Victor Hugo

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• Born: 26 February 1802
• Birthplace: Besancon, France
• Died: 22 May 1885
• Best Known As: The author of Les Misérables

Victor-Marie Hugo was one of France's most distinguished writers: a poet, dramatist and novelist of the romantic school of the 19th century. His most famous works in English are his two epic novels, The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831) and Les Misérables (1862), both of which have been adapted many times for stage and screen. He was exiled in 1851 by Napoleon III, but returned to France in 1870 in triumph, and his final years marked by public veneration.

Hugo's character Quasimodo -- the Hunchback of Notre Dame -- has been played on-screen by Anthony Quinn (1956), Anthony Hopkins (1982), Charles Laughton (1939), and most famously by Lon Chaney (1923).

• Country: France
• Born: February 26, 1802 in Besancon
• Died: May 22, 1885 in Paris

Biography

Victor Hugo, arguably France's greatest literary figure, wrote poetry, plays, and novels with equal facility, and while his novels (including Notre Dame de Paris [aka The Hunchback of Notre Dame] and Les Misérables) are his most influential works today, his works in all three genres have inspired composers of not just classical, but popular music. During the Romantic era, there was hardly a single French composer who didn't set at least one of Hugo's works, few Italian opera composers who didn't at least consider one of his plays, and while his influence was strongest in those two countries, it was also felt worldwide. His writing also had a profound impact on other writers, calling for an end to the neo-Classicism that had dominated French literature, particularly its deliberate elegance and restraint in expression and choice of subjects, introducing "orientalist" influences, and insisting on juxtaposing humor and tragedy, as well as the ugly and the beautiful. (This emphasis on freedom found particular resonance in Giuseppe Verdi and sparked several of his wars with censorship in Italy, particularly over Rigoletto, based on Le roi s'amuse.) Though his later writing in particular, he tended to be sentimental and moralizing, his trailblazing spread Romanticism throughout Europe, and his humanism inspired Tolstoy. Despite his populism, he was well aware of his fame and influence and not modest about it; for example, he declared that the city should be renamed Hugo in his honor. His writing brought him early fame, earning him membership in the Legion of Honor at the age of 23 and membership in the prestigious Academie Française at 39. He was also controversial from an early age; the premiere of his play Hernani in 1830 actually sparked brawls and riots. Like Beethoven, Hugo was first deeply inspired by Napoleon and later, deeply disillusioned; he was even exiled from France in 1851 for his highly vocal criticism of and opposition to Napoleon III. In 1870, he returned to Paris, where he was lionized by both political and literary circles. ~ Ann Feeney, All Music Guide

(b Besan?on, 26 Feb 1802; d Paris, 22 May 1885). Writer and draughtsman. Quite apart from his vast literary output, he produced around 3000 drawings in various sizes and techniques. They constitute a fairly homogeneous body of work, comprising a mass of comic or grotesque sketches, which are not caricatures properly speaking, views of landscapes and buildings drawn from life or imagination (among them a large number of travel notes) and more delicate works typical of the artistic genres of the time. He was daringly experimental in technique, employing cut-outs, often used as stencils, impressions taken from fabric or natural objects, inkblots more or less reworked and every sort of graphic caprice.

Part of the Hugo family

See the Abbreviations for further details.

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The French author Victor Marie, Vicomte Hugo (1802-1885), was the supreme poet of French romanticism. He is noted for the breadth of his creation, the versatility that made him as much at ease in the novel as in the short lyric, and the mystical grandeur of his vision.

Victor Hugo had a nomadic and anxious childhood. He was erratically schooled, a fact which accounts in part for the eclectic and unsystematic aspect of his poetic thought. At age 14 he wrote, "I want to be Chateaubriand or nothing." He had begun to write in every poetic genre - odes, satires, elegies, riddles, epics, madrigals - and to receive recognition while still in his adolescence, never having to fact the long years of obscurity and struggle that are the lot of most poets.

In 1822 Hugo married his childhood sweetheart, Adèle Foucher, one and a half years after the death of his mother, who opposed the match. They later had four children, and their apartment, on the rue Cherche-midi in Paris, became the meeting place for the avant-garde of the romantic movement. In 1822 Hugo also published his first signed book, Odes et poésies diverses. In the preface to this book, which contains many poems celebrating his love for Adèle, the poet wrote, "Poetry is the most intimate of all things."

Hugo's work may be roughly divided into three periods. First in time is the intimate lyrical vein typical of the odes. Second is an involved or committed poetry speaking directly to political and social conditions. The epic novel Les Misérables, for example, fits into this group. (But this vein is also present in the very first volume, where a number of poems praise the throne and the altar; Hugo, who was to end as a staunch republican, began as a royalist.) In the last phase of his career Hugo rose to the heights of mysticism and poetic vision, as in La Fin de Satan.

Development of Romanticism

In 1824 some of Hugo's friends founded a review called Muse française which claimed as its contributors Alfred de Musset, Charles Nodier, and Hugo himself. All were young writers who were beginning to break with neoclassicism. After his visit to Alphonse de Lamartine and his discovery of German balladry, in 1826 Hugo published Odes et ballades, in which his rejection of neoclassicism became increasingly clear.

The years 1826 and 1827 were triumphant ones for the Cénacle, the name given to the young romantics who recognized Hugo as their chief and called him the "prince of poets." What Lamartine and the Vicomte de Chateaubriand had begun, Hugo was dedicated to complete. He ceased writing complimentary odes to King Charles X and began praising Napoleon I instead. With critics like Nodier and Charles Sainte-Beuve to advise him and with the support of geniuses such as the painter Eugène Delacroix and the poets Musset and Gerard de Nerval, Hugo formulated the doctrine of romanticism. This doctrine was expressed in the preface to his unproduced play, Cromwell, published in October 1827. Where classics and neoclassics had repudiated the Middle Ages as "barbaric," Hugo saw richness and beauty in this period, and he called for a new poetry inspired by medieval Christianity. He vindicated the ugly and grotesque as elements of the "new beauty." Poetry, he said, should do as nature does, "mixing in its creations yet without confusion shadow with light, the grotesque with the sublime, in other words, the body with the soul, the bestial with the spiritual." The vivifying sources of this new literature were to be the Bible, Homer, and Shakespeare.

Convinced that the new vision must prove itself in the theater, Hugo followed Cromwell with a number of other plays. On Feb. 25, 1830, the famous "battle of Hernani" took place, with Hugo's supporters outshouting the neoclassicists and antiromantics who had come to hiss the play. Hernani was performed 45 times (an unusual success for those days) and brought Hugo the friendship of such notable figures as Dumas père and George Sand.

But Hugo did not confine himself to the drama. In 1831 he published his magnificent novel Notre Dame de Paris, the work for which he is best known in the United States. He was originally inspired by Sir Walter Scott, on whom he hoped to improve by adding "sentiment" and "poetry" to the historical novel. In addition, he wished to convey the true spirit of the late Middle Ages through his evocation of the Cathedral of Notre Dame and his characters: Frollo the archdeacon, Quasimodo the hunchback, and Esmeralda the gypsy girl. Hugo wrote the novel nonstop during the fall and early winter of 1830 in order to meet his publisher's deadline. Although some readers were shocked that Frollo (who had taken holy orders) should fall in love with Esmeralda, the tale was an immense success. Théophile Gautier compared it to Homer's Iliad.

Also in 1831 Hugo published one of his most beautiful collections of poetry, Les Feuilles d'automne. Once again, Hugo wrote in the intimate vein: "Poetry speaks to man, to man as a whole…. Revolution changes all things, except the human heart." This volume expressed the sadness of things past as the poet approached his significant thirtieth birthday. The tone was personal and elegiac, sometimes sentimental.

It was not merely the passage of time that accounted for Hugo's melancholy. His wife, tired of bearing children and frustrated by the poet's immense egoism (Ego Hugo was his motto), turned for consolation to the poet's intimate friend, the waspish critic Sainte-Beuve. The sadness of this double betrayal is felt in Feuilles d'automne.

Tormented by his wife's coldness and his own inordinate sexual cravings, Hugo fell in love with the young actress and courtesan Juliette Drouet and took it upon himself to "redeem" her. He paid her debts and forced her to live in poverty, with her whole being focused entirely upon him. For the next 50 years Juliette followed the poet wherever he went. She lived in his shadow, unable to take a step without his permission, confined to a room here, a mere hovel there, but always near the magnificent houses where Hugo settled with his family. She lived henceforth solely for the poet and spent her time writing him letters, of which many thousands are extant.

With the advent of the July Monarchy, which ended the Bourbon succession and brought Louis Philippe of the house of Orléans to power, Hugo achieved wealth and recognition, and for 15 years he was the official poet of France. During this period a host of new works appeared in rapid sequence, including three plays: Le Roi s'amuse (1832), Lucrézia Borgia (1833), and the triumph Ruy Blas (1838).

In 1835 came Chants du crépuscule, which included many love lyrics to Juliette, and in 1837 Les Voix intérieures, an offering to the memory of his father, who had been a Napoleonic general. Les Rayons et les ombres (1840) showed the same variety of inspiration, the same sonorous harmony, the same brilliance of contrasting images. His devotion to Juliette here found its deepest poetic expression in the beautiful poem entitled Tristesse d'Olympio, which directly rivals Lamartine's Le Lac and Alfred de Vigny's Maison du berger. Like these famous poets, Hugo evoked the past, searching for permanence of love; but unlike the pantheistic Lamartine or the skeptical Vigny, Hugo found permanence in memory.

Political Involvement

Hugo published no more lyric poetry until 1853. He was now seized with a new ambition: he wished to become a statesman. At first a royalist, then a moderate, Hugo moved steadily toward liberalism. After the July Revolution he wrote in a more stirring vein than he ever had before: "I hate oppression with a profound hatred…. I curse those kings who ride in blood up to the bridle!" Hugo claimed that he had a "crystal soul" that reflected the same evolution as that the French people had gone through: from royalism to opposition to royalism, from the cult of Bonaparte to republicanism.

When Louis Philippe was deposed in the Revolution of 1848, Hugo at first found it hard to identify himself with the provisional government of Lamartine, for he still believed that a constitutional monarchy was the best form of government for France. Nevertheless, he allowed himself to be elected a deputy to the Assembly.

When Louis Napoleon, the nephew of the great man Hugo had always idolized, began to achieve notoriety, Hugo supported him. But his enthusiasm for the new president was short-lived. He wrote: "Upon the barricades I defended order. Before dictatorship I defended liberty." He made a stirring plea for freedom of the press and clemency to the rebel elements; at last, in 1849, he broke with Napoleon III with the words, "Because we have had a Great Napoleon must we now have a Little one?"

Louis Napoleon seized power by a coup d'etat on the night of Dec. 2, 1850, and proclaimed himself emperor. Hugo called for armed resistance and, witnessing the ensuing slaughter, Hugo believed the "Little Napoleon" to be a murderer. At great peril to her own life, Juliette saved the poet, found him shelter, and organized his escape to Brussels. From there he went to the British Channel islands of Jersey and Guernsey.

In November 1853 Hugo's fiercely anti-Napoleonic verse volume, Les Châtiments, was published in Belgium. Two different editions - one published under a false name with rows of dots in place of the individuals attacked, and the other, which was complete, with only "Geneva and New York" in place of the author's name - were culled from the 6,000 verses of the original manuscript. Though banned in France, the books were smuggled in (a favorite trick being to stuff them into hollow busts of the Emperor) and widely circulated.

In Les Châtiments Hugo wrote in the same polemical but exalted vein as did Pierre Ronsard in some of his Discours, Agrippa d'Aubigne in his Les Tragiques, André Chénier in his lambs. Comparisons between the Great and the Little Napoleons recur frequently in the poem, and the poet repeatedly calls on Nature to punish the hideous crime against her. Only the vision of an avenging future can placate the poet's hatred of Little Napoleon. The definitive edition of Les Châtiments, with numerous additions, was published in 1870, when Hugo returned to Paris after the fall of Napoleon III.

His Mysticism

During his exile Hugo gave vent to the mystical side of his personality. There were many séances in his home, first on Jersey, then in his splendid Hauteville House overlooking the coast of Guernsey. For Hugo, the supernatural was merely the natural. He had always felt premonitions, always heard premonitory sounds and messages during the night. Now, under the influence of a female voyante, he believed that he was communicating with spirits, among them Dante, Shakespeare, Racine, and even Jesus. But the "visit" that touched him most was that of his favorite daughter, Léopoldine, tragically drowned in the Seine with her young husband in 1843.

Indeed, Hugo's family was stricken with multiple tragedies. While exile refreshed and nourished his poetry, his wife and children languished. They longed for their friends and the familiar surroundings of Paris. His daughter, Adèle, retreated into a fantasy world, till at last she ran away in pursuit of an English officer who was already married. Hugo's wife left him to live in Brussels, where she died in 1868. Only Juliette remained loyal during the 17 years the poet spent in Hauteville House.

Hugo continued his experiments with the supernatural until stopped by the threatened insanity of his son, Charles. He never abandoned, however, the syncretic and magical religious views that he reached at this time. He believed that all matter was in progress toward a higher state of being, and that this progress was achieved through suffering, knowledge, and the love that emanates from God. Evil was not absolute but rather a necessary stage toward the Good. Through suffering and the experience of evil, man made progress toward higher states of being.

In 1856 Hugo published Les Contemplations, a work which he described as follows: "Les Contemplations are the memoirs of a soul; they are life itself beginning with the dawn of the cradle and finishing with the dawn of the tomb, they are a spirit which marches from gleam to gleam through youth, love, work, struggle, sorrow, dreams, hope, and which stops distraught on the brink of the infinite. It begins with a smile, continues with a sob, and ends with a trumpet blast from the abyss."

Many of these poems anticipate Hugo's next major work, the epic cycle La Légende des siècles (1859), conceived as part of an enormous uncompleted work whose mission was to "express humanity." Like his heroes Homer, Shakespeare, Dante, and his own contemporary Honoréde Balzac, Hugo dreamed of an all-inclusive cosmic poem. It would show the ascent of the universal soul toward the Good, and the emergence of Spirit from Matter.

In 1862 Hugo published Les Misérables, an immense novel, the work of many years. His guiding interest was similar to that of Charles Dickens, a social and humanitarian concern for the downtrodden. The book was meant to show the "threefold problem of the century": the degradation of proletarian man, the fall of woman through hunger, and the destruction of children. The sympathetic portrayal of the waif, Gavroche, and the escaped convict, Jean Valjean, won a vast readership for Hugo. The book was not merely an adventure story but a love story and a mystery as well. It crystallized Hugo's concern for social injustice and once again astounded the reading public with the scope of his literary powers.

When Victor Hugo died on May 22, 1885, it was as a venerable man, crowned with worldwide glory, still robust and emotionally ardent to the last.

Further Reading

The best life of Hugo in English is Matthew Josephson, Victor Hugo: A Realistic Biography of the Great Romantic (1942). Elliott M. Grant, The Career of Victor Hugo (1945), amplifies and complements Josephson with additional details on Hugo's publications and literary career. A partial account of the poet is Adèle Hugo, Victor Hugo, by a Witness of His Life, translated by Charles E. Wilbour (1964). Other studies are André Maurois, Olympio: The Life of Victor Hugo (1954; trans. 1956), and Richard B. Grant, The Perilous Quest: Image, Myth, and Prophecy in the Narratives of Victor Hugo (1968). A bibliography of works by and about Hugo is Elliott M. Grant, Victor Hugo: A Select and Critical Bibliography (1967). See also Horatio Smith, Masters of French Literature (1937).

Additional Sources

Decaux, Alain, Victor Hugo, Paris: Perrin, 1984.

Ionesco, Eugene, Hugoliad, or, The grotesque and tragic life of Victor Hugo, New York: Grove Press, 1987.

Juin, Hubert, Victor Hugo, Paris: Flammarion, 1980-c1986.

Peyre, Henri, Victor Hugo: philosophy and poetry, University: University of Alabama Press, 1980.

Richardson, Joanna, Victor Hugo, New York: St. Martin's Press, 1976.

Stevens, Philip, Victor Hugo in Jersey, Shopwyke Hall, Chichester, Sussex: Phillimore, 1985.

For more information on Victor-Marie Hugo, visit Britannica.com.

Hugo, Victor-Marie (1802-85). Leader of the Romantic school between 1830 and 1850, he dominated 19th-c. French literature with the prodigious flow and bold originality of his work until his death. During his 20 years of voluntary exile in the Channel Islands under the Second Empire, he symbolized the promise of spiritual regeneration and the humanitarian ideals of republicanism, and was greeted upon his return to France as a revered national patriarch. Flaubert called him the ‘immense vieux’. Translated into many languages before his death and read by a popular as well as an intellectual public, Victor Hugo's work has had a wide-ranging influence.

Born in Besançon, he had a tumultuous childhood. His father, Joseph-Léopold-Sigisbert Hugo, an officer in the Republican army, met his mother, Sophie Trébuchet, a strong-minded young Breton woman, after being sent to help quell an uprising in the Vendée in 1793. Married in 1797, they had three sons: Abel, 1798; Eugène, 1799; and Victor, 1802; but the marriage was fraught with tension. Sophie resented uprooting her family to follow her husband, whose status in Napoleon's army eventually rose to that of general and count as he moved from France to Corsica, and, with the protection of Joseph Bonaparte, to Italy and Spain. Both parents developed other attachments. Twice Sophie took the children by coach through war-ravaged landscapes to join her husband: once to Italy in 1807 and once, more memorably for the precocious child, to Spain in 1811 with a royal escort; but despite Joseph Bonaparte's efforts to reconcile the couple, Sophie returned to Paris in 1812, where she took charge of the education of her children, preparing them for careers as men of letters.

By the age of 13 Victor had already begun writing stories and classical tragedies; at 16 he received first prize from the Académie des Jeux Floraux at Toulouse for an ode entitled ‘Le Rétablissement de la statue de Henri IV’ and had written a draft of his first novel, Bug-Jargal. In 1819 he and his brothers founded a royalist literary journal, Le Conservateur littéraire, which appeared regularly from December 1819 until March 1821. Victor, whose learning and energy were already extraordinary, was the major contributor with literary criticism, the drama review, and numerous works of his own. In 1822 he published a volume of Odes, for which he was awarded a royal pension, enabling him to marry Adèle Foucher. Their first child, Léopold, died after a few months. They had four others: Léopoldine, 1824; Charles, 1826; François-Victor (the translator of Shakespeare), 1828; and Adèle, 1830. During these years as Hugo acquired a critical mastery of classical French verse forms, he read the German and English Romantics, discovered Shakespeare, and became closely associated with the conservative Cénacle of La Muse française headed by Nodier. In 1825 Hugo's stature was such that he was invited to the coronation of Charles X at Reims; but he had already begun to connect modernist practice in the arts with revolutionary politics. The prefaces to the five editions of the Odes, which became the Odes et ballades in 1826 and 1828, reflect the shift towards republicanism that occurred after the death of his mother and reconciliation with his Bonapartist father.

By 1826 the Hugo salon had replaced Nodier's as a vital centre for Romantic artists and writers. The period 1826-30 was one of intense creativity. Sainte-Beuve praised the Odes et ballades in the liberal newspaper, Le Globe, and became a regular of the Hugo entourage. In 1827 Hugo read the preface to Cromwell to his friends. This anti-classical text, demanding the inclusion of the grotesque and the ugly for a genuinely contemporary notion of the beautiful, became a founding document for French Romantic theory. In 1829 he published Les Orientales, a virtuoso collection of poems demonstrating the originality of his control over a wide range of verse forms, and one month later a deeply moving novel against capital punishment, Le Dernier Jour d'un condamné à mort, written from the point of view of the condemned man. The culmination of Hugo's meteoric rise to fame came in October 1830 with the performance of Hernani at the Comédie-Française. Fighting broke out on the opening night between the defenders of classicism and Hugo's friends, strategically planted in the audience. The event heralded the ascension of the Romantic avantgarde to aesthetic dominance.

The year 1830 marks a turning-point both in French political history and in Hugo's personal life. After the birth of her fifth child Adèle Hugo withdrew from her husband and began cultivating an intimate relationship with Sainte-Beuve that lasted, off and on, for many years. In 1833 Hugo himself began a liaison that would become a lifetime commitment with Juliette Drouet, a minor actress in his play Lucrèce Borgia. Hugo and his wife remained friends throughout their marriage, but they were no longer the ideal family of the 1820s painted by Louis Boulanger. The lyric collections, Les Feuilles d'automne (1831) and Les Chants du crépuscule (1835), contain poems commemorating Hugo's attachment to his family and to Juliette; those published later in the decade, Les Voix intérieures (1837) and Les Rayons et les ombres (1840), focus more on the metaphysical nature of poetic consciousness than on the personal love lyric.

With the performance of Hernani, Hugo became a leading dramatist under the July Monarchy. Despite the censorship of Le Roi s'amuse in 1832 for its cruel depiction of François I^er, the royal family offered Hugo his own playhouse, the Théâtre de la Renaissance. It opened in 1838 with Ruy Blas, his most successful play. In 1831 he published Notre-Dame de Paris—1482) a dark, multi-layered novel set in 15th-c. Paris. The descriptions of the cathedral revolutionized contemporary attitudes toward medieval architecture and caused the creation of a Commission of Historic Monuments to save France's buildings from further destruction. Reeditions of his early novels, Le Dernier Jour d'un condamné à mort, Han d'Islande, and Bug-Jargal, followed the publication of Notre-Dame de Paris, and a new novel against capital punishment based on a real event, Claude Gueux, appeared in 1834. Hugo was nominated to the Légion d'Honneur in 1837 and elected to the Académie Française in 1841.

In the 1840s Hugo's political ambitions caused a lessening of his poetic output. In 1845 he was named peer of France. But several events prepared the way for a major change in his life. In 1843 his drama Les Burgraves was booed off the stage after five performances. Later in the same year his adored daughter, Léopoldine, drowned in a sailing accident. In 1845 the recently elected peer caused a national scandal when caught in flagrante with Léonie d'Aunet. After the fall of the July Monarchy in June 1848, Hugo was elected député from Paris to the Assemblée Constituante and began publication of a newspaper, L'Événement, in which he supported the candidature of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte for the presidency of the new Republic. In May 1849 he was re-elected, but to a conservative Assembly, where, isolated from both the Left and the Right, he made impassioned but ineffectual speeches on poverty, universal suffrage, freedom of the press, lay education, and capital punishment. By February 1851 he openly opposed the government of the future Napoleon III, fleeing to Belgium to avoid arrest after the coup d'état of 2 December. After publishing a virulent pamphlet, Napoléon le petit, denouncing the usurper, he moved his family to the Channel Islands, first Jersey and then Guernsey in 1855, where he remained until the emperor's abdication in 1870.

During the exile years Hugo wrote his greatest poetry: the powerful satirical verse of Les Châtiments (1853), the personal and metaphysical poems of Les Contemplations (1856), La Fin de Satan and Dieu, the epic poems of La Légende des siècles (1859), and the erotic and pastoral lyrics of Les Chansons des rues et des bois (1865). He also finished the great social novel Les Misérables (1862) begun in 1845, wrote his essay on the nature of genius, William Shakespeare (1864), and two other visionary social novels, Les Travailleurs de la mer (1866) and L'Homme qui rit (1869). His popularity in France was unparalleled, even after other literary movements had displaced Romanticism.

When Hugo returned to France in 1870 he was elected to the new conservative Assembly in 1871, but resigned after a few months. Although opposed to the Commune, he sheltered fleeing communards in his house in Belgium. L'Année terrible (1872) captures the complexity of his feelings surrounding these events. He returned to Hauteville House in Guernsey to write his last great novel, Quatrevingt-Treize (1874), describing the civil war in the Vendée. When Hugo was elected senator in 1876, he asked for amnesty for the supporters of the Commune. A second series of La Légende des siècles and L'Art d'être grand-père appeared in 1877. After a stroke in 1878 Hugo virtually stopped writing, but previously finished works continued to appear: La Pitié suprême (1879), L'Âne and Religion des religions (1880), Les Quatre Vents de l'esprit (1881), Torquemada (1882), and a final series of La Légende des siècles (1883). Hugo died in 1885 and was entombed in the Pantheon after a state funeral attended by 2 million people and delegates from every country in Europe. Posthumous publications include: La Fin de Satan (1886), Le Théâtre en liberté (1888), Dieu (1891), Les Années funestes (1898), Dernière Gerbe (1902), Océan and Tas de pierres (1942).

From his earliest writings Hugo insisted on the social responsibility of the writer, and after 1850 conceived of himself as a spiritual guide, whose vocation it was to reveal the providential order underlying personal and historical events. He interpreted his own life as exemplary of the fate of a collective, historical self, and was not adverse to substituting dates of symbolic significance on his manuscripts to make the links in the mythopoetic story clear. Many of Hugo's prefaces as well as the allegorical structuring of his works point to the way the past inhabits and animates the present. Littérature et philosophie mêlées (1834) was one of his first efforts to combine writings from the early royalist period of 1819 with those of 1830 to show the invisible connections linking them.

Like other Romantic historians, Hugo saw the Revolution as a major turning-point in his progressivist concept of history; but he never became reconciled to the excesses of the Terror and the violence of mass uprisings. The startling discontinuities in his own work seem to underscore the arbitrariness of his idealizing claims. As history repeatedly wipes away the redemptive design, every century must find a prophet to reconstruct the providential story in a language appropriate to its time. The birth of democracy is reflected in the hybrid forms that typify Hugo's work—the grotesque hero with the sublime soul, the stylistic blending of familiar and lofty diction, history as an amalgam of folklore and erudition. His formal innovations in all genres—the broken rhythms of the alexandrine, the vast new lexicon of common and proper names, and the visionary treatment of metaphor; the symbolic complexity of theatrical set and costume design; or the treatment of the novel as a total work blending drama, philosophy, epic, and history—are meant to reflect the confusion and potential freedom of the post-Revolutionary era.

If Hugo's Utopian view of history has met with derision, his modernist heirs recognize the enormous importance of his contribution to the revitalization of poetic forms. As Valéry put it 50 years after his death, Hugo's greatness can be judged by the controversy his work continues to inspire.

[Suzanne Nash]

Bibliography

• J. Massin's 18-vol. edition of the Œuvres complètes (1967-70) for a wealth of informed commentary on all of Hugo's works
• J. Gaudon, Le Temps de la contemplation (1969)
• A. Ubersfeld, Le Roi et le bouffon (1974)
• S. Nash, ‘Les Contemplations’ of Victor Hugo: An Allegory of the Creative Process (1976)
• V. Brombert, Victor Hugo and the Visionary Novel (1984)

Hugo, Victor Marie, Vicomte (hyū'gō, Fr. vēktôr' märē' vēkôNt' ügō') , 1802–85, French poet, dramatist, and novelist, b. Besançon. His father was a general under Napoleon. As a child he was taken to Italy and Spain and at a very early age had published his first book of poems, resolving “to be Chateaubriand or nothing.” The preface to his drama Cromwell (1827) placed him at the head of the romanticists; he remained the greatest exponent of the school and was considered by many the greatest poet of his day. His principal poetic works are Les Orientales (1829), Les Feuilles d'automne (1831), Les Chants du crépuscule (1835), Les Voix intérieures (1837), Les Rayons et les ombres (1840), Les Châtiments (1853), Les Contemplations (1856), and La Légende des siècles (1859). The production of his poetic drama Hernani (tr. 1830), which broke with conventions of the French theater, caused a riot between the classicists and the romanticists. The drama was the basis of Verdi's opera Ernani; Verdi also made use of Hugo's play Le Roi s'amuse (1832) for Rigoletto. Other plays include Marion Delorme (1831, tr. 1872), Ruy Blas (1838, tr. 1850), and Les Burgraves (1843), the failure of which spelled the end of the romantic drama. The tragic deaths in that year of Hugo's daughter and her husband were reflected in a moving series of poems of childhood, including The Art of Being a Grandfather (1877). Hugo's two greatest novels are Notre Dame de Paris (1831, tr. 1833) and Les Misérables (1862, tr. 1862), which are epic in scope and portray the sufferings of humanity with great compassion and power. His other important novels include Les Travailleurs de la mer (1866, tr. Toilers of the Sea, 1866), and Quatre-vingt-treize (1874, tr. Ninety-three, 1874). He began his political career as a supporter of the duke of Reichstadt, Napoleon's son; later Hugo espoused the cause of Louis Philippe's son, and then for a short time of Louis Bonaparte. Because he afterward opposed Napoleon III, Hugo was banished and went first to Brussels, then to the isle of Jersey, and later (1855) to Guernsey, where he lived until 1870, refusing an amnesty. In 1870 he returned to Paris in triumph. He was elected to the national assembly and the senate. His last years were marked by public veneration and acclaim, and he was buried in the Panthéon. Critics are divided as to his relative greatness, but he was a towering figure in 19th-century French literature.

Bibliography

See biographies by A. Maurois (tr. 1956), H. Peyre (1980), and G. Robb (1997); studies by R. B. Grant (1968), E. M. Grant (1945, repr. 1966 and 1968), J. P. Houston (1974), W. M. Greenberg (1985), and V. Brombert (1986).

(1802-1885)

The great French romantic novelist. He was keenly interested in Spiritism. He wrote, "To avoid phenomena, to make them bankrupt of the attention to which they have a right, is to make bankrupt truth itself." Hugo left an unpublished manuscript on Spiritism in the possession of Paul Meurice, who died in 1905. It appears that he had his first experiences in table turning in September 1853 at the home of a Mme. de Girardin during his period on the island of Jersey after he was exiled from France by Napoleon III in 1852. Hugo at first refused to attend the séance but was greatly moved when the table spelled out the name of his lost daughter Leopoldine. Soon regular communications were established.

The sitters included General Le Flo, Count Paul Teleki, Charles Hugo, one Vacquerie, and Mme. Hugo. Victor Hugo himself was never at the table, sometimes not even in the room. Many symbolical personages came through, including "the Lion of Androcles," "the Ass of Balaam," and "the Dove of Noah." "The Shadow of the Tomb" expressed itself in verse in the style and language of Victor Hugo, with all the grandiloquence of romantic poetry. Sometimes verse in the same style was signed by "Aeschylus." "Shakespeare" challenged Hugo to a poetic competition. "André Chenier," the guillotined poet, finished the fragmentary poem that was interrupted by his execution. Charles Hugo was the principal medium in all these experiments.

In 1892, seven years after Victor Hugo's death, the spirit of Victor Hugo, or a secondary personality assuming the name, appeared as the control of Hélène Smith, the medium, famous for her pseudo-Martian communication. "Victor" was in exclusive control for five months. After a struggle lasting for a year he was ousted by another control, "Leopold," the so-called spirit of Cagliostro.

Sources:

Berger, Arthur S., and Joyce Berger. The Encyclopedia of Parapsychology and Psychical Research. New York: Paragon House, 1991.

Ebon, Martin. They Knew the Unknown. New York: New American Library, 1971.

Flournoy, Theodor. From India to the Planet Mars. Reprint, New Hyde Park, N.Y.: University Books, 1963.

Grillet, Claudius Victor Hugo Spirite. Paris, 1929.

Malo, Henry. Life of Delphine Gray. N.p., 1925.

Sudre, René. "The Case of Victor Hugo and the Collective Psychism." Psychic Research 23 (1971).

Quotes:

"Forty is the old age of youth, fifty is the youth of old age."

"When grace is joined with wrinkles, it is adorable. There is an unspeakable dawn in happy old age."

"Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters."

"A creditor is worse than a slave-owner; for the master owns only your person, but a creditor owns your dignity, and can command it."

"We are the children of our own deeds."

"Despots play their part in the works of thinkers. Fettered words are terrible words. The writer doubles and trebles the power of his writing when a ruler imposes silence on the people. Something emerges from that enforced silence, a mysterious fullness which filters through and becomes steely in the thought. Repression in history leads to conciseness in the historian, and the rocklike hardness of much celebrated prose is due to the tempering of the tyrant."

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