Victor hugo biography complete list

Although he was a committed royalist when young, Hugo's views changed as the decades passed, and he became a passionate supporter of republicanism , serving in politics as both deputy and senator. His work touched upon most of the political and social issues and the artistic trends of his time. His opposition to absolutism , and his literary stature, established him as a national hero.

Hugo died on 22 May , aged The Hugo family came from Nancy in Lorraine , where Hugo's grandfather was a wood merchant. He was an atheist and an ardent supporter of the Republic. Hugo's mother Sophie was loyal to the deposed dynasty but would declare her children to be Protestants. Since Hugo's father was an officer in Napoleon's army, the family moved frequently from posting to posting.

Hugo later titled himself as a viscount, and it was as "Vicomte Victor Hugo" that he was appointed a peer of France on 13 April Soon, Hugo's father was called to Spain to fight the Peninsular War. Madame Hugo and her children were sent back to Paris in , where they moved to an old convent, 12 Impasse des Feuillantines , an isolated mansion in a deserted quarter of the left bank of the Seine.

Hiding in a chapel at the back of the garden was de La Horie, who had conspired to restore the Bourbons and been condemned to death a few years earlier. He became a mentor to Hugo and his brothers. In , the family joined their father in Spain. Hugo and his brothers were sent to school in Madrid at the Real Colegio de San Antonio de Abad while Sophie returned to Paris on her own, now officially separated from her husband.

On 10 July , Hugo wrote in his diary: "I shall be Chateaubriand or nothing. The Academicians refused to believe that he was only fifteen. Hugo published his first novel Hans of Iceland , the year following his marriage, and his second three years later Bug-Jargal , This cemented his reputation as one of the greatest elegiac and lyric poets of his time.

In his youth, Hugo resolved to be " Chateaubriand or nothing", and his life would come to parallel that of his predecessor in many ways. Like Chateaubriand , Hugo furthered the cause of Romanticism, became involved in politics though mostly as a champion of Republicanism , and was forced into exile due to his political stances. The precocious passion and eloquence of Hugo's early work brought success and fame at an early age.

Though the poems were admired for their spontaneous fervor and fluency, the collection that followed four years later in Odes et Ballades revealed Hugo to be a great poet, a natural master of lyric and creative song. Victor Hugo's first mature work of fiction was published in February by Charles Gosselin without the author's name and reflected the acute social conscience that would infuse his later work.

Claude Gueux, a documentary short story about a real-life murderer who had been executed in France, was published in Hugo became the figurehead of the Romantic literary movement with the plays Cromwell and Hernani Hugo's popularity as a playwright grew with subsequent plays, such as Marion Delorme , Le roi s'amuse , and Ruy Blas One of the effects of the novel was to shame the City of Paris into restoring the much neglected Cathedral of Notre Dame , which was attracting thousands of tourists who had read the popular novel.

He went to Toulon to visit the Bagne in and took extensive notes, though he did not start writing the book until Hugo was acutely aware of the quality of the novel, as evidenced in a letter he wrote to his publisher, Albert Lacroix, on 23 March "My conviction is that this book is going to be one of the peaks, if not the crowning point of my work.

The Belgian publishing house Lacroix and Verboeckhoven undertook a marketing campaign unusual for the time, issuing press releases about the work a full six months before the launch. It also initially published only the first part of the novel " Fantine " , which was launched simultaneously in major cities. Installments of the book sold out within hours and had an enormous impact on French society.

The critical establishment was generally hostile to the novel; Taine found it insincere, Barbey d'Aurevilly complained of its vulgarity, Gustave Flaubert found within it "neither truth nor greatness", the Goncourt brothers lambasted its artificiality, and Baudelaire —despite giving favourable reviews in newspapers—castigated it in private as "repulsive and inept".

Today, the novel remains his best-known work. It is popular worldwide and has been adapted for cinema, television, and stage shows. An apocryphal tale [ 24 ] has circulated, describing the shortest correspondence in history as having been between Hugo and his publisher Hurst and Blackett in He queried the reaction to the work by sending a single-character telegram to his publisher, asking?

The publisher replied with a single! Dedicated to the channel island of Guernsey , where Hugo spent 15 years of exile, the novel tells of a man who attempts to win the approval of his beloved's father by rescuing his ship, intentionally marooned by its captain who hopes to escape with a treasure of money it is transporting, through an exhausting battle of human engineering against the force of the sea and an almost mythical beast of the sea, a giant squid.

Superficially an adventure, one of Hugo's biographers calls it a "metaphor for the 19th century—technical progress, creative genius and hard work overcoming the immanent evil of the material world. The word used in Guernsey to refer to squid pieuvre , also sometimes applied to octopus was to enter the French language as a result of its use in the book.

Hugo returned to political and social issues in his next novel, L'Homme Qui Rit The Man Who Laughs , which was published in and painted a critical picture of the aristocracy. His last novel, Quatre-vingt-treize Ninety-Three , published in , dealt with a subject that Hugo had previously avoided: the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution.

Though Hugo's popularity was on the decline at the time of its publication, many now consider Ninety-Three to be a work on par with Hugo's better-known novels. On the nomination of King Louis-Philippe , Hugo entered the Upper Chamber of Parliament as a pair de France in , where he spoke against the death penalty and social injustice , and in favour of freedom of the press and self-government for Poland.

In , he broke with the conservatives when he gave a noted speech calling for the end of misery and poverty. Other speeches called for universal suffrage and free education for all children. Hugo's advocacy to abolish the death penalty was renowned internationally. When Louis Napoleon Napoleon III seized complete power in , establishing an anti-parliamentary constitution, Hugo openly declared him a traitor to France.

He finally settled with his family at Hauteville House in Saint Peter Port , Guernsey , where he would live in exile from October until The pamphlets were banned in France but nonetheless had a strong impact there. Contact with a wicked man is sometimes enough to rot a good deed and cause something bad to come out of it. Like most of his contemporaries, Hugo justified colonialism in terms of a civilizing mission and putting an end to the slave trade on the Barbary coast.

Take it" and "in the nineteenth century the white man made a man out of the black, in the twentieth century Europe will make a world out of Africa". This might partly explain why in spite of his deep interest and involvement in political matters he remained silent on the Algerian issue. It is the duty of this republic to set such a bad example no longer The United States must renounce slavery, or they must renounce liberty.

Only one slave on Earth is enough to dishonour the freedom of all men. So the abolition of slavery is, at this hour, the supreme goal of the thinkers. As a novelist, diarist, and member of Parliament, Victor Hugo fought a lifelong battle for the abolition of the death penalty.

Victor hugo biography complete list

The Last Day of a Condemned Man published in analyses the pangs of a man awaiting execution; several entries in Things Seen Choses vues , the diary he kept between and , convey his firm condemnation of what he regarded as a barbaric sentence; [ 37 ] on 15 September , seven months after the Revolution of , he delivered a speech before the Assembly and concluded, "You have overthrown the throne.

Now overthrow the scaffold. Although Napoleon III granted an amnesty to all political exiles in , Hugo declined, as it meant he would have to curtail his criticisms of the government. It was only after Napoleon III fell from power and the Third Republic was proclaimed that Hugo finally returned to his homeland in , where he was promptly elected to the National Assembly and the Senate.

He was in Paris during the siege by the Prussian Army in , famously eating animals given to him by the Paris Zoo. As the siege continued, and food became ever more scarce, he wrote in his diary that he was reduced to "eating the unknown". During the Paris Commune —the revolutionary government that took power on 18 March and was toppled on 28 May—Victor Hugo was harshly critical of the atrocities committed on both sides.

On 9 April, he wrote in his diary, "In short, this Commune is as idiotic as the National Assembly is ferocious. From both sides, folly. Hang him! Death to the scoundrel! Hugo, who said "A war between Europeans is a civil war," [ 45 ] was a strong advocate for the creation of the United States of Europe. He expounded his views on the subject in a speech he delivered during the International Peace Congress which took place in Paris in However, in Pauvert 's published archives, he states strongly that "any work of art has two authors: the people who confusingly feel something, a creator who translates these feelings, and the people again who consecrate his vision of that feeling.

When one of the authors dies, the rights should totally be granted back to the other, the people. Hugo's religious views changed radically over the course of his life. In his youth and under the influence of his mother, he identified as a Catholic and professed respect for Church hierarchy and authority. From there he became a non-practising Catholic and increasingly expressed anti-Catholic and anti-clerical views.

A census-taker asked Hugo in if he was a Catholic, and he replied, "No. A Freethinker. After , Hugo never lost his antipathy towards the Catholic Church. He felt the Church was indifferent to the plight of the working class under the oppression of the monarchy. Perhaps he also was upset by the frequency with which his work appeared on the Church's list of banned books.

In his will, he made the same stipulation about his own death and funeral. Yet he believed in life after death and prayed every single morning and night, convinced as he wrote in The Man Who Laughs that "Thanksgiving has wings and flies to its right destination. Your prayer knows its way better than you do. Hugo's rationalism can be found in poems such as Torquemada , about religious fanaticism , The Pope , anti-clerical , Religions and Religion , denying the usefulness of churches and, published posthumously, The End of Satan and God and respectively, in which he represents Christianity as a griffin and rationalism as an angel.

The Hunchback of Notre-Dame also garnered attention due to its portrayal of the abuse of power by the church, even getting listed as one of the "forbidden books" by it. In fact, earlier adaptations had to change the villain, Claude Frollo from being a priest to avoid backlash. Although Hugo's many talents did not include exceptional musical ability, he nevertheless had a great impact on the music world through the inspiration that his works provided for composers of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Hugo himself particularly enjoyed the music of Gluck , Mozart , Weber and Meyerbeer. The latter played Beethoven in Hugo's home, and Hugo joked in a letter to a friend that, thanks to Liszt's piano lessons, he learned how to play a favourite song on the piano — with only one finger. Hugo also worked with composer Louise Bertin , writing the libretto for her opera La Esmeralda , which was based on the character in The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

He introduced him to George Sand who would be his lover for years. In , Hugo attended Chopin's funeral. On the other hand, he had low esteem for Richard Wagner , whom he described as "a man of talent coupled with imbecility. Well over one thousand musical compositions have been inspired by Hugo's works from the 19th century until the present day.

In particular, Hugo's plays, in which he rejected the rules of classical theatre in favour of romantic drama, attracted the interest of many composers who adapted them into operas. More than one hundred operas are based on Hugo's works and among them are Donizetti 's Lucrezia Borgia , Verdi 's Rigoletto and Ernani , and Ponchielli 's La Gioconda Today, Hugo's work continues to stimulate musicians to create new compositions.

Remarkably, not only has Hugo's literary production been the source of inspiration for musical works, but also his political writings have received attention from musicians and have been adapted to music. When Hugo returned to Paris in , the country hailed him as a national hero. He was confident that he would be offered the dictatorship, as shown by the notes he kept at the time: "Dictatorship is a crime.

This is a crime I am going to commit," but he felt he had to assume that responsibility. Throughout his life Hugo kept believing in unstoppable humanistic progress. In his last public address on 3 August he prophesied, in an over-optimistic way, "In the twentieth century war will be dead, the scaffold will be dead, hatred will be dead, frontier boundaries will be dead, dogmas will be dead; man will live.

His faithful mistress, Juliette Drouet , died in , only two years before his own death. Despite his personal loss, Hugo remained committed to the cause of political change. On 30 January , he was elected to the newly created Senate. This last phase of his political career was considered a failure. Hugo was a maverick and achieved little in the Senate.

He suffered a mild stroke on 27 June On 27 June, one of the largest parades in French history was held. The paraders marched for six hours past Hugo as he sat at the window at his house. Perhaps one of the most significant French writers, Victor Hugo was born on February 26th, , the youngest of three sons. His father was a general in Napoleon's army, and his mother was a strong-minded, religious woman.

Dissatisfied with the constant moves required by army life, Madame Hugo settled with her children in Paris. Hugo began writing at a young age, and at seventeen years old he won a national poetry prize. Hugo was an incredibly prolific writer, penning poetry, plays, and prose. He exploded onto the national scene with the publication of The Hunchback of Notre Dame and the success of the play Hernani.

His father was a military officer who later served as a general under Napoleon. Hugo studied law between and , though he never committed himself to legal practice. Encouraged by his mother, Hugo embarked on a career in literature. He founded the Conservateur Litteraire , a journal in which he published his own poetry and the work of his friends.

His mother died in His first novel was published in , followed by a number of plays. Hugo's innovative brand of Romanticism developed over the first decade of his career. Set in the medieval period, the novel presents a harsh criticism of the society that degrades and shuns the hunchback, Quasimodo. This was Hugo's most celebrated work to date and paved the way for his subsequent political writing.

A prolific writer, Hugo was established as one of the most celebrated literary figures in France by the s. In , he was elected to the French Academy and nominated for the Chamber of Peers. He stepped back from publishing his work following the accidental drowning of his daughter and her husband in Hugo fled to Brussels following a coup in He lived in Brussels and in Britain until his return to France in