MOBILE videophones, gigantic flying buses, lone sailors circumnavigating the world in 50 days and an aviator performing the feat in three, were all foreseen in the 19th century by Jules Verne.

The prolific visionary of high-tech adventure is still a household name thanks to Hollywood, but it has taken a century for France to accord full honour to the writer who fired the enthusiasm of schoolboys around the world.

This week, the centenary of his death, France and Vernologists around the world have been saluting a typical genius of his age, who was a mixture of prophet, artist, businesman, yachtsman and provincial gentleman.

Amiens, the Picardy capital where Verne lived and served as a councillor, is the focus of the celebrations which have included the publication of 90 biographies and fulsome homage on the internet.

Verne failed to foresee the internet, but he is being credited with paternity of the information society. In 1863 he predicted in In the 20th Century that in 1955 people would be chatting with friends on Mars with “telephonoscopes” or “intercontinental voice-carriers” with pictures. He also imagined helicopters, aeroplanes and the first Moon rocket. The French are happy to note that he astutely predicted the European Union in 1889, writing about a future European “league” set up to “confront the common enemy, otherwise known as The American Company”.

In a flood of tributes to the author of Around the World in 80 Days, 20,000 Leagues under the Sea and Verne’s other Voyages Extraordinaires this week, Le Monde said: “We are all the heirs of Jules Verne. We have all travelled with Phileas Fogg or walked on the ocean floor with Captain Nemo.”

In his lifetime, Verne was treated with disdain as a scribbler of ripping yarns for adolescents. Though an international celebrity in later life, he was shunned — like Marcel Proust and Emile Zola — by the Academie Francaise. He did not frequent Paris, visiting his publisher only occasionally, when he would steam up the Seine from the Channel aboard le Saint-Michel, his yacht, and dock by the Pont des Arts.

Michel Butor, a leading French novelist and Vernophile, said this week: “I have always seen him as a great writer, the equal of Balzac and Zola. His output as a novelist was of the same stature. Verne’s adventures become poetic.”

The modern view of Verne is that he was a “novelist of anticipation” who was imbued with all the scientific optimism of his age but who dealt with the human condition as imaginatively as his illustrious contemporaries. He did not so much prophesy inventions as use his imagination to extrapolate the science of his age.

He was a passionate enthusiast for technology, crossing the Atlantic on Brunel’s Great Eastern steamship and pillaging the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1867 for ideas. Prototype submarines and diving suits were on display, as was electric propulsion, which Verne used for Captain Nemo’s Nautilus.

Verne said he always tried to “describe the Earth in the form of a novel.”

Jean-Paul Dekiss, director of the International Jules Verne Centre at Amiens, said: “Les Voyages Extraordinaires can be read as a mythology of the ideology of progress. Verne was not a philosopher, not a man of ideas, but a writer who recounts to us the world that he has dreamed up.”

Sometimes the artistic comparisons are a little stretched. His 1877 novel The Underground City, about a colony living in a coalmine below the Trossachs, is being compared with Germinal, Zola’s masterpiece on the misery of the mines in northern France. A Scottish critic dismissed Verne’s romantic tale as “more like Brigadoon with Davey lamps”.

Verne’s Gallic worship of scientific prowess continues with French leadership in Airbus, the Ariane rocket and TGV high-speed trains. He was also fascinated by Britain and its tradition of the gentleman adventurer, although he was not a great anglophile.

Phileas Fogg, the ultimate Verne hero, began his epic world circuit from the Reform Club on a wager with fellow members.

Verne’s English translators did not treat him kindly. Jean-Michel Margot, a Swiss writer based in North Carolina who heads the North American Jules Verne Society, said: “Verne was massacred by the English translators in the Victorian age. Whenever one of his British characters turned out to be not very nice, he was erased or turned into a German.”

VIE DE VERNE

Wrote more than 50 books, including Five Weeks in a Balloon (1863) and A Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864)

At least 98 films made from his books, including the earliest sci-fi film, Le Voyage dans la Lune (1902)

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