secretly terrified that technology
would eventually strip the world of its humanity,
what does that say about our own blind obsession
with innovation today? It's a chilling thought.
Maybe the indie filmmaker was trying to warn
us all along, but we were just too busy watching
the Saturday morning cartoons to notice.