Victor Hugo

• 1. Introduction

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  Victor Hugo died on the 22nd of May 1885, at 50 Avenue Victor Hugo in Paris. He was 83 years old, and he died of pneumonia. More than two million people joined his funeral procession from the Arc de Triomphe to the Panthéon, the largest such gathering in French history. He had asked for a pauper's funeral. Instead, by decree of President Jules Grévy, the French state gave him the grandest send-off the nation had ever staged.

  Two days before that death, he left a note with five words: "To love is to act." That sentence arrived at the end of a life spanning eight decades, two empires, a revolution, exile, the Siege of Paris, the Paris Commune, and a literary output that included poetry collections, plays, novels, essays, political pamphlets, and more than four thousand drawings. The man who wrote that note had also once written in his diary, at age fourteen, that he resolved to be "Chateaubriand or nothing."

  How does a boy born in Besançon in 1802, the son of a general in Napoleon's army and a royalist mother, become the defining conscience of nineteenth-century France? That question runs through every chapter of Hugo's life: through the plays that provoked riots, the exile that lasted nearly two decades, the friendships with Liszt and Berlioz, the private code he used to record his affairs, and the novels that shamed a city into restoring its own cathedral.

• 2. A Divided Childhood

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  Victor-Marie Hugo was born on the 26th of February 1802, in Besançon in Eastern France, the youngest of three sons. His father, Léopold Hugo, had enlisted in the army of Revolutionary France at the age of fourteen. His mother, Sophie Trébuchet, was loyal to the deposed Bourbon dynasty and would raise the children as Protestants. The two parents held almost entirely opposite convictions, and that tension shaped their household from the start.

  Because Léopold was an officer in Napoleon's army, the family moved from posting to posting. He told his son that Victor had been conceived on one of the highest peaks in the Vosges Mountains, on a journey between Lunéville and Besançon. He wrote that this "elevated origin" seemed to have effects on his son, whose "muse is now continually sublime." Hugo took the story seriously enough that he believed himself conceived on the 24th of June 1801, and he later used that date as the prisoner number 24601 for Jean Valjean.

  Sophie eventually grew weary of military life and separated temporarily from Léopold, settling in Paris in 1803 with her sons. Hiding at the back of the garden of their lodgings on the left bank, in a chapel at 12 Impasse des Feuillantines, was General Victor Fanneau de La Horie, Hugo's godfather, who had been condemned to death for conspiring to restore the Bourbons. He became a mentor to Hugo and his brothers. In 1812, de La Horie was arrested and executed.

  In February 1815, Hugo and his brother Eugène were placed by their father in the Pension Cordier, a private boarding school in Paris, where they also attended lectures at the Lycée Louis le Grand. On the 10th of July 1816, Hugo wrote in his diary: "I shall be Chateaubriand or nothing." Within a year he had submitted a poem to the Académie Française and received an honorable mention; the Academicians refused to believe he was only fifteen.

• 3. Romantic Firebrand

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  Hugo's first collection of poetry, Odes et poésies diverses, was published in 1822, when he was twenty years old, and earned him a royal pension from Louis XVIII. Four years later, the follow-up collection Odes et Ballades revealed, in the view of those who read it, a natural master of lyric and creative song.

  Hugo became the figurehead of the French Romantic movement through two plays in particular: Cromwell in 1827 and Hernani in 1830. Hernani was performed at the Comédie-Française and greeted with several nights of rioting. Romantics and traditionalists clashed in the audience over the play's deliberate disregard for the rules of neo-classical theatre. Hugo followed that success with Marion Delorme in 1831, Le roi s'amuse in 1832, and Ruy Blas in 1838.

  Hugo's novel Notre-Dame de Paris was published in 1831 and quickly translated into other languages across Europe. One practical consequence of its popularity was notable: the City of Paris was shamed into restoring the much-neglected Cathedral of Notre Dame, which was by then attracting thousands of tourists who had read the novel. A book had changed the fate of a building.

  Hugo published five volumes of poetry between 1829 and 1840, including Les Orientales in 1829, Les Feuilles d'automne in 1831, Les Voix intérieures in 1837, and Les Rayons et les Ombres in 1840. He was, in the estimation of those who followed French letters, one of the greatest elegiac and lyric poets of his time. Like his great influence Chateaubriand, whom he had accompanied to the Coronation of Charles X in Reims in 1825, Hugo would eventually be forced out of France by his political stances.

• 4. Les Misérables and Social Conscience

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  As early as the 1830s, Hugo began planning a major novel about social misery and injustice, but it took a full seventeen years before Les Misérables was realised and finally published in 1862. He visited the Bagne of Toulon in 1839 and took extensive notes, though he did not start writing the book until 1845. On one page of his prison notes, he wrote in large block letters a possible name for his hero: "JEAN TRÉJEAN." When the book was finally written, Tréjean became Jean Valjean.

  Hugo wrote to his publisher Albert Lacroix on the 23rd of March 1862, expressing his conviction: "this book is going to be one of the peaks, if not the crowning point of my work." The Belgian publishing house Lacroix and Verboeckhoven ran a marketing campaign unusual for the era, issuing press releases six months before the launch and initially publishing only the first part of the novel, titled "Fantine," simultaneously in major cities. Installments sold out within hours.

  The critical establishment was largely hostile. Gustave Flaubert found within it "neither truth nor greatness." Barbey d'Aurevilly complained of its vulgarity. Baudelaire, despite giving the book favourable reviews in print, castigated it in private as "repulsive and inept." The Goncourt brothers lambasted its artificiality. Yet the novel proved popular enough with the masses that the issues it raised were soon on the agenda of the National Assembly of France.

  One story, possibly apocryphal, describes the shortest correspondence in history: Hugo, on vacation when the book was published, sent his publisher a single-character telegram inquiring about public reaction. The publisher replied with a single character indicating its success. The novel has since been adapted for cinema, television, and stage, including what became London's West End's longest running musical.

• 5. Exile and Political Battle

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  When Louis Napoleon, who would become Napoleon III, seized complete power in 1851 and established an anti-parliamentary constitution, Hugo openly declared him a traitor to France. He left the country and moved first to Brussels, then to Jersey, from which he was eventually expelled for supporting a local newspaper that had published a letter to Queen Victoria deemed treasonous. He settled his family at Hauteville House in Saint Peter Port, Guernsey, where he lived in self-imposed exile from October 1855 until 1870.

  Although Napoleon III granted an amnesty to all political exiles in 1859, Hugo declined. Accepting amnesty meant curtailing his criticisms of the government. He only returned to France after Napoleon III's fall from power and the proclamation of the Third Republic in 1870, following the French defeat at the Battle of Sedan in the Franco-Prussian War.

  While in Guernsey, Hugo composed or published some of his most celebrated work, including Les Misérables and three widely praised poetry collections: Les Châtiments in 1853, Les Contemplations in 1856, and La Légende des siècles in 1859. His political pamphlets against Napoleon III, Napoléon le Petit and Histoire d'un crime, were banned in France but still found their way there and had a strong impact.

  Back in Paris during the Siege of 1870, he famously ate animals given to him by the Paris Zoo. As food became increasingly scarce, he wrote in his diary that he had been reduced to "eating the unknown." During the Paris Commune, which seized power on the 18th of March 1871 and was toppled on the 28th of May, Hugo was harshly critical of atrocities on both sides. On the 9th of April he wrote in his diary: "In short, this Commune is as idiotic as the National Assembly is ferocious. From both sides, folly." Yet he publicly offered support to members of the Commune facing brutal repression, which drew a mob of fifty to sixty men to his house shouting for his death.

• 6. Music, Art, and the Composer's Muse

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  Well over a thousand musical compositions have been inspired by Hugo's works from the nineteenth century to the present day. Among the operas adapted from his plays are Donizetti's Lucrezia Borgia from 1833, Verdi's Ernani from 1844 and Rigoletto from 1851, and Ponchielli's La Gioconda from 1876. More than one hundred operas in total draw on Hugo as their source.

  Hugo himself had two famous musicians as personal friends: Hector Berlioz and Franz Liszt. Liszt played Beethoven in Hugo's home, and Hugo joked in a letter to a friend that, thanks to Liszt's piano lessons, he had learned to play a favourite song with only one finger. Hugo also introduced Frédéric Chopin to Amantine de Francueil, known as George Sand, who became Chopin's lover. Hugo attended Chopin's funeral in 1849. His view of Richard Wagner was considerably less warm; he described Wagner as "a man of talent coupled with imbecility."

  Hugo wrote the libretto for composer Louise Bertin's 1836 opera La Esmeralda, based on the character from Notre-Dame de Paris. The opera closed soon after its fifth performance, though it has since seen a modern revival. Hugo also admired composers well outside the fashionable taste of his era; he particularly appreciated works by Palestrina and Monteverdi at a time when that enthusiasm was unusual.

  Beyond music, Hugo produced more than four thousand drawings in his lifetime, with around three thousand still in existence. Drawing was originally a casual hobby, but it became his primary creative outlet between 1848 and 1851, when he made the decision to stop writing and devote himself to politics. He worked only on paper, at a small scale, usually in dark brown or black pen-and-ink wash, sometimes adding touches of white.

• 7. Family, Grief, and Private Life

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  Hugo married Adèle Foucher in October 1822, a woman he had secretly become engaged to against his mother's wishes. Despite their respective affairs, they lived together for nearly forty-six years until Adèle died in August 1868. Hugo, still banished from France at that time, was unable to attend her funeral in Villequier.

  The deepest personal grief of his life came on the 4th of September 1843, when his eldest and favourite daughter, Léopoldine, drowned in the Seine at Villequier when the boat she was in overturned. She was nineteen, and had married Charles Vacquerie only shortly before. Her young husband died trying to save her. Hugo was travelling in the south of France when he learned of her death from a newspaper he read in a café. He described his shock and grief in the poem "À Villequier," and his most famous poem, "Demain, dès l'aube" (Tomorrow, at Dawn), describes visiting her grave.

  From February 1833 until her death in 1883, Juliette Drouet devoted her life to Hugo. She followed him into exile on Guernsey, where he rented a house for her near Hauteville House, his family home. She wrote some twenty thousand letters to him expressing her passion and, at times, venting her jealousy. During the Siege of Paris, Hugo left his children a note referring to Drouet: "She saved my life in December 1851. For me she underwent exile. Never has her soul forsaken mine... She is my widow."

  Hugo also had a relationship lasting more than seven years with Léonie d'Aunet. Both were caught in adultery on the 5th of July 1845. Hugo, a Member of the Chamber of Peers since April of that year, avoided condemnation, while his mistress spent two months in prison and six in a convent. Hugo would later support her financially.

• 8. Final Years and Legacy

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  Hugo was elected to the newly created Senate on the 30th of January 1876, but this final phase of his political career was considered a failure. He was a maverick who achieved little there. He had suffered a mild stroke on the 27th of June 1878. To honour his entering his eightieth year, he received one of the greatest tributes ever held for a living writer, beginning on the 25th of June 1881, when he was presented with a Sèvres vase, the traditional gift for sovereigns.

  On the 27th of June 1881, one of the largest parades in French history was held in his honour. Marchers stretched from the Avenue d'Eylau, where Hugo was living, all the way down the Champs-Élysées to the centre of Paris. The procession lasted six hours, with Hugo watching from his window. Every official guide wore cornflowers, a reference to Fantine's song in Les Misérables. The following day, the 28th of June, the city of Paris renamed the Avenue d'Eylau as the Avenue Victor-Hugo, and letters were addressed simply "To Mister Victor Hugo, In his avenue, Paris."

  On the 20th of May 1885, le Petit Journal published the official medical bulletin on Hugo's condition. He was fully conscious and aware that there was no hope. At some point that night he whispered an alexandrine: "En moi c'est le combat du jour et de la nuit" -- "In me, this is the battle between day and night."

  He died two days later. His will left fifty thousand francs to the poor and requested burial in a pauper's hearse. He refused funeral orations from any church, asking instead for a prayer from all souls. The state ignored his request for a pauper's send-off and granted him the largest funeral procession in French history. He was buried in the Panthéon, where he shares a crypt with Alexandre Dumas and Émile Zola. Hugo is venerated as a saint in the Vietnamese religion of Caodaism, and a crater on the planet Mercury bears his name.