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Culture, history,
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and more!
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VICTOR HUGO - French Dramatist
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Music expresses that which can not be
said and on which it is impossible to be silent.
Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes
monsters.
-- Victor Hugo (1802-1885)
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Like Proust, his fellow countryman, Victor Hugo is a writer whose works
are discussed more often than they are actually read. Perhaps we had Les
Misérables force-fed to us in high school or saw one of the many
film versions of his novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame. But of his many
other works of prose, poetry, and drama, most modern readers are ignorant
-- as they are of the details of Hugo's life. In Victor Hugo, Graham Robb
brings a fresh eye to an old subject with laudable results.
During his lifetime, Hugo himself was the author of most of the legend
that has grown up around him, from his pastoral conception on a mountainside
to his heroic republican opposition to Napoleon. Robb turns these myths
inside out as he searches for the underlying compulsions that led Hugo to
obsessively recreate his own history. Robb thoroughly and compassionately
presents the tangled, sometimes sordid, often ridiculous events of Hugo's
life, at the same time commenting knowledgeably on his work. Victor Hugo
is a terrific biography of a fascinating man, a great motivator for readers
to start agitating for more translations of Hugo's work.
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by Graham Robb
Paperback - 720 pages
Published May 1999 by
W.W. Norton & Co.
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ISBN: 0393318990
Other Editions:
Hardcover
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Frenchman Jean Valjean, imprisoned for stealing bread, is paroled
after nearly two decades of hard labor. A gift of silver candlesticks
from a kindly priest helps him begin anew. Forging a decent and
profitable existence, he finds success as a businessman and as the
mayor of a small town. He even takes in a pregnant young woman and
raises her daughter as his own. When a former prison guard (Geoffrey
Rush) -- now a cop -- recognizes Valjean, his past catches up to him.
The relentless Javert gives hot pursuit, intent on putting Valjean
back in prison.
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by Victor Hugo,
Lee Fahnestock (Translator)
Mass Market Paperback -
1463 pages
Reissue edition
Published March 1987 by
New American Library.
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ISBN: 0451525264
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Other editions:
Audio CD (ISBN: 962634105X),
Audio Cassette - Abridged (ISBN: 1559352736),
Audio Cassette - Unabridged (ISBN: 1570190658),
Hardcover (ISBN: 0375403175),
VHS videotape, starring Liam Neeson, Geoffrey Rush,
Uma Thurman, Claire Danes.
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The novelist, poet,
and dramatist Victor Marie Hugo {hue'-goh or ue-goh'}, b.
Besançon, France, Feb. 26, 1802, d. May 22, 1885, was the
preeminent French man of letters of the 19th century and the leading
exponent and champion of romanticism. A conservative in youth, Hugo
later became deeply involved in republican politics, and his work
touched upon many of the major currents of artistic and political
thought of his time. 
Although best known in the English-speaking
world for his two major novels, Notre-Dame de Paris (1831; trans. as
The Hunchback of Notre Dame, 1833) and Les Misérables (1862;
Eng. trans., 1862), Hugo was also the outstanding French lyric poet
of the 19th century.
Until age 10, Hugo
traveled with his father, a general under Napoleon. He then settled
(1812) in Paris with his mother, whose strong royalist sympathies
young Hugo shared. He had early success as a poet and novelist and in
1822 married his childhood sweetheart, Adele Foucher. The home of the
young couple became a meeting place of romantic writers -- among them
Alfred de Vigny and the critic Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve -- whose
search for freedom in art is exemplified in Hugo's epic play
Cromwell (1827; Eng. trans., 1896). The play's
preface was the most widely read and influential manifesto of
romantic literary theory. In it, Hugo spoke of freeing art from the
formal constraints of classicism so that it might reflect the full
extent of human nature. Hugo's romantic theory is exemplified by
Hernani (1830; Eng. trans., 1830), whose first performance on the
stage of the Comédie Française, scene of many
productions of plays by the classical dramatist Jean Racine, was a
triumph for romantic writers. 
Many of Hugo's novels, like his dramas, use
historical settings.
The Hunchback of Notre Dame is a powerfully
melodramatic story of medieval Paris that deals with a deformed bell
ringer's devotion to a wild gypsy girl.
Les Misérables centers on the life of Jean
Valjean, a victim of social injustice, but includes a multitude of
scenes and incidents that offer a panoramic view of post-Napoleonic
France and the early years of the 19th century.
The publication of
Hugo's third collection of poems, Odes and Ballads (1826), marked the
beginning of a period of intense creativity. During the next 17 years
Hugo published essays, three novels, five volumes of poems, and the
major part of his dramatic works. In 1843, however, the failure of
his verse drama Les Burgraves (Eng. trans., 1896), followed by the
death of his beloved daughter Leopoldine, interrupted his prodigious
creativity. In 1845 he accepted a political post in the
constitutional government of King Louis Philippe and in 1848 became a
representative of the people after Louis Napoleon Bonaparte became
president of the Second Republic. When Napoleon seized complete power
in 1851, Hugo's republican beliefs drove him into exile, first to
Brussels and then to the Channel Islands, where he continued to write
savage denunciations of the French government.
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When a woman is talking to you, listen to
what she says with her eyes.
There is one thing stronger than all the
armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has
come.
-- Victor Hugo
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In exile,
accompanied by his devoted mistress Juliette Drouet, Hugo reached
maturity as a writer, producing the first volumes of his visionary
epic poem Legend of the Centuries (1859-83; Eng. trans., 1894), Les
Miserables, and Contemplations (1856; Eng. trans., 1887), often
considered his finest collection of poems. He returned to Paris after
the fall of the Second Empire (1870) to find himself a national hero.
He was elected a member of the National Assembly, then a senator of
the Third Republic.
The last two decades
of his life were saddened by the deaths of his sons, wife, and
mistress, but he continued to write poetry and remained active in
politics until 1878, when his health began to fail. His death was an
occasion of national mourning, and he received a state funeral.
Hugo's works have
survived controversy and critical indifference and remain, by the
challenge of their thematic range and the richness of their style,
among the most significant of the 19th century.
Charles Affron, Professor of French, New York University, New York City.
Source: 1997 Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia v.9.0.1
Bibliography: Charles Affron, A Stage for Poets:
Studies in the Theatre of Hugo and Musset (1971);
Victor Brombert, Victor Hugo and the Visionary Novel (1984; repr. 1986);
Samuel Edwards, Victor Hugo: A Tumultuous Life (1971);
Elliott M. Grant, The Career of Victor Hugo (1945);
Richard B. Grant, The Perilous Quest: Image, Myth,
and Prophecy in the Narratives of Victor Hugo (1968);
Adele Hugo, Victor Hugo, by a Witness of His Life, trans. by Charles E. Wilbour (1964);
Matthew Josephson, Victor Hugo: A Realistic Biography of the Great Giant (1942);
André Maurois, Olympio: The Life of Victor Hugo (1956);
Henri Peyre, Victor Hugo, trans. by R.P. Roberts (1980);
Joanna Richardson, Victor Hugo (1977).
Image Source: Portrait of Victor Hugo, Quasimodo carrying
the gypsy girl Esmeralda to safety - The Bettmann Archive.
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Playwright Biographies:
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Hugo Links:
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Maison de Victor Hugo
6 Place des Vosges, 75004 Paris: Hugo's house for 17 years,
restored to its original character, now a museum. The
Paris Pages and
Pariserve offer brief descriptions of the museum, hours
of operation, and Hugo's works which were completed here.
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