Victor Hugo

Victor-Marie Hugo, vicomte Hugo, was born on 26 February 1802 in Besançon in Eastern France and died in Paris on 22 May 1885. He was a French Romantic author, poet, essayist, playwright, journalist, human rights activist, and politician. His life stretched across an age of revolution, empire, monarchy, and republican politics, and his writing moved through many of the artistic, social, and political questions of his century.

Hugo is best known outside France for two novels: The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, published in 1831, and Les Misérables, published in 1862. In France, he is also celebrated for poetry collections including Les Contemplations and La Légende des siècles. His play Cromwell and drama Hernani placed him at the forefront of the Romantic literary movement. His works later inspired music during his lifetime and after his death, including the opera Rigoletto and the musicals Les Misérables and Notre-Dame de Paris.

His early life was marked by movement and divided loyalties. His father, Joseph Léopold Sigisbert Hugo, was a general in the Napoleonic army, an atheist, and an ardent supporter of the Republic. His mother, Sophie Trébuchet, was loyal to the deposed dynasty and declared her children to be Protestants. Because of his father’s military service, the family moved often. Hugo lived in Paris, spent time in Italy and Spain, and attended school in Madrid at the Real Colegio de San Antonio de Abad. In Paris, the family’s circle included General Victor Fanneau de La Horie, Hugo’s godfather, who became a mentor to Hugo and his brothers before his arrest and execution in 1812.

Hugo showed literary ambition early. On 10 July 1816, he wrote in his diary, “I shall be Chateaubriand or nothing.” In 1817, he received an honorable mention in a competition organized by the Académie Française, though the Academicians refused to believe he was only fifteen. With his brothers, he began publishing Le Conservateur littéraire in 1819. His first poetry collection, Odes et poésies diverses, appeared in 1822, when he was twenty, and earned him a royal pension from Louis XVIII. His first novel, Hans of Iceland, followed in 1823, and Bug-Jargal in 1826.

Although Hugo was a committed royalist when young, his views changed over the decades. He became a passionate supporter of republicanism and served in politics as both deputy and senator. He was appointed a peer of France on 13 April 1845 as “Vicomte Victor Hugo.” He also campaigned for social causes, including the abolition of capital punishment and slavery. His opposition to absolutism helped make him a national hero. When he died at eighty-three, he was given a state funeral in the Panthéon of Paris, attended by more than two million people, the largest in French history.