The storm
Beethoven, Concerto No. 5, adagio (extract). Composed in 1809.
The life of Victor Hugo
Victor Hugo was born in February 1802 in Besançon, during a time of turmoil and into a divided family: his father, a general under Napoleon, and his mother, a royalist from the Vendée, soon separated. His elder brother Eugène was mentally fragile. From a very young age, Hugo was filled with ambition, read voraciously, and wrote his first novel, Han d’Islande, at eighteen.
His father was often away, and his mother died when he was nineteen. He married soon after. His brother Eugène descended into madness and had to be committed. At twenty, Victor was already a father and had to provide for his family. He worked relentlessly. Success followed: the young writer distinguished himself in poetry, the novel, and the theatre. He loved women and honours. He became a Peer of France. A young actress, Juliette Drouet, fell in love with him, and he with her; their affair would last fifty years. At the same time, he was a doting father. He was happy. His little family continued to grow.
In 1843, the joy of his life, his daughter Léopoldine, drowned at the age of twenty, along with her husband, who, unable to save her, let himself sink in despair. Victor Hugo was devastated by this loss, a grief that would forever remain buried in the depths of his soul. He stopped writing.
Life, however, went on. Before long, he began a passionate affair with a young woman of letters, Léonie. He could not live without her body. But she was married. One morning, the police burst into their room and caught them in flagrante delicto of adultery. In a morally rigid century, it was a scandal—made worse by the ridiculous nature of the scene.
Exile and triumphant return
A few years earlier, he had entered politics. He was elected deputy. But in 1851 came the coup d’état of the man who would become Napoleon III. Hugo rebelled and refused to accept it. He went into exile, first in Brussels, then on the island of Guernsey, off the coast of Normandy. Immersed in the elements—in the sea, in rage, in solitude—his inspiration took a new breath: this was the second great period of Victor Hugo’s literary creation. Although amnestied by the emperor in 1859, he vowed to return only “when liberty returned.” The writer kept his word and remained on his rock for nineteen years, until the abdication of Napoleon III.
His return to France was a triumph. When he arrived in Paris, an immense crowd gathered to see him: “They were shouting: ‘Long live Victor Hugo!’” he wrote in Choses vues. “Every moment, one could hear verses from Les Châtiments rising in the crowd. I gave more than six thousand handshakes.” With inexhaustible vitality, he continued to write and, even at eighty, made love regularly. “As long as the man can, as long as the woman wills,” he noted in his journals. On his birthday in 1881, six hundred thousand people paraded beneath his window. A week later, the Avenue d’Eylau, where he lived, was renamed after him. Thus it was at 124 Avenue Victor Hugo in Paris that death finally came for him in May 1885. “And it is welcome,” said the man who had lived so fully, on his deathbed.
“The sea has been raging for a month; my house at night sounds like a reef; I sleep little in this din; the howling of the abyss makes the dogs bark (I have dogs. That remains). Do you know what I do, not sleeping? I work. I dream. I think of France, of those I love, of radiant spirits, of true friendships, of beautiful styles, of noble hearts, of firm courage, of you.”
To Jules-Janin, Marine Terrace, December 28, 1854
Victor Hugo and his time
During the 1820s and 1830s, and especially since the famous Battle of Hernani, Victor Hugo was the driving force of Romanticism in France. In his wake, an entire generation of writers declared that classical tragedy and its rigid conventions were no longer suited to their era. Beyond literature, numerous artists took part in the movement, convinced that their generation—their values, their style, their ideas—was worth just as much as those of the great masters of the seventeenth century or of Antiquity.
On a political level, Victor Hugo was a man deeply engaged with his time. After an ultra-monarchist youth, he gradually moved leftward, guided by his conscience. His opponents called him foolish. Hugo was not foolish. He was straightforward. His political causes were those of a man outraged by child labor, by poverty, and by the death penalty. During the writer’s adult life, from 1826 to 1880, French courts pronounced 2,527 death sentences. Hugo threw his full weight against this punishment, writing The Last Day of a Condemned Man and even physically intervening to stop the lynching of a police informant while in exile.
This anger never left him. He did not become an indifferent old man, nor did he compromise with Napoleon III during his exile in order to bask in glory back in France. He gave a third of his income to the poor. His actions spoke as loudly as his words. That is why, unlike many writers of his time, he was loved by the people, who saw in him something more than a salon intellectual: a man of words, of heart, and of action.
“There is, at this very moment in Paris, a woman who is dying of hunger.
Her name is Mademoiselle Élisa Mercœur. (…) I have come to ask you, Monsieur le Ministre, to transfer my pension to Mlle Mercœur. If you agree, I shall be doubly happy — happy to have surrendered it, and happier still to see it bestowed where it is truly needed. This pension will sit far more justly upon the head of Mlle Mercœur than upon mine.”
To M. Thiers, Minister of the Interior, June 15, 1834.
His place in the history of literature
During his lifetime, nearly all of his romantic plays, poetry collections, and novels met with great success. After his death, his language and style seeped into our collective memory. Even today, the figures of Cosette, Jean Valjean, Quasimodo, Esmeralda are archetypes known as far away as China and the United States. The endless revivals of his dramas — in television, film, and musicals — attest to the depth of his popular reach.
It is less certain, however, that his influence on writers was as strong. The revolution of the Romantic drama did not really give rise to a lasting literary current. And while he remains the essential poet of the nineteenth century, he was hardly the most radical or innovative of his time. His lyrical impulse in La Légende des Siècles or his epic voice in Les Misérables have found no true heirs in France. But does that really matter? Victor Hugo is like the Alps or the Himalayas: a majestic, splendid landscape — we simply wander in the valleys below and take in the view.
“No artist is more universal than he, more capable of putting himself in contact with the forces of universal life, more disposed to take a bath in nature without ceasing. Not only does he express clearly, he literally translates the clear and unambiguous letter; but he expresses, with the indispensable obscurity, that which is obscure and confusedly revealed.”
Charles Baudelaire
Why Hugo is an extraordinary writer
Paradoxically, what makes Victor Hugo extraordinary is his simplicity. Unlike many writers, he loved life unreservedly. He was not a tortured soul. He loved women, flowers, children, rain, mountains, the sea — even broccoli. He loved everything.
Hugo celebrated life in all its forms with a language bursting with vitality; yet, with the same fervor, he condemned whatever degraded it and roared against whatever made it ugly. He commanded a breathtaking sense of contrast: the grotesque and the sublime, physical deformity and inner beauty, guilt and redemption — all collide vividly in his imagery.
And despite the monumental scale of his work, he never lost his attention to detail: every line stands up to close scrutiny. He was a master of words.
« I do not know in what world Victor Hugo ate beforehand the dictionary of the language he was called to speak; but I see that the French lexicon, coming out of his mouth, became a world, a colorful, melodious and moving universe. »
Charles Baudelaire
