Victor Marie Hugo was a French poet and novelist. He was born in 1802 at Besancon and died in 1885. His father having entered the service of Joseph Bonaparte, king of Italy, and afterwards of Spain, Victor's earlier years were partly spent in those countries, but in 1812 he went with his mother to Paris. At the age of twelve he was already writing verses, and in 1823 his first novel, Han d'lslande, appeared, followed in 1825 by Bug Jargal.
In 1828 a complete edition of his Odes et Ballades appeared. In these productions Victor Hugo's anti-classical tendencies in style and treatment of his subject had been very visible, but the appearance of his dramaCromwell in 1827, with its celebrated preface, gave the watchword to the anti-classical or romantic school. Cromwell was too long for representation, and it was only in 1830 that Hernani, over which the great contest between Classicists and Romantacists took place, was brought on the stage.
Other dramas followed: Marion Delorme (1831), Le Roi s'amuse (1832), Lucrece Borgia (1833), MarieTudor
(1833), Angelo (1835), Ruy Blas (1838), Les Bourgraves (1843). During those years he had also published a novel, Notre Dame de Paris (1830), and several volumes of poetry, Les Feuilles d'Automne (1831), Les Chants du Crepuscule (1835), Les Voix Interieures (1837), Les Rayons et Les Ombres (1840). The poetry of this period has a melody and grace superior perhaps to any that he afterwards wrote, but wants that deep and original sense of life which is characteristic of his later poems. During the same period he also wrote his critical essays on Mirabeau, Voltaire, and a number of articles for the Revue de Paris.
In 1841, after having been twice previously rejected, he was elected a member of the French Academy and shortly afterwards made a tour in the Rhineland, of which he wrote a brilliant and interesting account in Le Rhin, published in 1842. In 1845 he was made a peer of France by Louis Philippe.
The revolution of 1848 threw Victor Hugo into the thick of the political struggle. At first his votes were decidedly Conservative, but afterwards, whether from suspicion of Napoleon's designs or from other reasons, he became one of the chiefs of the democratic party. After the coup d'etat on December the 2nd, 1851, he was one of those who kept up the struggle in the streets against Napoleon to the last. He then fled to Brussels, where he published the first of his bitter satires on the founder of the Second Empire, Napoleon le Petit. In the following year (1853) the second, the famous volume of Les Chatiments, a wonderful mixture of satirical invective, lyrical passion and pathos appeared.
Victor Hugo now went to live in Jersey, was expelled along with the other French exiles in 1855 by the English government, and finally settled in Guernsey. It was in the comparative solitude and quietness of the Channel Islands that he wrote most of the great works of his later years, Les Contemplations (1856), La Legende des Siecles, 1st series (1859), Chansons des Rues et des Bois (1865), and his celebrated series of social novels, Les Miserables (1862), Les Travailleurs de la Mer (1866), and L'Homme qui Rit (1869).
In 1870, after the fall of the Empire, Victor Hugo returned to Paris, where he spent the remaining years of a remarkably vigorous old age in occasional attendances at the senate, and in adding to the already long list of his literary works. Amongst these latest productions may be mentioned Quatro-vingt-treize (1872), L' Art d'etre Grand-pere (1877), L'Histoire d'un Crime (1877), Le Pape (1878), La Pitie Supreme (1879), Religions et Religion (1880), Les Quatre Vents de l'Esprit (1881), La Legende des Siecles (last series 1883), Torquemada (1882). Research Victor Hugo
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