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50 free Jules Verne trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Jules Verne trivia quiz covers the Frenchman behind Journey to the Center of the Earth, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas and Around the World in Eighty Days. The easy questions cover the famous titles, the birthplace on the Loire, the publisher who launched him, the nationality, the 'father of science fiction' tag and the astronaut who quoted him on the way back from the Moon. From there it moves through the life: the cabin-boy legend, the law degree his father demanded, the salons and Alexandre Dumas, the theatre secretary job, the Paris Bourse, the yachts all named Saint-Michel and the fifteen years as an Amiens town councillor. The harder end covers the rejected Paris in the Twentieth Century, the argument over Captain Nemo's nationality, the Hetzel contract of three volumes a year, the nephew who shot him in the leg, the notorious 1872 English translation, the Onze-sans-femme dining club, and his ranking between Agatha Christie and Shakespeare in the world's translation league table. Every answer was checked against Verne's encyclopaedia entry before publishing and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our science fiction and classic literature quizzes are the natural next stop.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which French city was Jules Verne born in 1828?
Nantes
He was born on Île Feydeau, then an artificial island in the Loire, in his grandmother's house.
Q 02What was the profession of Verne's father, Pierre?
Avoué (a lawyer)
He expected his firstborn to inherit the family practice and was dismayed when Jules refused it in 1852.
Q 03Verne's first teacher told pupils her long-lost husband would return like which fictional character?
Robinson Crusoe
The castaway theme, or robinsonade, stayed with him through The Mysterious Island and The School for Robinsons.
Q 04According to a famous legend, why did the 11-year-old Verne try to stow away on the ship Coralie?
To bring back a coral necklace for his cousin
The tale, in which his father caught him at Paimbœuf and made him promise to travel only in his imagination, was invented by his niece and first biographer.
Q 05What did Verne and his uncle play endlessly, later memorialised in The Will of an Eccentric?
The Game of the Goose
The game shapes The Will of an Eccentric (1900), while the uncle's name went into Robur the Conqueror.
Q 06What grade did Verne receive in his baccalauréat at Rennes in 1846?
'Good Enough'
By 19 he was writing verse tragedies in the style of his idol, whom he could recite by the page.
Q 07What subject did Verne's father send him to Paris to study in 1847?
Law
He got his licence en droit in 1851 while writing plays and haunting literary salons.
Q 08The young Verne memorised pages of Notre Dame de Paris. Whose dramatic works did he say most influenced him?
Victor Hugo
He arrived in Paris during the 1848 revolution and used family connections to enter the salons.
Q 09Verne's recurring facial paralysis was actually caused by what?
Inflammation of the middle ear
He never knew the cause; he also suffered violent stomach cramps that scholars now think were colitis.
Q 10Which famous author's son helped Verne revise his comedy The Broken Straws and get it staged in 1850?
Alexandre Dumas fils
The elder Dumas later encouraged Verne's idea of a 'novel of science'.
Q 11Which magazine published Verne's first short stories in 1851?
Musée des familles
Editor Pitre-Chevalier wanted accessible science and geography; Verne called 'A Voyage in a Balloon' the first sign of the line he would follow.
Q 12What job did Verne take at the Théâtre Lyrique in the early 1850s?
Secretary
It paid little or nothing, but let him stage comic operas with Aristide Hignard and Michel Carré.
Q 13What was the name of the bachelors' dining club Verne founded with ten friends?
Onze-sans-femme
'Eleven Without Women'; by the time he was a stockbroker, all eleven had married.
Q 21How many volumes a year did Verne's long-term contract with Hetzel oblige him to deliver?
Three
Hetzel bought each outright for a flat fee, and most were serialised first in his Magasin d'Éducation et de Récréation.
Q 22What collective name did Hetzel give Verne's novel sequence in 1866?
Voyages extraordinaires
The stated aim was to outline all the geographical, geological, physical and astronomical knowledge of modern science.
Q 23How did Verne change the ending of The Adventures of Captain Hatteras at Hetzel's request?
The hero survives instead of dying
Q 14Which blind geographer and explorer became Verne's friend and steered him toward travel writing?
Jacques Arago
Arago had lost his sight completely in 1837 but kept travelling.
Q 15Whom did Verne marry in January 1857?
Honorine Morel, a widow with two children
He met her at her sister's wedding, where he was best man, in the town he would later settle in.
Q 16What full-time job did Verne take after his marriage, writing early each morning before work?
Stockbroker's agent on the Paris Bourse
A colleague recalled that he 'did better in repartee than in business'.
Q 17Where did Verne make his first trip outside France, in 1858?
Liverpool and Scotland
It became the semi-autobiographical Backwards to Britain, unpublished until 1989.
Q 18What was the name of Verne's only biological son, born in 1861?
Michel
Verne was on a trip to Scandinavia and missed the birth; the son later married an actress against his wishes and ran up debts.
Q 19Hetzel, the publisher who took on Verne in 1862, already published which three authors?
Balzac, Sand and Hugo
He planned a family magazine mixing fiction with science and saw Verne as the ideal contributor.
Q 20What was Verne's first published novel, released by Hetzel on 31 January 1863?
Five Weeks in a Balloon
He said he wrote it 'not as a story about ballooning, but as a story about Africa'.
Early on he accepted almost every change Hetzel suggested; that changed after the fight over Captain Nemo.
Q 24Which pessimistic Verne novel did Hetzel reject as too subversive, leaving it unpublished until 1994?
Paris in the Twentieth Century
His great-grandson found the manuscript in 1989.
Q 25Verne originally made Captain Nemo a scientist of which nationality, out for revenge on Russia?
Polish
Hetzel feared losing the Russian market; the compromise was to leave Nemo's past mysterious.
Q 26In which newspaper did Around the World in Eighty Days first appear in 1872?
Le Temps
Most of Verne's wealth came from the stage versions of it and of a Russian-courier drama written with Adolphe d'Ennery.
Q 27What name did Verne give to each of his successive boats?
Saint-Michel
Aboard the Saint-Michel III he sailed around Europe.
Q 28Who shot Verne twice with a pistol in March 1886, leaving him with a permanent limp?
His nephew Gaston
The incident was kept out of the press; the 26-year-old spent the rest of his life in an asylum.
Q 29To which body was Verne elected in 1888, serving for fifteen years?
Amiens town council
After the deaths of his mother and Hetzel in 1886 his books also grew darker.
Q 30In which city did Verne die in March 1905?
Amiens
His street, 44 Boulevard Longueville, is now Boulevard Jules-Verne; he had diabetes and a stroke had paralysed his right side.