Victor Hugo

Victor-Marie Hugo was born on February 26, 1802 in Besançon, a garrison town in eastern France, the third son of Joseph Léopold Sigisbert Hugo, an officer in Napoleon's army, and Sophie Trébuchet, a woman of Breton origin ^[1]. His father's military postings pulled the family across Europe during Victor's childhood, with stays in Italy and Spain, while his parents' marriage steadily fell apart. His mother eventually settled with the children in Paris, and the boy grew up largely under her influence, absorbing her royalist sympathies before forming his own very different politics as an adult ^[2].

Hugo was a precocious student. He studied at the Pension Cordier and the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, filling notebooks with verse while still a schoolboy. At fifteen he received an honourable mention in a poetry competition held by the Académie française, and prizes from the Académie des Jeux floraux in Toulouse followed soon after ^[1]. According to a story he told throughout his life, he had resolved as a teenager to be "Chateaubriand or nothing", taking the most famous French writer of the day as his measure ^[2].

In 1819 Victor and his brothers founded a review, Le Conservateur littéraire, which gave him an early platform. His first collection, Odes et poésies diverses, appeared in 1822 when he was twenty, and it earned him a royal pension from Louis XVIII ^[1]. That income allowed him to marry his childhood sweetheart, Adèle Foucher, the same year. Any Victor Hugo biography has to begin with this striking fact: he was a professional, recognised writer before he could legally be called an adult for very long.

During the 1820s Hugo moved from the royalist classicism of his first odes toward the new Romantic sensibility, and he soon became its most forceful French champion. The preface he attached to his 1827 verse drama Cromwell rejected the rigid rules of classical French theatre, arguing that art should mix the grotesque and the sublime as life does. The essay circulated far beyond the play itself and became a manifesto for a generation of young writers ^[2].

The decisive battle came in February 1830, when his play Hernani opened at the Comédie-Française. Supporters of Romanticism and defenders of classical convention clashed noisily in the theatre over successive performances, an episode remembered as the battle of Hernani. The play's success settled the argument in favour of the Romantics and confirmed Hugo, still in his twenties, as the movement's leader ^[1].

He followed it in 1831 with the novel Notre-Dame de Paris, known in English as The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, a sweeping story set around the medieval cathedral in 1482. The book was an immediate popular success, and its loving attention to Gothic architecture helped fuel public interest in preserving the neglected cathedral, which underwent a major restoration under Eugène Viollet-le-Duc in the following decades ^[3]. Through the 1830s Hugo also published a stream of poetry collections, including Les Feuilles d'automne and Les Chants du crépuscule, that fixed his reputation as the leading poet of his age ^[1].

Hugo's standing brought official honours early. He was elected to the Académie française in 1841 after several failed attempts, and in 1845 King Louis-Philippe made him a peer of France, giving him a seat in the upper chamber ^[1]. After the revolution of 1848 he won election to the National Assembly of the Second Republic. Initially a conservative, he shifted leftward in office, speaking against poverty, in favour of free education, and, notably for his time, against the death penalty, a cause he had already argued in his 1829 novella Le Dernier Jour d'un condamné ^[2].

When Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte seized power in the coup of December 1851, Hugo denounced him and had to flee France. He settled first in Brussels, then on the Channel Islands, in Jersey and from 1855 in Guernsey, where he bought Hauteville House and lived until 1870 ^[4]. Exile sharpened rather than silenced him. He published Napoléon le Petit, a scathing pamphlet against the new emperor, and Les Châtiments (1853), a book of satirical verse attacking the Second Empire. The great poetry collections Les Contemplations (1856) and the first series of La Légende des siècles (1859) also date from these years ^[1].

The summit of his exile, and among the most read of all Victor Hugo achievements, was Les Misérables, published in 1862 after decades of intermittent work. The vast novel follows the former convict Jean Valjean through post-Napoleonic France, taking in the justice system, urban poverty, the 1832 Paris insurrection, and much else. Launched with an international publicity campaign unusual for its era, it sold rapidly and was translated widely within months ^[5]. He remained productive afterward, publishing Les Travailleurs de la mer (1866), set among Guernsey fishermen, and L'Homme qui rit (1869).

Hugo married Adèle Foucher in 1822, and the couple had five children: Léopold, who died in infancy, Léopoldine, Charles, François-Victor, and Adèle ^[1]. The household was complicated. From 1833 Hugo maintained a lifelong relationship with the actress Juliette Drouet, who followed him into exile and served for decades as his companion, copyist, and correspondent, writing him thousands of letters ^[2].

Grief marked the middle of his life. In September 1843 his eldest daughter Léopoldine drowned in the Seine at Villequier with her young husband, only months after her wedding. Hugo, travelling in the south of France, learned of her death from a newspaper. The loss haunted his poetry for years, most famously in poems of Les Contemplations, a collection he organised around the rupture of 1843 ^[1]. His youngest daughter Adèle later suffered severe mental illness and spent much of her life in institutions; her story inspired the 1975 François Truffaut film The Story of Adele H ^[2].

For all his fame as a man of letters, Hugo was also a gifted visual artist. He produced several thousand drawings, many in ink and wash, experimenting with stains, stencils and unconventional materials. He kept this work mostly private during his lifetime, but artists including Eugène Delacroix admired it, and the drawings are now held in collections such as the Maisons de Victor Hugo in Paris and Guernsey ^[4].

Hugo refused the amnesty Napoleon III offered exiled opponents in 1859, declaring that he would return only when liberty returned. The chance came with the collapse of the Second Empire after the French defeat at Sedan in 1870. He arrived back in Paris on September 5, 1870, one day after the Republic was proclaimed, and crowds greeted him at the railway station ^[1]. He remained in the city through the Prussian siege that winter, sharing its privations.

His last political career was uneven. Elected to the National Assembly in 1871, he resigned within weeks, frustrated by the conservative majority. He was defeated in later contests but won election to the Senate in 1876, where he campaigned for amnesty for the imprisoned and deported Communards, a cause that finally succeeded in 1880 ^[2]. These years also brought private sorrow: his sons Charles and François-Victor both died in the early 1870s, and Juliette Drouet died in 1883.

He kept writing. Quatrevingt-treize (1874), his final novel, examined the Terror of 1793 during the French Revolution, and the poetry collection L'Art d'être grand-père (1877) drew on his devotion to his grandchildren Georges and Jeanne, whose guardian he had become ^[1]. His eightieth year, 1881, was celebrated almost as a national festival, with a huge procession passing beneath his windows on the avenue that was soon renamed Avenue Victor-Hugo in his honour ^[2].

Victor Hugo died of pneumonia in Paris on May 22, 1885, at the age of 83. The Republic gave him a state funeral: his coffin lay in state beneath the Arc de Triomphe, and enormous crowds, commonly estimated at well over a million people, followed the procession to the Panthéon, where he was interred ^[1]. In a gesture consistent with his politics, he had asked to be carried in a pauper's hearse.

His literary influence has proved as durable as his fame. In France he remains a central school author, quoted across the political spectrum, and his poetry shaped successors from the Symbolists onward. Abroad he is known above all as a novelist: Les Misérables and Notre-Dame de Paris have never gone out of print and have generated a long line of adaptations, including the 1980 stage musical by Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil that became one of the longest running shows in theatre history after its 1985 London opening ^[5].

Hugo's civic legacy is broad. His campaigns against the death penalty and for free education, press freedom and a united Europe made him a reference point for later reformers, and his 1849 speech to a Paris peace congress imagining a "United States of Europe" is still cited in debates about European integration ^[2]. Streets bear his name in cities across the French-speaking world, and his houses in Paris's Place des Vosges and in Guernsey operate as museums ^[4]. Among the more curious Victor Hugo facts is his status in the Vietnamese religion of Cao Dai, which venerates him as a saint. Few writers anywhere have been folded so completely into a nation's identity.