Victor Hugo

Victor Hugo, (born February 26, 1802, Besançon, France—died May 22, 1885, Paris), poet, novelist, and dramatist who was the most important of the French Romantic writers. Though regarded in France as one of that country’s greatest poets, he is better known abroad for such novels as Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) and Les Misérables (1862).


Victor was the third son of Joseph-Léopold-Sigisbert Hugo, a major and, later, general in Napoleon’s army. His childhood was coloured by his father’s constant traveling with the imperial army and by the disagreements that soon alienated his parents from one another. His mother’s royalism and his father’s loyalty to successive governments—the Convention, the Empire, the Restoration—reflected their deeper incompatibility. It was a chaotic time for Victor, continually uprooted from Paris to set out for Elba or Naples or Madrid, yet always returning to Paris with his mother, whose royalist opinions he initially.


While Hugo had derived his early renown from his plays, he gained wider fame in 1831 with his historical novel Notre-Dame de Paris (Eng. trans. The Hunchback of Notre-Dame), an evocation of life in medieval Paris during the reign of Louis XI. The novel condemns a society that, in the persons of Frollo the archdeacon and Phoebus the soldier, heaps misery on the hunchback Quasimodo and the gypsy girl Esmeralda. The theme touched the public consciousness more deeply than had that of his previous novel, Le Dernier Jour d’un condamné (1829; The Last Days of a Condemned), the story of a condemned man’s last day, in which Hugo launched a humanitarian protest against the death penalty. While Notre-Dame was being written, Louis-Philippe, a constitutional king, had been brought to power by the July Revolution. Hugo composed a poem in honour of this event, Dicté aprés juillet 1830. It was a forerunner of much of his political verse.