Romanticism's Field Marshal
Victor Hugo was born in 1802 at Besancon, son of a general of Napoleon and a mother of royalist sympathies, a household division he spent a lifetime reconciling. Precocity arrived early and never left: royal pensions for teenage verse, and by 1830 the generalship of a movement, when the riotous premiere of his play Hernani became the pitched battle of Romanticism against classical rules. Notre-Dame de Paris in 1831 did more than sell; its success helped rescue the neglected cathedral itself, launching the restoration that saved a Gothic landmark.
His politics traveled the century's whole road, royalist to Bonapartist sympathizer to peer of France to republican, a journey critics called opportunism and he called education. The hinge was grief and power observed closely: the drowning of his beloved daughter Leopoldine in 1843 silenced his poetry for years, while a seat in the upper chamber showed him poverty, prisons, and the death penalty at working distance. His speeches demanding free education and denouncing misery made him, by 1848, something rare: a famous man drifting leftward as he aged.
The Rock That Argued with an Empire
When Louis-Napoleon strangled the Republic in the coup of December 1851, Hugo tried to organize resistance, fled with a price on his head, and began nineteen years of exile in Brussels, Jersey, and finally Guernsey. From Hauteville House, a home he decorated like a novel, he bombarded the Second Empire with contraband literature: Napoleon the Little, the lacerating Chastisements. When an amnesty was offered in 1859, his refusal was total; he would return when liberty did. The empire never found an answer to a poet it had made a martyr.
On Guernsey he finished Les Miserables in 1862, the book he had carried for twenty years: Jean Valjean's nineteen years of unjust punishment, Fantine sold piece by piece, Cosette rescued, Javert's law broken by mercy. Launched with unprecedented international publicity, devoured by soldiers, servants, and statesmen, it made the wretched visible as no parliamentary report ever had. Exile also revealed stranger rooms in him: seances transcribing messages from the dead, and a prodigious appetite for women recorded in coded diaries, indulged while his lifelong mistress Juliette Drouet copied his manuscripts and his daughter Adele slid toward the asylum.
Two Million Mourners
He came home in September 1870, the day after the empire fell, to a Paris that greeted him at the station in tears. He endured the Prussian siege eating whatever the zoo could spare, buried his son, and, though he opposed the Commune's rising in 1871, denounced the slaughter of Communards and sheltered fugitives in Brussels at real personal risk. His last two decades were spent as the Republic's living monument: senator, defender of amnesty, host of famous dinners for poor children, grandfather of the nation through the bestselling Art of Being a Grandfather.
He had asked for a pauper's hearse, and got one, followed by roughly two million people, the largest funeral France had seen, from the Arc de Triomphe to the newly re-secularized Pantheon in 1885. The flaws are on record: vanity of imperial scale, the exploited women, positions arrived at late. Yet no writer ever converted fame into moral force more effectively. Abolition of the death penalty, a United States of Europe, free schooling: he made lost causes respectable by lending them his enormous voice, and lived to see some of them begin to win.
