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Authors: Victor Hugo
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The Hunchback of Notre Dame (2 page)
Victor Hugo
Novelist, poet, dramatist, essayist, idealist politician, and leader of the French Romantic movement from 1830 on, Victor-Marie Hugo was born the youngest of three sons in Besançon, France, on February 26, 1802. Victor’s early childhood was turbulent: His father, Joseph-Léopold, traveled frequently as a general in Napoleon Bonaparte’s army, forcing the family to move throughout France, Italy, and Spain. Weary of this upheaval, Hugo’s wife, Sophie, separated from her husband and settled with her three sons in Paris. Victor’s brilliance declared itself early in the form of illustrations, plays, and nationally recognized verse. Against his mother’s wishes, the passionate young man fell in love and secretly became engaged to his neighbor, Adèle Foucher. Following the death of Sophie Hugo, and self-supporting thanks to a royal pension granted for his first book of odes, Hugo wed Adèle in 1822.
In the 1820s and 30s, Hugo came into his own as a writer and figurehead of the new Romanticism, a movement that sought to liberate literature from its stultifying classical influences. His preface to the play
Cromwell
, in 1827, proclaimed a new aesthetics inspired by Shakespeare and Velazquez, based on the shock effects of juxtaposing the grotesque with the sublime (for example, the deformed hunchback inhabiting the magnificent cathedral of Notre Dame). The play Hernani incited violent public disturbances among scandalized audiences in 1830. The next year, the great success of
Notre-Dame de Paris
(
The Hunchback of Notre Dame)
confirmed Hugo’s primacy among the Romantics.
By 1830 the Hugos had four children. Exhausted from her pregnancies and Hugo’s insatiable sexual demands, Adèle began to sleep alone, and soon fell in love with Hugo’s best friend, the critic Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve. They began an affair. The Hugos stayed together as friends, and in 1833 Hugo met the actress Juliette Drouet, who would remain his primary mistress until her death fifty years later.
Personal tragedy pursued Hugo relentlessly. His jealous brother Eugène went permanently insane at Victor’s wedding to Adèle. Three of Victor’s children died before him. His favorite, Léopoldine, together with her unborn child and her devoted husband, died at nineteen in a boating accident on the Seine. The one survivor, Adèle (named after her mother), would be institutionalized for more than thirty years.
Hugo’s early royalist sympathies shifted toward liberalism during the late 1820s under the influences of the fiery liberal priest Félic ite de Lamennais; of his close friend Charles Nodier, an ardent opponent of capital punishment; and of his father, a general under Napoleon I. He first held political office in 1843, and as he became more engaged in France’s social troubles, he was elected to the Constitutional Assembly following the February Revolution of 1848. A lifetime advocate of freedom and justice, often at his own peril, Hugo’s work linked art to the political realm. After Napoleon III’s coup detat in 1851, Hugo’s open opposition created hostilities that ended in his flight abroad from the new government.
Hugo’s exile took him first to Belgium, and then to the Channel Islands of Jersey and Guernsey. Declining at least two offers of amnesty—which would have meant curtailing his opposition to the Empire—Hugo remained abroad for nineteen years, until Napoleon’s fall in 1870. Meanwhile, the seclusion of the islands enabled Hugo to write some of his most famous verse and his masterpiece, the novel
Les Misérables.
When he returned to Paris, the country hailed him as a hero. Hugo then weathered, within a brief period, the siege of Paris, the institutionalization of his daughter for insanity, and the death of his two sons. Despite this personal anguish, the aging author remained committed to political change. He became an internationally revered figure who helped to preserve and shape the Third Republic and democracy in France. Hugo’s death on May 22, 1885, generated intense national mourning; more than two million people joined his funeral procession in Paris from the Arc de Triomphe to the Pantheon, where he was buried.
The World of Victor Hugo and
The Hunchbach of
Notre
Dame
| 1797 | Hugo’s parents, Joseph-Léopold Hugo and Sophie Trébuchet, marry. They will have three sons: Abel (1798), Eugène (1800), and Victor-Marie (1802), who is born in Be sançon on February 26. An officer in the army of Napoleon Bonaparte (Napoleon I), Léopold must travel constantly during Victor’s youth. |
| 1803 1812 | Marital problems occur as Sophie cannot tolerate the tran sience of army life; finally, she settles in Paris with her three children. Both parents start extramarital affairs. The family travels to Corsica and Elba, where Léopold is stationed. He later commands the troops that will suppress freedom fight ers in occupied Italy and Spain, sometimes nailing their severed heads above church doors. |
| 1804 | apoléon proclaims himself Emperor of the French. Liter ary critic Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve is born. |
| 1807 | Leopold Hugo receives a post in Naples, where his family soon joins him. |
| 1808 | Leopold Hugo follows a cortege of Napoléon’s brother, Joseph, to Spain. Weary of travel, Sophie returns with her young sons to Paris, where she begins an affair with General Victor Lahorie, a conspirator against Napoleon. |
| 1809 | Napoleon promotes Major Hugo to general, and honors him with the title of count. |
| 1810 | The police arrest Lahorie in Mme. Hugo’s house on De cember 30. |
| 1811 | Sophie journeys to Spain to save her marriage, but problems in the relationship persist. Léopold, knowing of his wife’s in fidelity, asks for a divorce. Sophie and her sons return to Paris. |
| 1812 | General Lahorie is executed for plotting against Napoleon. |
| 1814 | Napoléon abdicates and is banished to the island of Elba. The monarchy is reinstated, and Louis XVIII is named king. |
| 1815 | Napoleon returns from exile. The “Hundred Days” of his re newed reign ends when he is defeated at Waterloo. Louis XVIII returns to power. |
| 1816 | A marvelously gifted and precocious writer, Victor Hugo pro claims his ambition to rival François-René de Chateaubriand, the most famous Romantic author of his generation. Es tranged from his father and influenced by his mother, a roy alist by expediency, he skillfully curries favor with the conservative literary establishment and the King, whom he praises in odes. |
| 1817 | Hugo wins honorable mention in the national poetry con test sponsored by l‘Académie française (the French Acad emy). |
| 1818 | Sophie and Léopold are legally separated (divorce was ille gal in France between 1816 and 1886). Victor composes a first, brief version of his novel Bug-Jargal , an account of a slave revolt in the Caribbean after the French Revolution; this version will appear in 1820. |
| 1819 | Despite his mother’s wishes for a more ambitious union, Victor falls in love with—and secretly asks the hand of—his neighbor, Adèle Foucher. But as a minor, he cannot marry her without his mother’s consent, which is denied. The three Hugo brothers found a literary journal called Le Con servateur littéraire. |
| 1820 1821 | Hugo writes over one hundred essays and more than twenty poems for Le Conservateur . |
| 1821 | Victor becomes friends with the famous priest Félicité de Lamennais, who preaches a socially committed Christianity. Victor’s mother dies on June 27. In July his father marries his mistress, Catherine Thomas. Victor becomes reconciled with his father, who does not oppose Victor’s marriage to Adèle. |
| 1822 | Granted a small pension by Louis XVIII for his first volume of Odes praising the monarchy, Victor marries Adèle Foucher on October 12. Eugène Hugo, who also loves her, has a psychotic breakdown at the wedding; he will never re cover. |
| 1823 | Hugo publishes a pioneering historical novel, Han d’Islande (Han of Iceland, sometimes translated as The Demon Dwarf), a bloodthirsty melodrama. He helps found the periodical La Muse frangaise and attends weekly gatherings hosted by the then leader of the French Romantic movement, Charles Nodier (1780-1844). |
| 1824 | Hugo publishes the Nouvelles Odes. His first child, a daugh ter, Léopoldine, is born. Charles X assumes the throne, and Victor serves as the historian of the coronation. |
| 1826 | Odes et Ballades is published, as is the full version of BugJargal , noteworthy for its altruistic black hero. Adèle gives birth to Hugo’s second child, Charles-Victor. |
| 1827 | Hugo becomes best friends with the critic Sainte-Beuve. The play Cromwell is published; its famous preface proposes a Romantic aesthetic that contrasts the sublime with the grotesque, in emulation of Shakespeare. Hugo declares his independence from the conservative, divine-right royalists. |
| 1828 | General Léopold Hugo dies unexpectedly on January 29. Hugo’s third child, François-Victor, is born. |
| 1829 | Hugo’s prodigious literary output includes the picturesque verse collection Les Orientales (The Orientals), the tale Le Dernier Jour d‘un condamné à mort (The Last Day of a Condemned Man), opposing capital punishment, and the histor ical play Marion de Lorme, censored by the French monarchy because it portrays the sixteenth-century ruler François I as a degenerate. |
| 1830 | Hugo’s fourth child, a daughter, named Adèle after her mother, is born. Mme. Hugo wants no more children, and from then on sleeps alone. Sainte-Beuve betrays his best friend, Victor, by telling Adèle he loves her. Hugo’s play Hernani (which served as the basis for the libretto to Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi’s 1844 opera Ernani ), defiantly Romantic in its use of informal language and its violation of the classical “three unities” of time, place, and action, causes riots in the theater where it is performed. |
| 1831 | Notre-Dame de Paris: 1482 (The Hunchback of Notre Dame), a tale of the era of the cruel, crafty Louis XI, is published and becomes a best-seller. The visionary poetry collection Les Feuilles d’automne (The Leaves of Autumn) is published. In it Hugo displays a profundity and a mastery of the art of verse that rival the greatest European poets of the era, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Percy Bysshe Shelley. |
| 1832 | Hugo’s play Le Roi s‘amuse (The King’s Fool), which will in spire Giuseppi Verdi’s great opera Rigoletto (1851), is banned after opening night owing to its disrespectful por trayal of a king. Hugo occupies an apartment in what is today called la place des Vosges, where he will remain until 1848. |
| 1833 | The minor actress Juliette Drouet enters Hugo’s life. He pro vides her with an apartment near him, forbids her to go out alone, and occupies her with making fair copies of his manuscripts. The couple will continue their liaison until her death fifty years later. The first version of George Sand’s feminist novel Lelia is published. |
| 1834 | Hugo ends his friendship with Sainte-Beuve. |
| 1835 | Hugo’s great verse collection Les Chants du crépuscule (Songs of Twilight) appears. |
| 1837 | Hugo is made an officer of the Legion d’honneur (Legion of Honor). Les Voix intérieures , the third of four collections of visionary poetry during Hugo’s middle lyric period (1831-1840), appears. Victor’s brother Eugène, confined in the Charenton madhouse, dies. |
| 1838 | Ruy Blas , Hugo’s best play, outrages the monarchists by de picting a queen and a valet in love. |
| 1840 | Les Rayons et les Ombres (Sunlight and Shadows), the last great poetic collection before Hugo’s exile, is published. |
| 1841 | After several failed attempts, Hugo is elected to the French Academy, the body of “Forty Immortals”—the greatest honor a French writer can receive. |
| 1843 | A tragic year is punctuated by the failure of Hugo’s play Les Burgraves and the drowning of his beloved elder daughter, Léopoldine, her unborn child, and her husband, a strong swimmer who tried to save her after a boating accident. ugo will dedicate his poetic masterpiece, Les Contemplations, to her. |
| 1844 | Alexandre Dumas’s Le Comte de Monte Cristo (The Count of Monte Cristo) appears. |
| 1845 | Hugo is made a pair de France, an appointive position in a body roughly equivalent to the British House of Lords. Ten weeks later, his affair with Mme. Léonie Biard (from 1844 to 1851) comes to light when they are arrested in their love nest and charged with adultery. She goes to prison. Hugo’s rank saves him from prosecution. |
| 1847 | Honoré de Balzac publishes La Cousine Bette. |
| 1848 | The monarchy is overthrown and the Second Republic pro claimed. Hugo is elected to its Constitutional Assembly, with the support of the conservatives. With his son Charles he founds and edits L‘Événement , a liberal paper that un wisely campaigns to have Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, the nephew of the former Emperor, elected president. |
| 1849 | Hugo presides over the International Peace Conference in Paris and delivers the first public speech that proposes the creation of a United States of Europe. Eugène Delacroix paints the ceiling of the Louvre’s Salon d’Apollon. |
| 1849 1851 | Hugo increasingly criticizes the government’s policies, mak ing fiery speeches on poverty, liberty, and the church. His positions provoke the ire of the government. |
| 1851 | The government briefly imprisons Hugo’s two sons in June for having published disloyal articles in L‘Événement . Soon after Louis-Napoléon’s coup d’état (actually, a legal election that creates the Second Empire) in early December, Hugo learns that the imperial police have issued a warrant for his arrest. He flees with his family and mistress to Belgium and then to the Isle of Jersey, a British possession in the English Channel. |
| 1852 1853 | In 1852 Louis-Napoléon declares himself emperor as Napoleon III. Hugo writes a scathing satire, Napoleon le petit . From 1853 to 1855 he attends séances at which the spirits of both the living and the dead (including Shake speare, Jesus, and a cowering Napoleon I) seem to commu nicate by tapping on the table. They explain that all living beings must expiate their sins through a cycle of punitive reincarnations, but that all, even Satan, will finally be par doned and merge with the Godhead. These ideas figure prominently in Hugo’s visionary poetry for the remainder of his life. Georges Haussmann (1809-1891) begins the urban renewal of Paris. |
| 1853 | Hugo publishes Les Châtiments (The Punishments), power ful anti-Napoleonic satire. |
| 1855 | Hugo moves to the Channel island of Guernsey. |
| 1856 | Hugo’s Les Contemplations , his poetic masterpiece, appears. Profits from its sales allow him to purchase Hauteville House on Guernsey, today a museum. |
| 1857 | Gustave Flaubert’s novel of adultery, Madame Bovary— the work most influential on Western novelists until after World War II-is published in book form, as is the first edition of Charles Baudelaire’s poetry, Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil). Both men and their publishers are placed on trial for offenses to public morals. Baudelaire’s publisher is fined and must remove seven poems treating lesbianism and sadism. |
| 1859 | The first volume of Hugo’s poetic history of the world, La Légende des siècles (The Legend of the Centuries), appears. |
| 1861 | The danger of arrest having subsided, Hugo’s wife, Adèle, and her sons begin leaving him to stay in Paris during the winter months. She secretly meets with Sainte-Beuve there. |
| 1862 | Les Misérables, a 1,200-page epic completed in fourteen months, is published on the heels of a fertile period during which Hugo wrote many political speeches and creative works. Hugo’s famous novel gains an enormous popular au dience, although the book is panned by critics and banned by the government. He begins hosting a weekly banquet for fifty poor children. |
| 1866 | Guernsey provides the setting for Hugo’s regional novel Les Travailleurs de la mer (The Toilers of the Sea ). Edgar Degas commences his series of ballet paintings. Works of Cézanne, Renoir, Monet, and other Impressionists appear. The next year Emile Zola’s novel Thérèse Raquin is published. |
| 1868 | Hugo’s wife, Adèle, dies unexpectedly in Brussels. She had |
| | been living apart from Victor for several years, but the two had remained friends. |
| 1869 | Hugo publishes the historical novel L‘Homme qui rit (The Man Who Laughs). He declines a second offer of amnesty from Napoleon III. Sainte-Beuve dies. |
| 1870 | Defeated by the Prussians at Sedan, Napoleon III surrenders to them and is deposed. France’s Third Republic is pro claimed. Hugo returns to Paris in triumph after nineteen years in exile. |