Hugo, Victor Marie 1802-85
French poet and writer, a leading figure of the French Romantic movement

Victor Hugo was born in Besan�on, the son of one of Napoleon I's generals. He was educated in Paris at the Feuillantines, in Madrid, and at the �cole Polytechnique. He wrote a tragedy at the age of 14, and at 20, when he published his first set of Odes et ballades (1822), he had been victor three times at the Floral Games of Toulouse. In the 1820s and 1830s he produced further poetry and drama, establishing his place in the forefront of the Romantic movement, in particular with Hernani in 1830, the first of the five-act lyrics which are especially associated with him. In 1831 he produced one of his best-known novels, Notre Dame de Paris, an outstanding historical romance, later filmed as The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1924).

During the 1840s Hugo became an adherent of republicanism, and he was elected to the Constituent Assembly in 1848. After the coup d'�tat of Louis Napoleon (Napoleon III) he was sent into exile to Guernsey in the Channel Islands (1851-70), where he issued his satirical Napol�on le petit (1852). His greatest novel, Les Mis�rables, a panoramic piece of social history, appeared in 1862. He returned to Paris in 1870, and stayed through the Commune, but then departed for Brussels, protesting publicly against the action of the Belgian government in respect of the beaten Communists, in consequence of which he was again expelled. In 1872 he published L'Ann�e terrible, a series of pictures of the war, and in 1874 his last romance in prose appeared, Quatre-vingt-treize. In 1876 he was made a senator. He was buried as a national hero in the Panth�on.

Bibliography: Principal Works

Poems: Odes et Ballades (1822); second set of Odes et ballades (1826); Les Orientales (1828), which showed his mastery of rhythms; Les Feuilles d'automne (1832, 'Autumn Leaves'); Chants du cr�puscule (1835, 'Songs of Twilight'); Les Voix int�rieures (1837, 'Inner Voices'); Les Rayons et les ombres (1840, 'Sunlight and Shadows'), a collection of sonorous verse; Les Ch�timents (1853, 'Punishments'); Les Contemplations (1856, 'Contempla-tions'); the L�gende des si�cles (1859, 'Legend of the Centuries'); Les Chansons des rues et des bois (1865, 'Songs of the Street and the Forest', perhaps his greatest poetic achievement); a second part of the L�gende (1876).

Dramas: Cromwell (1827), whose preface set out Hugo's poetical creed; Hernani (1830); Marion Delorme (1832); Le Roi s'amuse (1832), which was banned, is best known as the basis of Verdi's opera Rigoletto; Lucr�ce Borgia and Marie Tudor (1832); Claude Gueux (1834); Ruy Blas (1838), after Hernani the most famous of his dramatic works.

Novels: Notre Dame de Paris (1831, 'The Hunchback of Notre Dame'); Les Mis�rables (1862); Les Travailleurs de la mer (1866, 'Toilers of the Sea'), an idyll of passion, adventure and self-sacrifice, set in Guernsey; Quatre-vingt-treize (1874, 'Ninety-Three', a prose romance).

Criticism and other writing: Litt�rature et philosophie m�l�es (1834, 'Literature and Philosophy Combined'), a collection of his youthful writings in prose; Napol�on le petit (1852); William Shakespeare (rhapsody, 1864); L'Homme qui rit (1869), a piece of fiction meant to be historical; L'Histoire d'un crime (1877).

Bibliography: See also Joanna Richardson, Victor Hugo (1976); Andr� Maurois, Victor Hugo (Eng trans, 1954); Elliott M Grant, The Career of Victor Hugo (1945).