Hugo, Victor

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HUGO, VICTOR

HUGO, VICTOR (1802–1885), French novelist, poet, and playwright.

The complete works of Victor Hugo are vast and varied. Hugo wrote in all the major genres—poetry, drama, and prose narrative—and transformed each one of them. He was also an accomplished visual artist and an astute literary critic. Engaging fiercely with the social issues of his day, Hugo held writers to the highest standards of aesthetic force and social responsibility.

Victor-Marie Hugo was born in 1802, two years before Napoleon I (r. 1804–1814/15) named himself emperor, having defended Republican France against the coalition of European armies. By the time Hugo turned sixteen, France once again had a Bourbon king. An aspiring poet without inherited wealth (his father had been a captain in Napoleon's army), Hugo wrote odes to Louis XVIII (r. 1814–1824) and received a royal pension in appreciation. By July 1830, when a revolution established the July Monarchy (putting Louis Philippe [r. 1830–1848] on the throne) Hugo had produced two very successful books of poetry, Odes et Ballades (1828; Odes and ballads) and Les Orientales (1829; Orientalia), a work devoted to the Romantic themes of nature and exotic beauty.

Hugo had also begun to write for the theater. The preface to his first play, Cromwell (1827), stridently proclaimed artistic freedom from the conventions of the classical theater—rules that had been in place for centuries, concerning formal structure, appropriate vocabulary and action, and the separation of tragic and comic genres. On a Shakespearian model, The Preface of Cromwell called for a mixture of tragic and comic elements,

of sublime and grotesque, and of common language and high rhetoric. Hernani (1830), which put theory into practice, caused a scandal. Supported by friends in the battle that erupted on opening night, Hugo triumphed, becoming the de facto leader of the young writers known as Romantics.

During the 1830s, Hugo published three major collections of poetry: Les Feuilles d'automne (1831; Autumn leaves), Les Chants du crépuscule (1835; Songs of the half-light), and Les Voix intérieures (1837; Inner voices). Les Rayons et les Ombres (Sunlight and shadows) followed in 1840. Fighting censorship and riposting stern critics, he also produced popular plays, among them Le Roi s'amuse (1832; The king is amused), Lucrèce Borgia (1833), and Ruy Blas (1838). The Hugo family hosted elegant parties at their apartment on the fashionable Place Royale (today the Place des Vosges) even receiving the king's son (the Duc d'Orléans), who became a personal friend. Elected to the Académie Française in 1841, Hugo was named pair de France (peer) in 1845. Monarchist, celebrated lyric poet, popular playwright as well as novelist (Notre Dame de Paris [The Hunchback of Notre Dame] appeared in 1831), Hugo was at his peak during the 1840s, poised for a successful career as a conservative politician.

Two events changed his life. The first was personal: the accidental drowning of his daughter Léopoldine in 1843. Devastated by this loss, Hugo stopped writing for a number of years. The second was political: the Revolution of 1848 put an end to the July Monarchy and established the Second Republic. Hugo backed the successful conservative candidate for president, Louis Napoleon Bonaparte (later Napoleon III, r. 1851–1871), but he aggressively opposed the coup d'état of 2 December 1851, when the newly elected president declared himself emperor as his uncle had done before him. For his opposition Hugo was expelled from France. On the run, he published a violent pamphlet against the emperor, "Napoléon-le-Petit" (Napoleon the Little), thereby sealing the fate of his exile that would last nineteen years. A violent narrative poem, Les Châtiments (1853; Punishments), followed, excoriating the emperor, calling upon the French people to revolt against his tyranny, and invoking divine vengeance upon the usurper.

Hugo experienced exile in the Channel Islands (first Jersey, then Guernsey) as a kind of death in life. He saw himself as "not yet a cadaver, already a ghost." To pass the time he experimented with the new medium of photography, created a brilliant oeuvre of drawings, and explored various forms of mysticism, attempting to communicate with the spirit of Léopoldine. He also militated against the death penalty (having already published two important prose works on this theme, Le dernier jour d'un condamné [The Last Day of a Condemned Man] in 1829 and Claude Gueux in 1834). Once a month he and his family served dinner to a group of poor children from Guernsey. The former royalist had become a republican, a thundering voice of freedom and social justice.

Hugo's writing took on new power, reach and depth. Les Contemplations (1856; Contemplations), perhaps his greatest collection of poems, presents a memoir of the poet's soul. The work is

divided into two parts, a before and after separated by the date of Léopoldine's death. In the second part, a range of haunting poetic voices explores themes of infinity and cosmic truth in poems of striking formal innovation. In parallel with this work, though even more ambitious, La Légende des Siècles (1859; The legend of the ages) presents an epic history of the human soul, tracing the progress of humanity throughout history in verse. Les Chansons des rues et des bois (1865; Songs from street and wood), a collection of short poems about love and nature, confirms that the exiled poet had not lost his light touch and his joy at being alive.

The premier writer of France became a property owner for the first time in the land of exile, purchasing Hauteville House with the proceeds from Les Contemplations. Here he wrote a major work of criticism, William Shakespeare (a lucid analysis of the value and urgency of art, and of relations between aesthetic value and social utility in the nineteenth-century historical context) and many of his greatest novels. He completed Les Misérables (begun much earlier) in 1862. Sentimental tale, allegory of the triumph of good over evil, and searing critical analysis of social conditions during the July Monarchy, this massive novel was a hugely popular success. In Les Travailleurs de la mer (1866; The Toilers of the Sea), inspired by the rugged coast of Guernsey, Hugo places the heroic Gilliatt in epic conflict with the forces of nature at sea. L'Homme qui rit (1869; The Man Who Laughs), a brilliant novel set in seventeenth-century England, returns to themes of social injustice. Kidnapped as a child, its hero Gwynplaine has been grotesquely disfigured, an eerie smile cut into his face. Having discovered his aristocratic identity, he speaks before the House of Lords about the suffering of the oppressed; his impassioned plea for social justice, however, meets with laughter, because the smile cut into his face ironically offsets the force of his words and his tears.

In 1859 Hugo refused an offer of amnesty, declaring that he would return to France only when liberty returned. In 1870, upon the departure of Napoleon III (defeated in the Franco-Prussian War), he did so triumphantly. In 1871 Hugo was elected Deputy, on the Left, in the National Assembly of the Third Republic. His last novel, Quatre-Vingt-Neuf (Ninety-Three), was published in 1874 (the title refers to the year of revolutionary regicide and of counterrevolutionary challenge in the Vendée uprising). The novel tells a story of conflict and reconciliation that carries a contemporary message: amnesty for the Communards, whose rebellion in 1871 was violently suppressed. A poet to the end of his life—Les Quatre Vents de l'esprit (The four winds of the spirit) appeared in 1881, Dieu (God) and La Fin de Satan (The end of Satan), among other works, were published posthumously—Hugo died in 1885. He received a state funeral attended by two million mourning Parisians and was buried in the Panthéon.

Monumental in stature, Hugo fits uneasily into the frames of literary history. Critics who emphasize his early work consider him primarily a Romantic poet who, having introduced sophisticated innovations of tone, vocabulary, rhythm, rhyme, syntax, and theme that left subsequent poets breathless, trying to catch up with him, went out of fashion in the second half of the century. His vast epic novels, symbolic romans poèmes (poem novels) whose action is frequently interrupted by lengthy digressions and whose language is sometimes deceptively simple, remain largely unassimilable by critics more at home in the realist tradition. His magnificent late visionary poems are often neglected in favor of more canonically modern works. Finally, critics are often puzzled in the face of the continuous development of Hugo's immense literary talent on the one hand and the radical turn of his political perspective on the other. The fact that Hugo both dramatized his ideological reversal from royalist to republican and claimed to have been a socialist all along only makes matters more confusing. One thing is clear, however: Hugo believed in the force of the word and the power of ideas. For him, the word is a living being, and form and content are indissolubly linked. His sophisticated conception of language (see "Réponse à un Acte d'Accusation" [Response to an accusation] in Les Contemplations) enabled him to fulfill the dream of modern artists: to be at once radically innovative as an artist and a writer fully engaged in the task of transforming the world.

See alsoFrance; Lamartine, Alphonse; Napoleon III; Romanticism.