Hugo, Victor-Marie

HUGO, VICTOR-MARIE. - Poet, novelist and playwright, b. at Besançon on 26 Feb. 1802, d. at Paris on 22 May 1885. From his father Joseph Léopold Sigisbert (1773-1828), a republican officer who had distinguished himself in the repression of the Vendée revolt and in the struggle against the bands of Fra' Diavolo and Empecinado, author of works on art, on military history and also of a novel, L'aventure tyrolienne, and from his mother Sophie Trébuchet, of traditionalist and monarchist sympathies, he inherited a taste for poetry, which he shared with his elder brothers Abel (1798-1855) and Eugène (1800-1837), together with whom he expressed his enthusiasms for Châteaubriand and for the ideas and principles of the Restoration in the Conservateur littéraire (1819-21). Monarchist and Catholic, in fact, was the inspiration of his first lyrics (1822), which earned him a pension from Louis XVIII. New motifs contributed to enriching it through his contacts with the most important of the Parisian romantic circles, the one that gathered around Charles Nodier in the Library of the Arsenal, with the novels on exotic subjects Han d'Islande and Bug Jargal (1823 and 1826; the latter, a development of a sketch that had already appeared in the Conservateur) and with new collections of Odes and Ballades (1824-28).

In 1827 appeared the drama (never performed) Cromwell, five acts that decisively established the romantic aspiration to bring historical events onto the stage, reaffirmed by an eloquent and celebrated preface: V. H. gained from it his consecration as head and master of the new school. The following years were the happiest of his creativity; the abundance of images and colors proper to his best lyric poetry was able to unfold in a perfect form, with a broad musical rhythm, in the Orientales (1829), taking occasion from the Hellenism then in vogue, while to the romantic passion for myths there came to be joined, or superimposed, the love for works with a thesis, imbued with a need to protest against laws or social conventions, in his work as novelist and playwright. Thus around Notre-Dame de Paris, a reconstruction of the follies and vices of a fantastic medieval Paris inspired almost tangibly by the architecture of the famous Cathedral, there cluster two other novels that are nothing if not eloquent protests against capital punishment: Le dernier jour d'un condamné (1829) and Claude Gueux (1834). Even more popular were the dramas, beginning with Marion Delorme, which ran afoul of the censor's prohibition precisely because of the thesis, or the myth, of the redemption of the fallen woman that inspires it (1829); there followed Hernani (1830), Le roi s'amuse (1832), Lucrèce Borgia and Marie Tudor (1833), Angelo (1835), Ruy Blas (1838); even Notre-Dame de Paris was adapted for the stage as an opera libretto, under the name of the novel's protagonist, Esmeralda (1836). This theatrical series was closed by the poem in three episodes Les burgraves (1843), the fruit of impressions from a journey to Germany in 1838, as was the collection of letters Le Rhin (1842).

From his original legitimism his political position had been evolving in an ever more liberal direction, his religious position into a vague humanitarianism, so as to make him in every respect an authentic "resonant echo" of his time (indeed, some Napoleonic tinge could even be found in the Rayons et les ombres, of 1840, the last of four collections of lyrics — the others being Feuilles d'automne [1831], Chants du crépuscule [1835], Les voix intérieures [1837] — grandiose even in their declamatory fervor: they are, moreover, the sentiments of those years full of reflowering enthusiasm for the glory of the Empire). The Académie de France had received him in 1841; the Chamber of Peers in 1845. The February revolution elected him, in 1848, deputy to the Constituent Assembly; his fiercely republican attitude made him an irreconcilable adversary of President Bonaparte, and the coup d'état of 2 Dec. 1851 sent him into exile in Brussels and then to the Norman islands, Jersey and Guernsey, to brand the new emperor ferociously with the libel Napoléon le petit (1852), with the Histoire d'un crime (published only in 1877) and with the Châtiments (1853).

The silence into which he had withdrawn after the death in a tragic accident (1843) of his daughter Léopoldine was definitively broken by exile: Les contemplations (1856) marked the culmination of his happiest creative period. There followed the Chansons des rues et des bois (1865), the three series of short poems of the Légende des siècles (1859, 1877, 1883) and several highly successful novels, from the Misérables (1862) to Quatre-vingt-treize (1873). Banished, V. H. imperiously reaffirmed his unshaken supremacy over the poetry and the taste of the Second Empire, through an incomparable mastery of the word, of the verbal instrument, and of the world of images and visions, as if in him there lived again, multiplied, the fantastic resources of the authors of visions and mysteries of the Middle Ages, their capacity to give life to an image, a dream, a symbol. His poetic work from 1850 to 1859 (comprising most of the Chansons des rues et des bois) truly represented the most mature and almost unique fruit, amid the disappearance or weakening of the other great voices of French letters, of the romantic nineteenth century; it imposed a new style, panic and mythic, on the years that followed.

In this very apogee of his finest poetic qualities H. must have found the stimulus, and perhaps the pedestal, for the mission of thinker, of politician, of social and moral reformer to which he had already shown he was destined with his early dramatic and narrative activity. Doubtless, the commitment and the radicalizing theses of his novels constituted by good right their liveliest and most fertile point of departure, as well as the easiest source of popularity; and likewise "le combat du jour et de la nuit" (as a verse fashioned in his last hours says), the questions about God and matter suggested images of grandeur to his lyric poetry. But the function thus assumed of tutelary bard of European democracy, in its republican impulses as in its anticlerical ones (consecrated by his return to his homeland after the fall of the Empire and by his election as senator in 1877), ended by bringing into relief the growing heaviness and exhaustion, within a closed circle of motifs and forms, of his art, though most fertile in resources in passing from the affections of the Art d'être grand-père (1877) to the polemic of the Année terrible (1872), of the Pape (1878), of the Pieté suprême (1879), of the Ane (1880), of Religion et religions (1880), of the Quatre vents de l'esprit (1881), of the drama Torquemada (1882). Just as perhaps the very great and immediate success of his work favored in our own day the tendency to limit its poetic value: which remains nonetheless, if one places oneself in a broader perspective, very great and dominant in the French literature of the modern age.

Of H. the following are on the Index: Notre-Dame de Paris (Decree 28 July 1834) and Les misérables (Decree 20 June 1864).

Enzo Bottasso