Victor Hugo

ABOUT VICTOR HUGO
Victor Marie Hugo, born in Besançon, France, on February 26, 1802, was the preeminent French man of letters of the 19th century and the leading expo- nent and champion of romanticism. A conservative in his 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; translated as The Hunchback of Notre Dame, 1833) and Les Misérables (1862; English translation 1862), Hugo was also the out- standing French lyric poet of the 19th century.
Until age 10, Hugo travelled with his father, a general under Napoleon. He then settled in Paris with his mother (1812), 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). 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. 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 centres 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, 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 presi- dent 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.
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), Les Misérables, and Contemplations (1856), 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 Re- public.
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 on May 22, 1885, was an occasion of national mourning and he received a state funeral.
-from Bill’s Notes to the Arts Club production of Les Misérables, July 2015

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Information about Victor Hugo

Born February 26, 1802
Son of General Joseph Leopold Hugo in Napoleon’s army
Had two brothers
Victor’s mother raised the three boys in Paris, not following her husband on his military campaigns. She became a mistress to her husband’s commanding officer, General Lahorie, who was a father figure to Hugo and his brothers until his execution in 1812 for plotting against Napoleon.
Victor won first place in a national poetry contest when he was 17.
Fell in love with his neighbor, Adele Foucher. His mother believed that he shouldn’t marry her because she wasn’t good enough for him. But, the year after his mother died, he married her anyway.
His brother, Eugene, who had mental problems, was secretly in love with Adele, too, and lost his mind on Hugo’s wedding day. He spent the rest of his life in an institution.
His mother died in 1821. He refused help from his father and lived in poverty for a year until he won a pension of 1,000 francs a year from Louis XVIII for his first volume of poetry.
He had five children with Adele: Leopold-Victor, Charles-Victor, Francois-Victor, Adele, and Leopoldine.
From 1830-1845, he produced six plays, four volumes of poetry, and the romantic historical novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame, establishing his reputation as the greatest writer in France.
Every morning, he would write at least 100 lines of poetry or 20 pages of prose.
In 1831, Adele became romantically involved with a well known critic and good friend of Victor’s named Sainte-Beuve. Victor became involved with the actress Juliette Drouet, who became his mistress in 1833. She became his secretary and travelling companion for the next fifty years.
After losing one of his daughters in a drowning accident in 1843, Hugo decided to focus on the growing social problems in France.
In 1848, after the revolution and the establishment of the Second Republic, he was elected to the Constitutional Assembly.
In 1851, Louis Napoleon abolished the republic and reestablished the Empire, Hugo risked execution to rally the workers of Paris against the new emporer. When he failed, he had to escape with his family and mistress to Brussels.
He spent 1851-1861 in exile, where he finished and published LES MISERABLES. It was an immediate popular success, despite the negative reaction by critics.
He returned to Paris after the Franco-Prussian War and the fall of the Empire in 1870. He helped buy weapons to fight the government.
In 1878, Hugo suffered a stroke after a long night spent with his maid, Blanche Lavin. His mistress wrote to her nephew, “You must try to track down the creature [Blanche] who has destroyed my happiness.”
Adele Hugo dies in 1868 and his mistress Mme. Drouet died in 1882.
Hugo died in 1885 at the age of 83.
Although he wanted his funeral to be simple, over 3 million spectators followed his coffin to the Pantheon, where he was buried among France’s great men. It took ten thousand police to control the crowds.

Victor Hugo almost set the world’s record for short letter writing. A month or so after the octavo edition of Les Miserables was published he wrote to his publisher the following:

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Victor Hugo

Hurst & Blackett, the London publishers, not to be outdone by the master, produced the world’s shortest letter when they wrote back to Hugo on the firm’s letterhead:

!
and did not sign it. Nobody could write anything shorter that would convey any meaning.

Many people attribute the longest sentence in literature to Victor Hugo, but the world record in English literature is a sentence with 13,955 words. Hugo currently holds the record for the longest sentence in French literature:

”The son of a father to whom history will accord certain attenuating circumstances, but also as worthy of esteem as that father had been of blame; possessing all private virtues and many public virtues; careful of his health, of his fortune, of his person, of his affairs, knowing the value of a minute and not always the value of a year; sober, serene, peaceable, patient; a good man and a good prince; sleeping with his wife, and having in his palace lackeys charged with the duty of showing the conjugal bed to the bourgeois, an ostentation of the regular sleeping-apartment which had become useful after the former illegitimate displays of the elder branch; knowing all the languages of Europe, and, what is more rare, all the languages of all interests, and speaking them; an admirable representative of the “middle class,” but outstripping it, and in every way greater than it; possessing excellent sense, while appreciating the blood from which he had sprung, counting most of all on his intrinsic worth, and, on the question of his race, very particular, declaring himself Orleans and not Bourbon; thoroughly the first Prince of the Blood Royal while he was still only a Serene Highness, but a frank bourgeois from the day he became king; diffuse in public, concise in private; reputed, but not proved to be a miser; at bottom, one of those economists who are readily prodigal at their own fancy or duty; lettered, but not very sensitive to letters; a gentleman, but not a chevalier; simple, calm, and strong; adored by his family and his household; a fascinating talker, an undeceived statesman, inwardly cold, dominated by immediate interest, always governing at the shortest range, incapable of rancor and of gratitude, making use without mercy of superiority on mediocrity, clever in getting parliamentary majorities to put in the wrong those mysterious unanimities which mutter dully under thrones; unreserved, sometimes imprudent in his lack of reserve, but with marvellous address in that imprudence; fertile in expedients, in countenances, in masks; making France fear Europe and Europe France; Incontestably fond of his country, but preferring his family; assuming more domination than authority and more authority than dignity, a disposition which has this unfortunate property, that as it turns everything to success, it admits of ruse and does not absolutely repudiate baseness, but which has this valuable side, that it preserves politics from violent shocks, the state from fractures, and society from catastrophes; minute, correct, vigilant, attentive, sagacious, indefatigable; contradicting himself at times and giving himself the lie; bold against Austria at Ancona, obstinate against England in Spain, bombarding Antwerp, and paying off Pritchard; singing the Marseillaise with conviction, inaccessible to despondency, to lassitude, to the taste for the beautiful and the ideal, to daring generosity, to Utopia, to chimeras, to wrath, to vanity, to fear; possessing all the forms of personal intrepidity; a general at Valmy; a soldier at Jemappes; attacked eight times by regicides and always smiling; brave as a grenadier, courageous as a thinker; uneasy only in the face of the chances of a European shaking up, and unfitted for great political adventures; always ready to risk his life, never his work; disguising his will in influence, in order that he might be obeyed as an intelligence rather than as a king; endowed with observation and not with divination; not very attentive to minds, but knowing men, that is to say requiring to see in order to judge; prompt and penetrating good sense, practical wisdom, easy speech, prodigious memory; drawing incessantly on this memory, his only point of resemblance with Caesar, Alexander, and Napoleon; knowing deeds, facts, details, dates, proper names, ignorant of tendencies, passions, the diverse geniuses of the crowd, the interior aspirations, the hidden and obscure uprisings of souls, in a word, all that can be designated as the invisible currents of consciences; accepted by the surface, but little in accord with France lower down; extricating himself by dint of tact; governing too much and not enough; his own first minister; excellent at creating out of the pettiness of realities an obstacle to the immensity of ideas; mingling a genuine creative faculty of civilization, of order and organization, an indescribable spirit of proceedings and chicanery, the founder and lawyer of a dynasty; having something of Charlemagne and something of an attorney; in short, a lofty and original figure, a prince who understood how to create authority in spite of the uneasiness of France, and power in spite of the jealousy of Europe, — Louis Philippe will be classed among the eminent men of his century, and would be ranked among the most illustrious governors of history had he loved glory but a little, and if he had had the sentiment of what is great to the same degree as the feeling for what is useful.”
How many words is it?

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Victor Hugo

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