Victor Hugo
1802–1885 2 entries
Biography
Victor Hugo was a French poet, novelist and playwright, the leading figure of French Romanticism. Born in Besançon in 1802, the son of an officer in Napoleon’s army, he published his first book of poems at twenty, and in 1830 the première of his play Hernani set off a famous battle between the Romantics and the defenders of classical theatre. His novel Notre-Dame de Paris of 1831 made the old cathedral so beloved that it helped to save it from neglect.
Hugo also went into politics, and when Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte seized power in 1851 he opposed him and went into exile, spending almost twenty years on the Channel Islands, most of them on Guernsey. There he wrote some of his greatest works, among them the poems of The Contemplations and the novel Les Misérables, published in 1862. He returned to Paris in 1870, after the fall of the Second Empire, as a hero of the Republic, and spoke out all his life against the death penalty and poverty. When he died in 1885, some two million people followed his funeral procession, and he was buried in the Panthéon.
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