Victor Hugo

Victor Hugo (1802-1885), French poet, novelist, and playwright, whose voluminous works provided the single greatest impetus to the romantic movement.

Hugo was born on February 26, 1802, in Besançon, and was educated both privately and in Paris schools. He was a precocious child, deciding at an early age to become a writer. In 1817 he was honored by the French Academy for a poem, and five years later, he published his first volume of poetry, Odes et poésies diverses (Miscellaneous Odes and Poems). This was followed by the novels Han d'Islande (Han of Iceland, 1823) and Bug-Jargal (1824), and the poems Odes et ballades (Odes and Ballads, 1826). In the preface to his long historical drama Cromwell (1827), Hugo made a plea for freedom from the classical restrictions. The plea quickly became the manifesto of the romantic school. Censors banned Hugo's second drama, Marion de Lorme (1829; trans. 1872), based on the life of a 17th-century French courtesan. Hugo answered the ban on February 25, 1830, when his poetic drama, Hernani, had a tumultuous premiere that ensured the success of romanticism. Hernani was adapted by the Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi for his opera Ernani (1844).

The period 1829-1843 was the most productive of Hugo's career. His great historical novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831; trans. 1833), a tale set in 15th-century Paris, made him popular and brought him, in 1841, election to the French Academy. In another novel of this period, Claude Gueux (1834), he eloquently indicted the French penal and social systems. He wrote several well-received volumes of lyric poetry, including Les Orientales (1829), Les feuilles d'automne (Autumn Leaves, 1831), Les chants du crépuscule (Songs of Twilight, 1835), Les voix intérieures (Inner Voices, 1837), and Les rayons et les ombres (Sunbeams and Shadows, 1840). His dramatic successes included Le roi s'amuse (The King Amuses Himself, 1832), adapted by Verdi for the opera Rigoletto (1851); the prose drama Lucrèce Borgia (1833); and the melodrama Ruy Blas (1838; trans. 1850). Les burgraves (The Governors, 1843), however, was a complete failure.

Hugo's disappointment over Les burgraves was overshadowed in the same year by the drowning of one of his daughters and her husband. He turned from poetry and took a more active role in politics. He had been raised in a Bonapartist home, and as a young man he had become a Royalist. In 1845 he was made a peer of France by King Louis Philippe, but by the time of the Revolution of 1848, Hugo was a Republican. In 1851, following the unsuccessful revolt against President Louis Napoleon, later Emperor Napoleon III, Hugo fled to Belgium. In 1855 he began a 15-year-long exile on the island of Guernsey.

While in exile Hugo wrote the fiercely scurrilous verse satire, Napoléon le petit (The Little Napoleon, 1852), the satiric poems Les châtiments (Punishments, 1853), the volume of lyric verse Les contemplations (1856), and the first volume of his epic poem La légende des siècles (The Legend of the Ages, 1859-1883). On Guernsey he completed his longest and most famous work, Les misérables (1862; trans. 1862), a novel that vividly describes and condemns the social injustice of 19th-century France.

Hugo returned to France after the collapse of the Second Empire in 1870, and resumed his role in politics. He was elected first to the National Assembly and later to the Senate. Among the most notable works of the final 15 years of his life are Ninety-Three (1874; trans. 1874), a novel about the French Revolution; and L'art d'être grand-père (The Art of Being a Grandfather, 1877), lyric poems of his family life.

Hugo's works set a standard for the rhetorical and poetic taste of generations of French youth, and he is still considered one of the finest French poets. After his death on May 22, 1885, in Paris, his body lay in state under the Arc de Triomphe and was later borne, in accord with his wishes, on a pauper's hearse and buried in the Panthéon, the burial place of many famous French citizens.