Romantic who wrote Notre-Dame and Les Misérables
Victor Hugo (1802–1885), French Romantic poet, novelist, playwright, and politician, is world-famous for the Notre-Dame novel of 1831 and for Les Misérables three decades later. France prizes his verse collections Contemplations and Legend of the Ages. Young royalist turned republican deputy and senator, he opposed Napoleon III.
Born 26 February 1802 in Besançon to Napoleonic general Joseph Léopold Sigisbert Hugo and Sophie Trébuchet, youngest of three sons. Cromwell helped lead the Romantic stage revolt.
Army postings kept the family moving, and in 1803 his mother settled in Paris with the boys, where she grew close to General Victor Fanneau de La Horie, Victor's godfather. From 1808 they lived in an old convent at 12 Impasse des Feuillantines while La Horie hid in its garden chapel; he was arrested and executed in 1812. In 1811 Victor and his brothers attended school in Madrid while their father fought in Spain, where Joseph Bonaparte had made him a count.
At fourteen he vowed in his diary to be Chateaubriand or nothing, and at fifteen his entry in an Académie Française poetry contest won an honourable mention from judges who doubted his age. His first poetry collection in 1822 brought a royal pension from Louis XVIII, and the novels Hans of Iceland (1823) and Bug-Jargal (1826) followed. The Last Day of a Condemned Man, issued anonymously in 1829, later marked Albert Camus. Hernani in 1830 set off nights of rioting at the Comédie-Française between romantics and traditionalists over its disregard for classical rules.
Les Misérables took some 17 years from first plans to publication in 1862; he told his publisher Albert Lacroix it would be a peak of his work. Critics were largely hostile: Flaubert found in it neither truth nor greatness, and Baudelaire praised it in print while mocking it privately. A popular but apocryphal story says Hugo, away on holiday, telegraphed his publisher a lone question mark and got an exclamation mark back. As Vicomte Victor Hugo he had been named a peer of France on 13 April 1845, and he died on 22 May 1885.
Source: Victor Hugo
