HUGO, Victor-Marie. Poet, novelist, and playwright, b. at Besançon on 26 Feb. 1802, d. in Paris on 22 May 1885. From his father, Joseph Léopold Sigisbert (1773–1828), a republican officer distinguished in the suppression of the Vendéan revolt and in the struggle against the bands of Fra’ Diavolo and Empecinado, author of works on art and military history and also of a novel, *L’aventure tyrolienne*, and from his mother, Sophie Trébucher, 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 enthusiasm for Chateaubriand and for the ideas and principles of the Restoration in the *Conservateur littéraire* (1819–21). Indeed, monarchical and Catholic was the inspiration of his first lyrics (1822), which earned him a pension from Louis XVIII. New motifs enriched this inspiration through his contacts with the most important of the Parisian Romantic circles, that which gathered around Charles Nodier in the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, with the novels of exotic subject matter *Han d’Islande* and *Bug-Jargal* (1823 and 1826; the latter being a development of a sketch already published in the *Conservateur*), and with new collections of *Odes* and *Ballades* (1824–28).
In 1827 appeared the drama *Cromwell* (never performed), in five acts, which firmly established the Romantic aspiration to bring historical events onto the stage, reinforced by an eloquent and celebrated preface: V. H. thereby gained recognition as the leader and master of the new school. The following years were the happiest of his creative life; the abundance of images and colors characteristic of his finest lyric poetry could unfold in a perfect form, with broad musical rhythm, in the *Orientales* (1829), taking occasion from the Hellenism then in vogue, while alongside the Romantic passion for myths there came to be added or superimposed a love for works with a thesis, imbued with a demand for protest against laws or social conventions, in his work as a novelist and playwright. Thus, *Notre-Dame de Paris*, a reconstruction of the follies and vices of a fantastic medieval Paris almost tangibly inspired by the architecture of the famous cathedral, is accompanied by two other novels that are nothing more than eloquent protests against the death penalty: *Le dernier jour d’un condamné* (1829) and *Claude Gueux* (1834). Even more popular were his plays, beginning with *Marion Delorme*, censored for its thesis, or the myth, of the redemption of the fallen woman that inspired it (1829); followed by *Hernani* (1830), *Le roi s’amuse* (1832), *Lucrèce Borgia* and *Marie Tudor* (1833), *Angelo* (1835), *Ruy Blas* (1838); *Notre-Dame de Paris* was also adapted for the stage as an opera libretto under the name of the novel’s protagonist, *Esmeralda* (1836). This theatrical series was concluded 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 stance evolved increasingly in a liberal direction, his religious stance toward a vague humanitarianism, so that in every respect he became a genuine “resounding echo” of his time (one might even find some Napoleonic vein 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]—grand even in their declamatory fervor: these are, moreover, the sentiments of those years filled with renewed enthusiasm for the glory of the Empire). The Académie française admitted him in 1841; the Chamber of Peers in 1845. The February Revolution elected him, in 1848, deputy to the Constituent Assembly; his fiercely republican stance made him an irreconcilable opponent 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, where he fiercely denounced the new Emperor in the pamphlet *Napoléon le petit* (1852), in *Histoire d’un crime* (published only in 1877), and in *Les Châtiments* (1853).
The silence into which he had withdrawn after the tragic death of his daughter Léopoldine in an accident (1843) was definitively broken by exile: *Les Contemplations* (1856) marked the peak of his most fruitful creative period. These were followed by *Les Chansons des rues et des bois* (1855), the three series of poems of *La Légende des siècles* (1859, 1877, 1883), and several highly successful novels, from *Les Misérables* (1862) to *Quatre-vingt-treize* (1873). In exile, V. H. imperiously reaffirmed his unshaken supremacy over the poetry and taste of the Second Empire, through an unparalleled mastery of language, of the verbal instrument, and of the world of images and visions, as if in him were revived, multiplied, the fantastic resources of the visionary and mystery writers of the Middle Ages, their capacity to give life to an image, a dream, a symbol. His poetic work from 1850 to 1859 (including most of *Les Chansons des rues et des bois*) truly represented the most mature and almost unique fruit, in the disappearance or weakening of other great voices of French Romantic literature of the 19th century; it imposed a new, panegyric and mythic style on the years that followed.
It was in this same apogee of his finest poetic qualities that H. found the stimulus, and perhaps the pedestal, for the mission of thinker, politician, social and moral reformer that he had already shown he yearned for in his early dramatic and narrative work. Without doubt, the commitment and radical theses of his novels constituted a most lively and fertile starting point for this mission, as well as the easiest source of popularity; and likewise “le combat du jour et de la nuit” (as a line in one of his last poems puts it), the questions about God and matter, suggested images of grandeur to his lyric poetry. But the role he thus assumed as a vast guardian of European democracy, in its republican impulses as in its anticlerical ones (sealed by his return to France after the fall of the Empire and by his election as senator in 1877), ended up highlighting the stiffening and exhaustion, within a closed circle of themes and forms, of his art, though still prodigiously rich in resources as he moved from the affections of *L’Art d’être grand-père* (1877) to the polemics of *L’Année terrible* (1872), *Le Pape* (1878), *La Pitié supérieure* (1879), *L’Âne* (1880), *Religion et religions* (1880), *Les Quatre vents de l’esprit* (1881), and the drama *Torquemada* (1882). Just as perhaps the very immense and immediate success of his work has, in our own day, favored the tendency to limit its poetic value: which remains, however, immense and dominant in the French literature of the modern age when viewed from a broader perspective.
Works by H. placed on the Index: *Notre-Dame de Paris* (Decree of 28 July 1834) and *Les Misérables* (Decree of 20 June 1864).