Victor Hugo was born in 1802 of a much-loved, conservative mother and a distant, heroic soldier father who rose to be a general. He spent much of his childhood on the move following the campaigns of the Napoleonic Wars. His parents separated when he was 16. Two years later, he received a gift from Louis XVIII for verses he had written on the assassination of the King's nephew the Duc de Berri and was later granted a royal pension of 3,000 francs a year. He wrote prodigiously and profitably, receiving a S�vres dinner service for a poem written for the coronation of Charles X and being invested as a Chevalier of the Legion d'Honneur at just 23. He was by this time married to Adele Foucher and had a child (the first of four): a conventional and successful family man. Perhaps only General Hugo detected the transformation to come: "Give it time," he said, "The boy is of his mother's opinions; but the man will be of his father's." The period 1828-30 was crucial in Hugo's life. A dispute over Napoleonic titles sparked a change in his ideas although he was more of an emotional than a political radical as yet. He was inspired by the theatre and became the Captain of the Romantics with his play Hernani. As much a battleground for Romanticists and Classicists offstage as a drama on, it was performed a hundred times, but never without scuffles and arguments among the audience.
At about this time Hugo met the actress Juliette Drouet who was to be his mistress for the next 50 years: by no means the only one, but certainly the most loyal. She never lived more than walking distance away from him and wrote at least a letter a day until she died.
Hugo's huge output of work continued, including the much filmed story of Quasimodo, Notre-Dame de Paris, and perhaps his best play, Ruy Blas. Already France's greatest living writer at 30, in 1845 he was made a peer of France by Louis Philippe - the same year that he began to write Les Mis�rables.
In 1848, after the fall of Louis Philippe, Hugo became a deputy in the National Assembly of the new Republic. A right-winger, he campaigned for Louis Napoleon but soon became disillusioned with him and his ambitions: "To think we have had the great Napoleon and now we must have the little Napoleon!" He became more and more outspoken on social and political issues like education, human rights and injustice and when in 1851, Louis Napoleon declared himself Emperor Napoleon III, Hugo first took to the barricades and then fled from France to exile in Brussels, Jersey, then Guernsey, where he continued to write in defiance of Napoleon. In 1859 he disdainfully rejected the amnesty offered him. In 1861, he completed Les Mis�rables. There is a famous story that, after publication of the first volume, Hugo sent a telegram to his publisher. It said, simply,
"?"
The answer came back by return:
"!"
His publisher made more than half a million francs out of the first six years' sales.
The most abiding picture of Hugo is that of the exile: the "Guernesy Tribunal" dispensing judgment and truth across Europe, his patriarchal image enhanced by the beard he grew to protect his weak throat. It is true that he had the vices of his virtues: he was proud, egocentric, sometimes mean, often unfaithful. But he was a great man, recognised as such and loved as such by his countrymen.
When, in 1870, the disastrous Franco-Prussian War forced Napoleon III into exile, Hugo made a triumphant return to Paris, which was still besieged by Prussian troops, and was elected to the National Assembly of the new Republic. Then in March 1871, the short-lived Paris Commune was declared - a revolutionary attempt to resist humiliating peace terms. Victor Hugo, in Brussels to settle the affairs of his son, who had just died, was mobbed by a Belgian crowd who identified him with the excesses of the Commune. They broke his windows, shouting "Down with Victor Hugo, Down with Jean Valjean." The Belgian government expelled Hugo, although his support for the Commune was equivocal he was opposed to its violence.
Hugo lived another 15 years, writing with much the same energy until a minor stroke in 1878. Three years later, all France turned out to celebrate as Hugo entered his eightieth year. There was a procession past his house and cheering crowds stood for hours under his window. It was in a sense a state funeral, organised while he was still alive to enjoy it, for probably the most famous man in the world at that time. For his actual funeral, in 1885, Hugo had asked for a simple pauper's funeral. In fact, his coffin was laid under the Arc de Triomphe for an all-night mass vigil, and the funeral procession took six hours to pass. Hugo was France's favourite son but, more than that, for years he had been her champion, her conscience and her spirit.
