Victor Hugo

Born on February 26, 1802, in Besançon, in eastern France, the youngest of three sons of Joseph Léopold Sigisbert Hugo, a general in Napoleon’s army, and Sophie Trébuchet, a royalist Catholic, Victor Hugo was dragged through his parents’ political and marital conflicts from infancy. He declared at fourteen that he wished to be “Chateaubriand or nothing” and by twenty had published his first collection of poems, earning a royal pension from Louis XVIII. His verse drama Hernani (1830) provoked a legendary riot at the Comédie-Française between classicists and Romantics, a battle that effectively inaugurated the Romantic movement in French theater. The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831) made him the most famous writer in France and helped save the cathedral itself from demolition, sparking a Gothic revival across Europe. Les Misérables (1862) , a vast novel encompassing the Parisian underworld, revolutionary barricades, the sewers, the convent, and the relentless pursuit of Jean Valjean by Inspector Javert , became one of the most widely read novels in history. Hugo’s political life was equally dramatic: elected to the National Assembly, he opposed the coup of Louis-Napoléon in 1851 and was forced into exile, spending nineteen years on the Channel Islands of Jersey and Guernsey, where he wrote some of his greatest poetry. He returned to France in 1870 as a national hero. His death on May 22, 1885, occasioned a state funeral attended by an estimated two million mourners , the largest public gathering Paris had ever seen. His body lay in state beneath the Arc de Triomphe before burial in the Panthéon.