VICTOR HUGO

by Petri Liukkonen

Novelist, poet, and dramatist, the most important of French Romantic writers. In his preface to his historical play CROMWELL (1827) Hugo wrote that romanticism is the liberalism of literature. Hugo developed his own version of the historical novel, combining concrete, historical details with vivid, melodramatic, even feverish imagination. Among his best-known works are The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Les Misérables.

"How came it that this prudent, economical man was also generous? That this chaste adolescent, this model father, grew to be, in his last years, an ageing faun? That this legitimist changed, first into a Bonapartist, only, later still, to be hailed as the grandfather of the Republic? That this pacifist could sing, better than anybody, of the glories of the flags of Wagram? That this bourgeois in the eyes of other bourgeois came to assume the stature of a rebel? These are the questions that every biographer of Victor Hugo must answer." (from Olympio: The Life of Victor Hugo by André Maurois, 1954)

Victor Hugo was born in Besançon as the son of a army general, who taught young Victor to admire Napoleon as a hero. After the separation of his parents, he was raised and educated in Paris by his mother, where the family settled when Hugo was two. His mother's lover, General Victor Lahorie, her husband's former Commandin Officer, was executed for plotting against Napoleon in 1812.

From 1815 to 1818 Hugo attended the lycée Louis-le Grand in Paris. He began in early adolescence to write verse tragedies and poetry, and translated Virgil. In 1819 he founded with his brothers a review, the Conservateur Littéraire. Inspired by the example of the statesman and author François René Chateaubriand, Hugo published his first collection of poems, ODES ET POÉSIES DIVERSES. It gained him a royal pension from Louis XVIII. As a novelist Hugo made his debut with HAN D'ISLANDE (1823). The style of Sir Walter Scott labelled several of his works, among them BUG-JARGAL (1826).

In 1822 Hugo married Adèle Foucher (d. 1868), who was the daughter of an officer at the ministry of war. His brother went insane on his wedding day - partly because losing his rivalry for Adele - and spent the rest of his life in an institution. In the 1820s Hugo come in touch with liberal writers, but his political stand wavered from side to side. In 1825 he cursed the memory of Napoleon but a few years later he started to speak of the glory that was bound up to the name of Napoleon. Hugo's foreword for his play CROMWELL (1827), a manifesto for a new drama, started a debate between French Classicism and Romanticism. However, Hugo was not a rebel, and not directly involved in the campaign against the bourgeois, but he influenced deeply the Romantic movement and the formulation of its values in France.

To sise at six, to dine at ten,
To sup at six, to sleep at ten,
Makes a man live for ten times ten.

(Inscription over the door of Hugo's study)

Hugo gained a wider fame with his play HERNANI (1830) and with his famous historical work NOTRE-DAME DE PARIS which became an instant success. Since its appearance in 1831 the story has became part of the popular culture. The novel, set in 15th century Paris, tells a moving story of a gypsy girl Esmeralda and the deformed bell ringer, Quasimodo, who loves her. Esmeralda aroses passion in Claude Frollo, an evil priest, who discovers that she favors Captain Phoebus. Frollo stabs the captain and Esmeralda is accused of the crime. Quasimodo attempts to shelter Esmeralda in the cathedral. Frollo finds her and when Frollo is rejected by Esmeralda, he leaves her to the executioners. In his despair Quasimodo catches the priest, throws him from the cathedral tower, and disappears. Later two skeletons are found in Esmeralda's tomb - that of a hunchback embracing that of a woman.

Où sont-ils, les marins sombrés dans le nuits noires?
O flots, quo vous savez de lugubres histoires!
Flots profonds redoutés des mères à genoux!
Vous vous les racontez en montant les marées,
Et c'est ce qui vous fait ces voix désespérées
Que vous avez le soir quand vous venez vers nous!

(from 'Oceano nox')

In the 1830s Hugo published several volumes of lyric poetry, which were inspired by Juliette Drouet, an actress with whom Hugo had a liaison until her death in 1882. Hugo's lyrical style was rich, intense and full of powerful sounds and rhythms, and although it followed the bourgeois popular taste of the period it also had bitter personal tones. Hugo's 'Mme Biard poems' - he had an affair with her in the 1840s - are intensely sexual. According to Verlaine a typical Hugo love poem was "I like you. You yield to me. I love you. - You resist me. Clear off..." Among his most ambitious works was an epic poem, 'Et nox facta est,' (And There Was Night), a study of Satan's fall. The poem was never completed. The latin title refers to the biblical lines "and there was light". But when Milton's Satan had in his revolt tragic, cosmic grandeur, Hugo brings forth the feeling terror - the devil is a bat flying from his eternal prison, crying his revenge: "He shall have the blue sky, the black sky is mine."

In his later life Hugo became involved in politics as a supporter of the republican form of government. After three unsuccessful attempts, Hugo was elected in 1841 to the Académie Francaise. This triump was shadowed by the death of Hugo's daughter Léopoldine in 1843. In a poem, 'Tomorrow, At Daybreak', written on the fourth anniversary of her death, Hugo depicted his walk to the place where she was buried: "I shall not look on the gold of evening falling / Nor on the sails descending distant towards Harfleur, / And when I come, shall lay upon your grave / A bouquet of green holly and of flowering briar." It took a decade before Hugo published again books. He devoted himself to politics, advocating social justice. After the 1848 revolution, with the formation of the Second Republic, Hugo was elected to the Constitutional Assembly and to the Legislative Assembly.

When the coup d'état by Louis Napoleon (Napoleon III) took place in 1851, Hugo believed his life to be in danger. He fled to Brussels and then to Jersey and Guernsey in the English Channel. In a poem, 'Memory of the Night of the Fourth,' focusing on the overthrown of the Second Republic and the death of a young child, killed by bullets, Hugo wrote about the new emperor: "Ah mother, you don't understand politics. / Monsieur Napoleon, that's his real name, / Is poor and a prince; loves palaces; / Likes to have horses, valets, money / For his gaming, his table, his bedroom, / His hunts, and he maintains / Family, church and society, / He wants Saint-Clod, rose-carpeted in summer, So prefects and mayors can respect him. That's why it has to be this way: old grandmothers / With their poor gray fingers shaking with age / Must sew in winding-sheets children of seven." Hugo's partly voluntary exile lasted 20 years. During this time he wrote at Hauteville House some his best works, including LES CHÂTIMENTS (1853) and Les Misérables (1862), an epic story about social injustice.

Les Misérables is set in the Parisian underworld. The protagonist, Jean Valjean, is sentenced to prison for 19 years for stealing a loaf of bread. After his release, Valjean plans to rob monseigneur Myriel, a saintlike bishop, but cancels his plan. However, he forfeits his parole by committing a minor crime, and for this crime Valjean is haunted by the police inspector Javert. Valjean eventually reforms and becomes under the name of M. Madeleine a successful businessman, benefactor and mayor of a northern town. To save an innocent man, Valjean gives himself up and is imprisoned in Toulon. He escapes and adopts Cosette, an illegitimate child of a poor woman, Fantine. Cosette grows up and falls in love with Marius, who is wounded during a revolutionary fight. Valjean rescues Marius by means of a flight through the sewers of Paris. Cosette and Marius marries and Valjean reveals his past. - The story has been filmed several times and made into a musical by the composer Claude-Michel Schönberg and the librettist Alain Boublil, opening in 1980 in Paris. The English version was realised in 1985 and the Broadway version followed two years later.

The political upheaval in France and the proclamation of the Third Republic made Hugo return to France. Napoleon III fell from power and in 1870 Hugo witnessed the siege of Paris. During the period of the Paris Commune, Hugo lived in Brussels, from where he was expelled for sheltering defeated revolutionaries. After a short time refuge in Luxemburg, he returned to Paris and was elected senator. - Hugo died in Paris on May 22, 1885. He was given a national funeral, attended by two million people, and buried in the Panthéon.

For further reading: Victor Hugo, a Realistic Biography by Matthew Josephson (1942); Olympio: The Life of Victor Hugo by André Maurois (1954 ); Victor Hugo romancier; ou, Les Dessus de l'inconnu by Georges Pironué (1964); Victor Hugo by John P. Houston (1975); Extraordinary House of Victor Hugo in Guernsey by A.D. Chauvel and M. Forestier (1975); Victor Hugo by Joanna Richardson (1976); Victor Hugo and the Visionary Novel by Victor Brombert (1984); Paroles de Hugo by Anne Ubersfeld (1985); The Impresonal Sublime by Suzanne Guerlac (1990); Victor Hugo, ed. by Harold Bloom (1991); "Les Miserables": Conversion, Revolution, Redemption by Kathryn M. Grossman (1996); Victor Hugo: A Biography by Graham Robb (1998); Victor Hugo Encyclopedia by John A. Frey (1998); Victor Hugo and the Romantic Drama by Albert W. Halsall (1998) - Museum: Maison de Victor Hugo, 6 Place des Vosges, the Marais, 75004 - Hugo's house in Paris for 17 years, restored to its original character. - See also: Alfred de Vigny

Selected works:


Die Bretter, die die Welt [be]deuten

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