Victor Hugo

Victor Hugo was a French poet, novelist and playwright, the leading figure of French Romanticism and the author of Notre-Dame de Paris and Les Misérables. Over a career of more than sixty years he moved from royalism to republicanism, spent nineteen years in exile as the most famous opponent of Napoleon III, and died a national hero, given a state funeral attended by around two million people.

Victor-Marie Hugo was born on 26 February 1802 in Besançon, in eastern France, the third son of Léopold Hugo, an officer who rose to be a general in the armies of Napoleon, and Sophie Trébuchet, who was royalist in sympathy. His parents separated, and he spent his childhood mostly in Paris with his mother, with spells following his father to Italy and to Spain, where Napoleon's brother Joseph was king. The fall of the First French Empire in 1814 and 1815 brought back the Bourbon kings, and the young Hugo began as a royalist and Catholic poet. His first collection, Odes, appeared in 1822 and earned him a pension from Louis XVIII. In the same year he married his childhood friend Adèle Foucher; they had five children.

By the late 1820s Hugo was at the centre of a group of young writers who rejected the strict rules of French classical drama. The preface to his play Cromwell (1827) became their manifesto, calling for theatre that mixed the sublime and the grotesque as life does. The premiere of his verse drama Hernani in February 1830 turned into a noisy contest between his supporters and the defenders of tradition, remembered as the battle of Hernani, and was taken as the victory of Romanticism on the French stage. He had already written The Last Day of a Condemned Man (1829), a short novel against the death penalty, a cause he defended all his life.

His novel Notre-Dame de Paris (1831), known in English as The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, is set in fifteenth-century Paris and tells of the gypsy dancer Esmeralda, the deaf bell-ringer Quasimodo and the archdeacon Frollo. The book was also a plea for the city's neglected Gothic buildings and helped stir the movement that led to the restoration of the cathedral. Through the 1830s he published several volumes of lyric poetry and plays such as Ruy Blas (1838). In 1833 he began a relationship with the actress Juliette Drouet, which lasted until her death fifty years later. He was elected to the Académie française in 1841. In 1843 his eldest daughter Léopoldine drowned with her new husband in the Seine at Villequier, a loss that marked much of his later poetry.

Under the July Monarchy of Louis-Philippe, Hugo was made a peer of France in 1845. After the revolution of 1848 he was elected to the assembly of the new Second Republic, where he moved steadily to the left, speaking against poverty, for free schooling and universal suffrage, and against the death penalty. He at first supported Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte for president, but turned against him. When Louis-Napoléon seized full power in a coup on 2 December 1851, Hugo tried to organise resistance in Paris and then fled to Brussels.

Hugo spent the next nineteen years outside France, first in Belgium, then from 1852 on Jersey and from 1855 on Guernsey, in the Channel Islands, where he bought Hauteville House. He attacked the new emperor, Napoleon III, in the pamphlet Napoléon le Petit (1852) and the satirical poems Les Châtiments (1853), and refused an amnesty in 1859, saying he would return only when liberty did. Exile was also his most productive period. He published Les Contemplations (1856), poems of love and mourning, and the first series of La Légende des siècles (1859), an epic history of humanity in verse.

Les Misérables, published in 1862, follows Jean Valjean, a former convict imprisoned for stealing bread, who is redeemed by an act of mercy from a bishop and spends his life doing good while being hunted by the police inspector Javert. Around him are the factory worker Fantine, forced into prostitution, her daughter Cosette, the street boy Gavroche and the student Marius, who fights on the barricades of the Paris uprising of June 1832. Hugo filled the book with digressions on Waterloo, the Paris sewers and convents, and with his argument that poverty and ignorance, not wickedness, are the main causes of crime. It was an immediate success across Europe and America. He followed it with The Toilers of the Sea (1866), set on Guernsey, and The Man Who Laughs (1869).

Napoleon III's empire collapsed after his defeat by Prussia at Sedan in September 1870, in the war that completed the unification of Germany. On 5 September, the day after the republic was proclaimed, Hugo returned to Paris to a hero's welcome and lived through the Prussian siege of the city. He was elected to the National Assembly in 1871 but soon resigned. He did not support the Paris Commune, but after its bloody suppression he called for an amnesty for the Communards and offered them refuge in his Brussels home. His last novel, Ninety-Three (1874), is set in the counter-revolutionary war in the Vendée during the French Revolution. He became a senator of the Third Republic in 1876 and was celebrated in old age as the grandfather of the nation, also known for a popular book of poems about his grandchildren. He had outlived Adèle, who died in 1868, and all but one of his children; his younger daughter, also named Adèle, spent most of her life in an asylum.

Hugo died in Paris on 22 May 1885, aged eighty-three. Although he had asked for a pauper's hearse, he was given a state funeral; his coffin lay in state under the Arc de Triomphe and was then carried to the Panthéon, which was converted back from a church for the purpose. He remains one of the most widely read French writers. In France he is honoured above all as a poet and as a symbol of the republic, while abroad he is known mostly for his two great novels, which have been adapted many times, including the long-running musical version of Les Misérables. He was also a talented artist, producing several thousand drawings, many in ink and wash. The history of France in the nineteenth century, from Napoleon to the Third Republic, runs through his life and his books. Among the novelists who admired him was Leo Tolstoy, who ranked Les Misérables among the greatest of novels, and his use of fiction to protest against poverty and injustice placed him alongside contemporaries such as Charles Dickens.