Victor Hugo

Novelist, poet, dramatist, essayist, idealist politician, and leader of the French Romantic movement from 1830 on, Victor-Marie Hugo was born the youngest of three sons in Besançon, France, on February 26, 1802. Victor’s early childhood was turbulent: His father, Joseph-Léopold, traveled frequently as a general in Napoleon Bonaparte’s army, forcing the family to move throughout France, Italy, and Spain. Weary of this upheaval, Hugo’s wife, Sophie, separated from her husband and settled with her three sons in Paris. Victor’s brilliance declared itself early in the form of illustrations, plays, and nationally recognized verse. Against his mother’s wishes, the passionate young man fell in love and secretly became engaged to his neighbor, Adèle Foucher. Following the death of Sophie Hugo, and self-supporting thanks to a royal pension granted for his first book of odes, Hugo wed Adèle in 1822.

In the 1820s and 30s, Hugo came into his own as a writer and figurehead of the new Romanticism, a movement that sought to liberate literature from its stultifying classical influences. His preface to the play Cromwell, in 1827, proclaimed a new aesthetics inspired by Shakespeare and Velazquez, based on the shock effects of juxtaposing the grotesque with the sublime (for example, the deformed hunchback inhabiting the magnificent cathedral of Notre Dame). The play Hernani incited violent public disturbances among scandalized audiences in 1830. The next year, the great success of Notre-Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre Dame) confirmed Hugo’s primacy among the Romantics.

By 1830 the Hugos had four children. Exhausted from her pregnancies and Hugo’s insatiable sexual demands, Adèle began to sleep alone, and soon fell in love with Hugo’s best friend, the critic Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve. They began an affair. The Hugos stayed together as friends, and in 1833 Hugo met the actress Juliette Drouet, who would remain his primary mistress until her death fifty years later.

Personal tragedy pursued Hugo relentlessly. His jealous brother Eugène went permanently insane at Victor’s wedding to Adèle. Three of Victor’s children died before him. His favorite, Léopoldine, together with her unborn child and her devoted husband, died at nineteen in a boating accident on the Seine. The one survivor, Adèle (named after her mother), would be institutionalized for more than thirty years.

Hugo’s early royalist sympathies shifted toward liberalism during the late 1820s under the influences of the fiery liberal priest Félic ite de Lamennais; of his close friend Charles Nodier, an ardent opponent of capital punishment; and of his father, a general under Napoleon I. He first held political office in 1843, and as he became more engaged in France’s social troubles, he was elected to the Constitutional Assembly following the February Revolution of 1848. A lifetime advocate of freedom and justice, often at his own peril, Hugo’s work linked art to the political realm. After Napoleon III’s coup detat in 1851, Hugo’s open opposition created hostilities that ended in his flight abroad from the new government.

Hugo’s exile took him first to Belgium, and then to the Channel Islands of Jersey and Guernsey. Declining at least two offers of amnesty—which would have meant curtailing his opposition to the Empire—Hugo remained abroad for nineteen years, until Napoleon’s fall in 1870. Meanwhile, the seclusion of the islands enabled Hugo to write some of his most famous verse and his masterpiece, the novel Les Misérables. When he returned to Paris, the country hailed him as a hero. Hugo then weathered, within a brief period, the siege of Paris, the institutionalization of his daughter for insanity, and the death of his two sons. Despite this personal anguish, the aging author remained committed to political change. He became an internationally revered figure who helped to preserve and shape the Third Republic and democracy in France. Hugo’s death on May 22, 1885, generated intense national mourning; more than two million people joined his funeral procession in Paris from the Arc de Triomphe to the Pantheon, where he was buried.