The World of Victor Hugo and

The Hunchbach of Notre Dame

1797	Hugo’s parents, Joseph-Léopold Hugo and Sophie Trébuchet, marry. They will have three sons: Abel (1798), Eugène (1800), and Victor-Marie (1802), who is born in Be sançon on February 26. An officer in the army of Napoleon Bonaparte (Napoleon I), Léopold must travel constantly during Victor’s youth.
1803 1812	Marital problems occur as Sophie cannot tolerate the tran sience of army life; finally, she settles in Paris with her three children. Both parents start extramarital affairs. The family travels to Corsica and Elba, where Léopold is stationed. He later commands the troops that will suppress freedom fight ers in occupied Italy and Spain, sometimes nailing their severed heads above church doors.
1804	apoléon proclaims himself Emperor of the French. Liter ary critic Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve is born.
1807	Leopold Hugo receives a post in Naples, where his family soon joins him.
1808	Leopold Hugo follows a cortege of Napoléon’s brother, Joseph, to Spain. Weary of travel, Sophie returns with her young sons to Paris, where she begins an affair with General Victor Lahorie, a conspirator against Napoleon.
1809	Napoleon promotes Major Hugo to general, and honors him with the title of count.
1810	The police arrest Lahorie in Mme. Hugo’s house on De cember 30.
1811	Sophie journeys to Spain to save her marriage, but problems in the relationship persist. Léopold, knowing of his wife’s in fidelity, asks for a divorce. Sophie and her sons return to Paris.
1812	General Lahorie is executed for plotting against Napoleon.
1814	Napoléon abdicates and is banished to the island of Elba. The monarchy is reinstated, and Louis XVIII is named king.
1815	Napoleon returns from exile. The “Hundred Days” of his re newed reign ends when he is defeated at Waterloo. Louis XVIII returns to power.
1816	A marvelously gifted and precocious writer, Victor Hugo pro claims his ambition to rival François-René de Chateaubriand, the most famous Romantic author of his generation. Es tranged from his father and influenced by his mother, a roy alist by expediency, he skillfully curries favor with the conservative literary establishment and the King, whom he praises in odes.
1817	Hugo wins honorable mention in the national poetry con test sponsored by l‘Académie française (the French Acad emy).
1818	Sophie and Léopold are legally separated (divorce was ille gal in France between 1816 and 1886). Victor composes a first, brief version of his novel Bug-Jargal, an account of a slave revolt in the Caribbean after the French Revolution; this version will appear in 1820.
1819	Despite his mother’s wishes for a more ambitious union, Victor falls in love with—and secretly asks the hand of—his neighbor, Adèle Foucher. But as a minor, he cannot marry her without his mother’s consent, which is denied. The three Hugo brothers found a literary journal called Le Con servateur littéraire.
1820 1821	Hugo writes over one hundred essays and more than twenty poems for Le Conservateur.
1821	Victor becomes friends with the famous priest Félicité de Lamennais, who preaches a socially committed Christianity. Victor’s mother dies on June 27. In July his father marries his mistress, Catherine Thomas. Victor becomes reconciled with his father, who does not oppose Victor’s marriage to Adèle.
1822	Granted a small pension by Louis XVIII for his first volume of Odes praising the monarchy, Victor marries Adèle Foucher on October 12. Eugène Hugo, who also loves her, has a psychotic breakdown at the wedding; he will never re cover.
1823	Hugo publishes a pioneering historical novel, Han d’Islande (Han of Iceland, sometimes translated as The Demon Dwarf), a bloodthirsty melodrama. He helps found the periodical La Muse frangaise and attends weekly gatherings hosted by the then leader of the French Romantic movement, Charles Nodier (1780-1844).
1824	Hugo publishes the Nouvelles Odes. His first child, a daugh ter, Léopoldine, is born. Charles X assumes the throne, and Victor serves as the historian of the coronation.
1826	Odes et Ballades is published, as is the full version of BugJargal, noteworthy for its altruistic black hero. Adèle gives birth to Hugo’s second child, Charles-Victor.
1827	Hugo becomes best friends with the critic Sainte-Beuve. The play Cromwell is published; its famous preface proposes a Romantic aesthetic that contrasts the sublime with the grotesque, in emulation of Shakespeare. Hugo declares his independence from the conservative, divine-right royalists.
1828	General Léopold Hugo dies unexpectedly on January 29. Hugo’s third child, François-Victor, is born.
1829	Hugo’s prodigious literary output includes the picturesque verse collection Les Orientales (The Orientals), the tale Le Dernier Jour d‘un condamné à mort (The Last Day of a Condemned Man), opposing capital punishment, and the histor ical play Marion de Lorme, censored by the French monarchy because it portrays the sixteenth-century ruler François I as a degenerate.
1830	Hugo’s fourth child, a daughter, named Adèle after her mother, is born. Mme. Hugo wants no more children, and from then on sleeps alone. Sainte-Beuve betrays his best friend, Victor, by telling Adèle he loves her. Hugo’s play Hernani (which served as the basis for the libretto to Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi’s 1844 opera Ernani), defiantly Romantic in its use of informal language and its violation of the classical “three unities” of time, place, and action, causes riots in the theater where it is performed.
1831	Notre-Dame de Paris: 1482 (The Hunchback of Notre Dame), a tale of the era of the cruel, crafty Louis XI, is published and becomes a best-seller. The visionary poetry collection Les Feuilles d’automne (The Leaves of Autumn) is published. In it Hugo displays a profundity and a mastery of the art of verse that rival the greatest European poets of the era, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Percy Bysshe Shelley.
1832	Hugo’s play Le Roi s‘amuse (The King’s Fool), which will in spire Giuseppi Verdi’s great opera Rigoletto (1851), is banned after opening night owing to its disrespectful por trayal of a king. Hugo occupies an apartment in what is today called la place des Vosges, where he will remain until 1848.
1833	The minor actress Juliette Drouet enters Hugo’s life. He pro vides her with an apartment near him, forbids her to go out alone, and occupies her with making fair copies of his manuscripts. The couple will continue their liaison until her death fifty years later. The first version of George Sand’s feminist novel Lelia is published.
1834	Hugo ends his friendship with Sainte-Beuve.
1835	Hugo’s great verse collection Les Chants du crépuscule (Songs of Twilight) appears.
1837	Hugo is made an officer of the Legion d’honneur (Legion of Honor). Les Voix intérieures, the third of four collections of visionary poetry during Hugo’s middle lyric period (1831-1840), appears. Victor’s brother Eugène, confined in the Charenton madhouse, dies.
1838	Ruy Blas, Hugo’s best play, outrages the monarchists by de picting a queen and a valet in love.
1840	Les Rayons et les Ombres (Sunlight and Shadows), the last great poetic collection before Hugo’s exile, is published.
1841	After several failed attempts, Hugo is elected to the French Academy, the body of “Forty Immortals”—the greatest honor a French writer can receive.
1843	A tragic year is punctuated by the failure of Hugo’s play Les Burgraves and the drowning of his beloved elder daughter, Léopoldine, her unborn child, and her husband, a strong swimmer who tried to save her after a boating accident. ugo will dedicate his poetic masterpiece, Les Contemplations, to her.
1844	Alexandre Dumas’s Le Comte de Monte Cristo (The Count of Monte Cristo) appears.
1845	Hugo is made a pair de France, an appointive position in a body roughly equivalent to the British House of Lords. Ten weeks later, his affair with Mme. Léonie Biard (from 1844 to 1851) comes to light when they are arrested in their love nest and charged with adultery. She goes to prison. Hugo’s rank saves him from prosecution.
1847	Honoré de Balzac publishes La Cousine Bette.
1848	The monarchy is overthrown and the Second Republic pro claimed. Hugo is elected to its Constitutional Assembly, with the support of the conservatives. With his son Charles he founds and edits L‘Événement, a liberal paper that un wisely campaigns to have Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, the nephew of the former Emperor, elected president.
1849	Hugo presides over the International Peace Conference in Paris and delivers the first public speech that proposes the creation of a United States of Europe. Eugène Delacroix paints the ceiling of the Louvre’s Salon d’Apollon.
1849 1851	Hugo increasingly criticizes the government’s policies, mak ing fiery speeches on poverty, liberty, and the church. His positions provoke the ire of the government.
1851	The government briefly imprisons Hugo’s two sons in June for having published disloyal articles in L‘Événement. Soon after Louis-Napoléon’s coup d’état (actually, a legal election that creates the Second Empire) in early December, Hugo learns that the imperial police have issued a warrant for his arrest. He flees with his family and mistress to Belgium and then to the Isle of Jersey, a British possession in the English Channel.
1852 1853	In 1852 Louis-Napoléon declares himself emperor as Napoleon III. Hugo writes a scathing satire, Napoleon le petit. From 1853 to 1855 he attends séances at which the spirits of both the living and the dead (including Shake speare, Jesus, and a cowering Napoleon I) seem to commu nicate by tapping on the table. They explain that all living beings must expiate their sins through a cycle of punitive reincarnations, but that all, even Satan, will finally be par doned and merge with the Godhead. These ideas figure prominently in Hugo’s visionary poetry for the remainder of his life. Georges Haussmann (1809-1891) begins the urban renewal of Paris.
1853	Hugo publishes Les Châtiments (The Punishments), power ful anti-Napoleonic satire.
1855	Hugo moves to the Channel island of Guernsey.
1856	Hugo’s Les Contemplations, his poetic masterpiece, appears. Profits from its sales allow him to purchase Hauteville House on Guernsey, today a museum.
1857	Gustave Flaubert’s novel of adultery, Madame Bovary—the work most influential on Western novelists until after World War II-is published in book form, as is the first edition of Charles Baudelaire’s poetry, Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil). Both men and their publishers are placed on trial for offenses to public morals. Baudelaire’s publisher is fined and must remove seven poems treating lesbianism and sadism.
1859	The first volume of Hugo’s poetic history of the world, La Légende des siècles (The Legend of the Centuries), appears.
1861	The danger of arrest having subsided, Hugo’s wife, Adèle, and her sons begin leaving him to stay in Paris during the winter months. She secretly meets with Sainte-Beuve there.
1862	Les Misérables, a 1,200-page epic completed in fourteen months, is published on the heels of a fertile period during which Hugo wrote many political speeches and creative works. Hugo’s famous novel gains an enormous popular au dience, although the book is panned by critics and banned by the government. He begins hosting a weekly banquet for fifty poor children.
1866	Guernsey provides the setting for Hugo’s regional novel Les Travailleurs de la mer (The Toilers of the Sea). Edgar Degas commences his series of ballet paintings. Works of Cézanne, Renoir, Monet, and other Impressionists appear. The next year Emile Zola’s novel Thérèse Raquin is published.
1868	Hugo’s wife, Adèle, dies unexpectedly in Brussels. She had
	been living apart from Victor for several years, but the two had remained friends.
1869	Hugo publishes the historical novel L‘Homme qui rit (The Man Who Laughs). He declines a second offer of amnesty from Napoleon III. Sainte-Beuve dies.
1870	Defeated by the Prussians at Sedan, Napoleon III surrenders to them and is deposed. France’s Third Republic is pro claimed. Hugo returns to Paris in triumph after nineteen years in exile.
1871	Hugo is elected to the National Assembly, but resigns due to the opposition of right-wing members. His son Charles dies.
1872	Consumed by madness, Hugo’s daughter Adèle is institu tionalized until her death, in 1915. Jules Verne’s Le Tour du Monde en quatre-vingts jours (Around the World in Eighty Days) is published.
1873	Hugo’s younger son, François-Victor, dies. French Symbol ist poet Arthur Rimbaud publishes Un Saison en enfer (A Season in Hell).
1874	Hugo publishes Quatrevingt-treize (Ninety-three), a histori cal novel about the counter-revolutionary rebellion in la Vendee (in eastern France) and events leading to the Reign of Terror in 1793. He provides nuanced portraits of both sides.
1876	Hugo is elected to the Senate.
1877	As senator, Hugo plays a leading role in preventing Marshal Marie Edmé Patrice de MacMahon, president of the Third Republic from 1873 to 1879, from becoming dictator of France. Because the monarchists have split their support among various claimants to the throne, the republicans achieve a working majority. The second volume of Hugo’s poetic history of the world, La Légende des siècles, appears.
1878	A stroke leaves Hugo incapable of composing additional lit erary works.
1880	After years of efforts, Hugo arranges amnesty for the Commu nards, popular-front rebels in the Paris of 1871 opposed to surrender to the Prussians. Some 20,000 of them, including women and children, had been slaughtered by French gov ernment troops—more than the total of those guillotined during the Reign of Terror in 1793. Guy de Maupassant’s collected Contes (Stories) are published.
1881	On February 26, Hugo’s birthday, a national holiday is pro claimed, and 600,000 marchers pass his windows. The street where he lives is renamed L’avenue Victor-Hugo.
1882	Hugo is reelected to the Senate. His play Torquemada (1869) is performed.
1883	Juliette Drouet, Hugo’s mistress since 1833, dies after a pro longed struggle with cancer. The final volume of Hugo’s po etic history of the world, La Légende des siècles, appears.
1885	Victor Hugo dies May 22. Two million mourners pass his coffin underneath the Arc de Triomphe. Hugo is entombed in the Pantheon, the first of a series of culture heroes and great leaders to be placed there. June 1 is declared a day of national mourning. Posthumous publications will enhance his reputation for decades—notably, the verse collections La Fin de Satan (The End of Satan, 1886), Toute la lyre (1888, 1893), and Dieu (1891). His experimental plays, eventually published in a Pléïade edition as “Le Theatre en liberte,” brilliantly anticipate the Theater of the Absurd in the 1950s.
1902	On the centenary of his birth, the French government opens the Maison de Victor Hugo museum in the apartment where he once lived on the place des Vosges.
1912 1918	In collaboration with André Antoine, the director of the nat uralistic Théatre-Libre, the filmmaker Albert Capellani, with the Pathé firm, produces a series of movies based on Hugo’s works: Les Misérables (1912), Marie Tudor (1912), Quatrevingt-treize (1914), and Les Travailleurs de la mer (1918).
1923	Wallace Worsley’s silent film version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame appears, starring Lon Chaney as Quasimodo.
1926	The Buddhist sect Cao Dai originates in Vietnam. It now has about 2,000 temples and several million followers world wide. The worshipers venerate Hugo and his two sons, whom they believe return to earth, reincarnated.
1939	William Dieterle’s film version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, with Charles Laughton as Quasimodo and Maureen O‘Hara as Esmeralda, is released.
1975	François Truffaut’s film Adèle H., retelling the tragedy of Hugo’s second daughter, wins Le Grand Prix du Cinema Français.
1996	Walt Disney issues an animated, freely altered film version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, distinctive in its politi cally correct treatment of gypsies, women, and persons with disabilities.