Victor Hugo

Life

Victor-Marie Hugo was born in Besançon in 1802, the third son of an officer in Napoleon’s army who rose to general and a royalist mother from whom he took his early politics. He was writing verse by his teens, won academic prizes before he was twenty, and received a pension from Louis XVIII for his first collection of odes in 1822, the year he married Adèle Foucher.

Through the 1820s and 1830s Hugo became the leader of the French Romantic movement. The preface to his play Cromwell (1827) was its manifesto, and the riotous opening of Hernani in 1830 its public battle. The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831) made him famous across Europe. He wrote plays, poetry and fiction at a great rate, was elected to the Académie française in 1841 and made a peer of France in 1845. His daughter Léopoldine drowned with her husband in 1843, a loss that marks his later poetry. His politics moved leftward: he was elected to the National Assembly after the 1848 revolution, broke with Louis-Napoléon, and after the coup of December 1851 fled France.

Hugo spent nineteen years in exile, in Brussels, Jersey and finally Guernsey, refusing an amnesty and writing his most important work there: the poems of Les Châtiments and Les Contemplations, and the novels Les Misérables (1862), Toilers of the Sea (1866) and The Man Who Laughs (1869). He returned to Paris on the fall of the Second Empire in 1870, lived through the siege and the Commune, and served as senator. He died in Paris in 1885 and was given a state funeral attended by an estimated two million people before burial in the Panthéon.

Literary significance

Hugo is the dominant figure of nineteenth-century French literature: its leading Romantic poet, a playwright who changed the rules of the French stage, and a novelist whose two great books, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame and Les Misérables, are known worldwide. In France he is valued first as a poet; abroad he is read mainly for the novels. Les Misérables in particular combined melodrama, social argument and historical panorama on a scale that few novels have matched, and its continuing life on stage and screen has made its characters common property. Hugo was also a public conscience, campaigning against the death penalty and for the poor, for a united Europe and for press freedom, and his funeral was a national event.

Where to start

Les Misérables, in our catalog in Isabel Florence Hapgood’s translation, is the central book, though it asks for time. The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, also in our catalog, is shorter and moves faster, and is a good first Hugo for readers wary of the longer novel.