Poet, Exile, National Hero: The Many Lives of Victor Hugo

Victor Hugo (1802–1885) was a French Romantic writer – poet, novelist, playwright and essayist – who was also a politician and a tireless campaigner for human rights. Around the world he is known for two novels, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831) and Les Misérables (1862). In France he is just as famous for his poetry, for leading the Romantic movement in the theatre, and for his long fight against the death penalty and slavery. He spent almost twenty years in exile for opposing Napoleon III, came home a national hero, and when he died more than two million people followed his funeral procession through Paris.

A general's son who wanted to be Chateaubriand

Hugo was born on 26 February 1802 in Besançon, in eastern France. His father was a general in Napoleon's army and his mother, Sophie Trébuchet, was loyal to the old royal family, so the boy grew up between two political worlds. The family followed the father's postings to Italy and Spain, and Victor went to school for a time in Madrid before settling in Paris.

He knew early what he wanted. At fourteen he wrote in his diary, "I shall be Chateaubriand or nothing," naming the most admired French writer of the day. A year later he entered a poetry competition held by the Académie française and received an honourable mention; the judges reportedly refused to believe he was only fifteen. In 1822 he married his childhood friend Adèle Foucher, and his first collection of poems, published that same year when he was twenty, earned him a royal pension from King Louis XVIII.

The battle of Hernani and the Romantic revolution

In the 1820s French theatre still followed strict classical rules. Hugo became the leading figure of the Romantic movement that broke them, first with his play Cromwell (1827) and then with Hernani (1830). When Hernani opened at the Comédie-Française, Romantics and traditionalists clashed for several nights in the theatre, because the play deliberately ignored the old rules. Other plays followed, including Ruy Blas (1838), and composers loved them: Verdi's opera Rigoletto is based on one of Hugo's dramas.

Even his early prose showed a strong social conscience. The Last Day of a Condemned Man (1829) follows the thoughts of a man waiting to be executed, and it later influenced writers such as Albert Camus, Charles Dickens and Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

Notre-Dame de Paris: a novel that saved a cathedral

Hugo's novel Notre-Dame de Paris, known in English as The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, appeared in 1831. Set in fifteenth-century Paris, it tells the story of the bell-ringer Quasimodo, the Romani street dancer Esmeralda and the archdeacon Claude Frollo. The English title puts the focus on Quasimodo, but Hugo's real hero was arguably the building itself; the novel is a passionate argument for protecting France's Gothic architecture, which at the time was being neglected and even destroyed.

The book worked. It became popular across Europe, and the crowds of readers coming to see the cathedral helped shame the city of Paris into restoring it. There is also a famous legend about how it was written: facing a deadline, Hugo supposedly locked away his clothes so he could not go out and had to keep writing.

Grief and poetry

Hugo published many volumes of lyric poetry in the 1830s, and in France he is considered one of the great poets of the language. In 1843 tragedy struck. His beloved eldest daughter, Léopoldine, nineteen and newly married, drowned when her boat overturned on the Seine at Villequier; her husband died trying to save her. Hugo learned the news from a newspaper while travelling. He wrote many poems about her afterwards, including his most famous one, "Demain, dès l'aube" ("Tomorrow, at dawn"), which describes walking to her grave.

From the Académie to the barricades of politics

After three failed attempts, Hugo was elected to the Académie française in 1841. In 1845 he became a peer of France, and in the upper chamber he spoke against the death penalty and social injustice and in favour of press freedom. Elected to the National Assembly in 1848 as a conservative, he broke with his allies in 1849 with a famous speech calling for an end to misery and poverty, and he argued for universal suffrage and free education for all children.

Nineteen years on an island

When Louis Napoleon, the future Napoleon III, seized full power in 1851, Hugo openly called him a traitor to France. He left for Brussels, then the Channel island of Jersey, and finally settled at Hauteville House on Guernsey, where he lived in exile from 1855 until 1870. In 1859 the emperor offered an amnesty, but Hugo refused to return, because it would have meant toning down his criticism.

Exile was astonishingly productive. On Guernsey he wrote political pamphlets attacking Napoleon III, which were banned in France but still widely read, and three great poetry collections: Les Châtiments (1853), Les Contemplations (1856) and La Légende des siècles (1859). There he also finished Les Misérables, a novel about poverty and injustice he had been planning since the 1830s. On notes from a visit to the prison at Toulon he wrote a possible name for his hero, "Jean Tréjean", which became Jean Valjean. Published in 1862 with an unusually modern publicity campaign, its first instalments sold out within hours, and critics' hostility did not stop the issues it raised from reaching the National Assembly.

Hugo's other late novels are less known but rewarding. Toilers of the Sea (1866), dedicated to Guernsey, pits a man against the ocean and a giant sea creature; The Man Who Laughs (1869) attacks the aristocracy; and Ninety-Three (1874) faces the Reign of Terror of the French Revolution.

Causes he fought for

Hugo fought all his life to abolish capital punishment. In 1848 he told the Assembly, "You have overthrown the throne. ... Now overthrow the scaffold," and his influence was credited in removing the death penalty from the constitutions of Geneva, Portugal and Colombia. He campaigned against slavery too, writing in 1859 to ask the United States to spare the abolitionist John Brown. He dreamed of a "United States of Europe" and helped found the association that led to the Berne Convention on copyright. His record has shadows as well: like many of his contemporaries he justified French colonialism as a "civilising mission", and he never publicly condemned the atrocities of the conquest of Algeria.

Few people know that Hugo was also a remarkable visual artist. He produced more than 4,000 drawings, mostly small, dark works in brown or black ink.

Return, old age and a funeral for millions

Hugo returned to Paris in 1870 when Napoleon III fell, and was greeted as a national hero. During the Prussian siege of the city he famously ate animals from the Paris zoo. In 1881, as he entered his eightieth year, one of the largest parades in French history marched past his window for six hours, and his street was renamed Avenue Victor-Hugo. Two days before his death he wrote a final note: "To love is to act." He died on 22 May 1885. Although he had asked for a pauper's funeral, he received a state funeral and was buried in the Panthéon.

Why read Hugo today?

More than a thousand musical works have been inspired by Hugo, including over a hundred operas and the musical version of Les Misérables, one of the longest-running shows in London's West End. Hugo's books are long, but they reward patience: they mix adventure, history, love stories and big ideas about justice. For learners of French, his poem "Demain, dès l'aube" is short, moving and perfect to memorise.

Learn with Victor Hugo: French phrases

Phrase	Meaning	Example
les misérables	the wretched, the poor	Hugo wrote for les misérables of Paris.
la misère	extreme poverty	Il voulait détruire la misère. (He wanted to destroy poverty.)
demain, dès l'aube	tomorrow, at dawn	Je partirai demain, dès l'aube. (I'll leave tomorrow at dawn.)
l'exil	exile	Il a écrit ses plus beaux poèmes en exil. (He wrote his finest poems in exile.)
aimer, c'est agir	to love is to act	Pour lui, aimer, c'est agir. (For him, to love is to act.)

Try this: Write two sentences in French starting with "Demain, dès l'aube, je…" to describe something you will do tomorrow morning.