Victor Hugo

Victor Hugo was the dominant figure of French Romanticism, a poet and novelist who spent nineteen years in exile for opposing a dictatorship. Born in Besançon in 1802, the son of a general in Napoleon's army and a royalist mother, he grew up between their politics and their separation. He founded a review at seventeen and published his first collection at twenty. His preface to the play Cromwell in 1827 was the manifesto of Romantic drama, rejecting the classical unities, and the premiere of Hernani in 1830 produced organised battles in the theatre between traditionalists and his supporters. The Hunchback of Notre-Dame appeared in 1831 and was written partly as a campaign: the cathedral was decaying and threatened with demolition, and the book's success led directly to its restoration. He was elected to the Académie française in 1841. His daughter Léopoldine drowned with her husband at Villequier in 1843, months after her marriage, and he wrote almost nothing for years afterwards; the poems in Les Contemplations are the response. He served in the assembly after 1848, moving from conservatism to the republican left, and campaigned against the death penalty and for universal suffrage and free education. When Louis-Napoléon seized power in December 1851 Hugo denounced him and fled — to Brussels, Jersey and then Guernsey, refusing the amnesty of 1859 with the statement that he would return when liberty did. He wrote Les Misérables in exile, publishing it in 1862 to enormous international sales. He returned in 1870 after the Second Empire collapsed. When he died in 1885 some two million people lined the route of his funeral, and he was buried in the Panthéon.

• Lived: 1802 CE – 1885 CE
• Nationality: French
• Roles: writer, poet, playwright