HUGO, VICTOR (1802–85)

HUGO, VICTOR (1802–85)

Victor Hugo was a French poet, novelist, play-wright, leader of French Romanticism and for much of his time an immensely popular political figure. He was a man of extraordinary ambition (already in his teens he exclaimed: ‘Je veux être Chateaubriand ou rien’ ), which, fortunately for him, was matched by extraordinary talents, imagination and energy. Born in Besangon to parents who were to divorce a decade later, his father was a Bonapartist army officer. In 1822 Victor married his childhood friend, Adèle Foucher. By 1830 they would have five children. By that time, though, it was no longer a secret that Adèle had formed an amorous liaison with his friend, the famous critic Sainte- Beuve.

Hugo’s feverishly hard work in the 1820s, aided by royalist family sympathies, earned him prizes and favour with the reigning Bourbon family. By the time he published Cromwell (1827), Hugo had come to be recognized as the leader of the young Romantics, assembling around himself a distinguished coterie of young writers. He met with a real apotheosis on 25 February 1830, at the premiere of his play Hernani, a milestone in French literary history. In 1841 he would be elected to the Académie Française.

Hugo shifted his political loyalties more than once: from a staunch royalist, supporter of the Bourbons in his early years, he had come by the late 1820s to Bonapartism and, moreover, he contributed greatly to the success and popularity of the Napoleonic legend. Then, during the 1830s, he was torn between his sympathy for the new Orléans King,

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Louis-Philippe, and his growing republican views and sensibilities. In 1847 he wrote one of his most socially sensitive works, the novel that was, much later, in 1862, to be published as Les Misérables. Meanwhile, in 1845, King Louis-Philippe had made Hugo a Peer of France. His speeches in the Upper House showed his sensitivity to the popular discontent that was to bring the Revolution of February 1848. He accepted the moderate Provisional Government of the Second Republic and in June 1848 he won a by-election and became a member of the National Assembly. He actively supported the candidature of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, who was elected President of the Republic in December. By 1851, however, he was disillusioned and attacked the President. After the coup d’état of December 1851, he narrowly escaped arrest by fleeing to Brussels. From there he castigated the new dictator with such powerful pamphlets as Napoléon le petit. A few months later, he moved to Jersey. From there he came to be seen as a leading figure of French republican opposition to the Second Empire. Once the Empire fell in 1870 and he returned to Paris, it was not difficult for revered Hugo to be elected a deputy with a huge number of votes. The failure of the battling factions of the Assembly to take seriously his proposal for a ‘United States of Europe’ led him to resign some weeks later. Hugo was passionately attached to the ideal of European unity and wrote some very powerful and evocative texts supporting it. He was probably the most enthusiastic prophet of European unity in the nineteenth century. He was elected again as a senator in 1876. An enormous crowd flooded Paris to attend his funeral in 1885, in one of the biggest funerals in French history, and his ashes were taken to the Pantheon.