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Hugo, Victor
born Feb. 26, 1802, Besançon, Fr.
died May 22, 1885, Paris
poet, novelist, and dramatist who was the most important of the French Romantic writers. Though regarded in France as one of that country's greatest poets, he is better known abroad for such novels as Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) and Les Misérables (1862).
Early years (1802–30).
Victor was the third son of Joseph-Léopold-Sigisbert Hugo, a major and, later, general in Napoleon's army. His childhood was coloured by his father's constant traveling with the imperial army and by the disagreements that soon alienated his parents from one another. His mother's royalism and his father's loyalty to successive governments—the Convention, the Empire, the Restoration—reflected their deeper incompatibility. It was a chaotic time for Victor, continually uprooted from Paris to set out for Elba or Naples or Madrid, yet always returning to Paris with his mother, whose royalist opinions he initially adopted. The fall of the empire gave him, from 1815 to 1818, a time of uninterrupted study at the Pension Cordier and the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, after which he matriculated at the law faculty at Paris, where his studies seem to have been purposeless and irregular. Memories of his life as a poor student later inspired the figure of Marius in his novel Les Misérables.
From 1816, at least, Hugo had conceived ambitions other than the law. He was already filling notebooks with verses, translations—particularly from Virgil—two tragedies, a play, and elegies. Encouraged by his mother, Hugo founded a review, the Conservateur Littéraire (1819–21), in which his own articles on the poets Alphonse de Lamartine and André de Chénier stand out. His mother died in 1821, and a year later Victor married a childhood friend, Adèle Foucher, with whom he had five children. In that same year he published his first book of poems, Odes et poésies diverses, whose royalist sentiments earned him a pension from Louis XVIII. Behind Hugo's concern for classical form and his political inspiration, it is possible to recognize in these poems a personal voice and his own particular vein of fantasy.
In 1823 he published his first novel, Han d'Islande, which in 1825 appeared in an English translation as Hans of Iceland. The journalist Charles Nodier was enthusiastic about it and drew Hugo into the group of friends, all devotees of Romanticism, who met regularly at the Bibliothèque de L'Arsenal. While frequenting this literary circle, which was called the Cénacle, Hugo shared in launching a new review of moderate tendencies, the Muse Française (1823–24). In 1824 he published a new verse collection, Nouvelles Odes, and followed it two years later with an exotic romance, Bug-Jargal (Eng. trans. The Slave King). In 1826 he also published Odes et ballades, an enlarged edition of his previously printed verse, the latest of these poems being brilliant variations on the fashionable Romantic modes of mirth and terror. The youthful vigour of these poems was also characteristic of another collection, Les Orientales (1829), which appealed to the Romantic taste for Oriental local colour. In these poems it can be remarked that the poet, while skillfully employing a great variety of metres in his verse and using ardent and brilliant imagery, was also gradually shedding the legitimist royalism of his youth. It may be noted, too, that “Le Feu du ciel,” a visionary poem, forecast those he was to write 25 years later. The fusion of the contemporary with the apocalyptic was always a particular mark of Hugo's genius.
Hugo emerged as a true Romantic, however, with the publication in 1827 of his verse drama Cromwell and a once-famous preface. The subject of this play, with its near-contemporary overtones, is that of a national leader risen from the people who seeks to be crowned king; but the play's reputation rested largely on the long, elaborate preface, in which Hugo proposed a doctrine of Romanticism that for all its intellectual moderation was extremely provocative. He demanded a verse drama in which the contradictions of human existence—good and evil, beauty and ugliness, tears and laughter—would be resolved by the inclusion of both tragic and comic elements in a single play. Such a type of drama would abandon the formal rules of classical tragedy for the freedom and truth to be found in the plays of William Shakespeare. Cromwell itself, though immensely long and almost impossible to stage, was written in verse of great force and originality.
Success (1830–51).
The defense of freedom and the cult of an idealized Napoleon in such poems as the ode “À la Colonne” and “Lui” brought Hugo into touch with the liberal group of writers on the newspaper Le Globe, and his move toward liberalism was strengthened by the French king Charles X's restrictions on the liberty of the press as well as by the censor's prohibiting the stage performance of his play Marion de Lorme (1829), in which the character of Louis XIII was portrayed unfavourably. Hugo immediately retorted with Hernani, the first performance of which, on Feb. 25, 1830, gained victory for the young Romantics over the traditional Classicists in a now-famous literary battle. In this play he extolled the Romantic hero in the form of a noble outlaw at war with society, dedicated to a passionate love and driven on by inexorable fate. The actual impact of the play owed less to the plot than to the sound and beat of the verse, which was softened only in the elegiac passages spoken by Hernani and Doña Sol.
Hugo had derived his early renown from his plays; he gained wider fame in 1831 with his historical novel Notre-Dame de Paris (Eng. trans. The Hunchback of Notre-Dame), an evocation of life in medieval Paris during the reign of Louis XI. The novel condemns a society that, in the persons of Frollo the archdeacon and Phoebus the soldier, heaps misery on the hunchback Quasimodo and the gypsy girl Esmeralda. The theme touched the public consciousness more deeply than had that of his previous novel, Le Dernier Jour d'un condamné (1829; The Last Days of a Condemned), the story of a condemned man's last day, in which Hugo launched a humanitarian protest against the death penalty. While Notre-Dame was being written, Louis-Philippe, a constitutional king, had been brought to power by the July Revolution. Hugo composed a poem in honour of this event, Dicté aprés juillet 1830; it was a forerunner of much of his political verse.
Four books of poems came from Hugo in the period of the July Monarchy: Les Feuilles d'automne (1831; “Autumn Leaves”), intimate and personal in inspiration; Les Chants du crépuscule (1835; Songs of Twilight), overtly political; Les Voix intérieures (1837; “Inner Voices”), both personal and philosophical; and Les Rayons et les ombres (1840; “Sunlight and Shadows”), in which the poet, renewing these different themes, indulges his gift for colour and picturesque detail. But Hugo was not content merely to express personal emotions; he wanted to be the “sonorous echo” of his time. In his verse political and philosophical problems were integrated with the religious and social disquiet of the period; one poem evoked the misery of the workers, another praised the efficacy of prayer. He addressed many poems to the glory of Napoleon, though he shared with his contemporaries the reversion to republican ideals. Hugo restated the problems of his century and the great and eternal human questions, and he spoke with a warmhearted eloquence and reasonableness that moved people's souls.
So intense was Hugo's creative activity during these years that he also continued to pour out plays. There were two motives for this: first, he needed a platform for his political and social ideas, and, second, he wished to write parts for a young and beautiful actress, Juliette Drouet, with whom he had begun a liaison in 1833. Juliette had little talent and soon renounced the stage in order to devote herself exclusively to him, becoming the discreet and faithful companion she was to remain until her death in 1883. The first of these plays was another verse drama, Le Roi s'amuse (1832; Eng. trans. The King's Fool), set in Renaissance France and depicting the frivolous love affairs of Francis I while antithetically revealing the noble character of his court jester. This play was at first banned but was later used by Giuseppe Verdi as the libretto of his opera Rigoletto. Three prose plays followed: Lucrèce Borgia and Marie Tudor in 1833 and Angelo, tyran de Padoue (“Angelo, Tyrant of Padua”) in 1835. Ruy Blas, a play in verse, appeared in 1838 and was followed by Les Burgraves in 1843.
Hugo's literary achievement was recognized in 1841 by his election, after three unsuccessful attempts, to the French Academy and by his nomination in 1845 to the Chamber of Peers. From this time he almost ceased to publish, partly because of the demands of society and political life but also as a result of personal loss: his daughter Léopoldine, recently married, was accidentally drowned with her husband in September 1843. Hugo's intense grief found some mitigation in poems that later appeared in Les Contemplations, a volume that he divided into “Autrefois” and “Aujourd'hui,” the moment of his daughter's death being the mark between yesterday and today. He found relief above all in working on a new novel, which became Les Misérables, published in 1862 after work on it had been set aside for a time and then resumed.
With the Revolution of 1848, Hugo was elected a deputy for Paris in the Constituent Assembly and later in the Legislative Assembly. He supported the successful candidacy of Prince Louis-Napoléon for the presidency that year. The more the president evolved toward an authoritarianism of the right, however, the more Hugo moved toward the assembly's left. When in December 1851 a coup d'état took place, which eventually resulted in the Second Empire under Napoleon III, Hugo made one attempt at resistance and then fled to Brussels.
Exile (1851–70).
Hugo's exile was to last until the return of liberty and the reconstitution of the republic in 1870. Enforced at the beginning, exile later became a voluntary gesture and, after the amnesty of 1859, an act of pride. He remained in Brussels for a year until, foreseeing expulsion, he took refuge on British territory. He first established himself on the island of Jersey, in the English Channel, where he remained from 1852 to 1855. When he was expelled from there, he moved to the neighbouring island of Guernsey. During this exile of nearly 20 years he produced the most extensive part of all his writings and the most original.
Immersed in politics as he was, Hugo devoted the first writings of his exile to satire and recent history: Napoléon le Petit (1852), an indictment of Napoleon III, and Histoire d'un crime, a day-by-day account of Louis Bonaparte's coup. Hugo's return to poetry was an explosion of wrath: Les Châtiments (1853; “The Punishments”). This collection of poems unleashed his anger against the new emperor and, on a technical level, freed him from his remaining classical prejudices and enabled him to achieve the full mastery of his poetic powers. Les Châtiments ranks among the most powerful satirical poems in the French language. All Hugo's future verse profited from this release of his imagination: the tone of this collection of poems is sometimes lyrical, sometimes epic, sometimes moving, but most often virulent, containing an undertone of national and personal frustration.
Despite the satisfaction he derived from his political poetry, Hugo wearied of its limitations and, turning back to the unpublished poems of 1840–50, set to work on the volume of poetry entitled Les Contemplations (1856). This work contains the purest of his poetry—the most moving because the memory of his dead daughter is at the centre of the book, the most disquieting, also, because it transmits the haunted world of a thinker. In poems such as “Pleurs dans la nuit” and “La Bouche d'ombre,” he reveals a tormented mind that struggles between doubt and faith in its lonely search for meaning and significance.
Hugo's apocalyptic approach to reality was the source of two epic or metaphysical poems, La Fin de Satan (“The End of Satan”) and Dieu (“God”), both of them confrontations of the problem of evil. Written between 1854 and 1860, they were not published until after his death because his publisher preferred the little epics based on history and legend contained in the first installment (1859) of the gigantic epic poem La Légende des siècles (The Legend of the Centuries), whose second and third installments appeared in 1877 and 1883, respectively. The many poems that make up this epic display all his spiritual power without sacrificing his exuberant capacity to tell a story. Hugo's personal mythology of the human struggle between good and evil lies behind each of the legends: Eve's motherhood is exalted in “Le Sacre de la femme”; mankind liberating itself from all religions in order to attain divine truth is the theme of “Le Satyre”; and “Plein Ciel” proclaims, through utopian prediction of men's conquest of the air, the poet's conviction of indefinite progress toward the final unity of science with moral awareness.
After the publication of three long books of poetry, Hugo returned to prose and took up his abandoned novel, Les Misérables. Its extraordinary success with readers of every type when it was published in 1862 brought him instant popularity in his own country, and its speedy translation into many languages won him fame abroad. The novel's name means “the wretched,” or “the outcasts,” but English translations generally carry the French title. The story centres on the convict Jean Valjean, a victim of society who has been imprisoned for 19 years for stealing a loaf of bread. A hardened and astute criminal upon his release, he eventually softens and reforms, becoming a successful industrialist and mayor of a northern town. Yet he is stalked obsessively by the detective Javert for an impulsive, regretted former crime, and Jean Valjean eventually sacrifices himself for the sake of his adopted daughter, Cosette, and her husband, Marius. Les Misérables is a vast panorama of Parisian society and its underworld, and it contains many famous episodes and passages, among them a chapter on the Battle of Waterloo and the description of Jean Valjean's rescue of Marius by means of a flight through the sewers of Paris. Les Misérables's plot is basically that of a detective story, but by virtue of its characters, who are sometimes a little larger than life yet always vital and engaging, and by its re-creation of the swarming Parisian underworld, the main theme of man's ceaseless combat with evil clearly emerges while the whole gives a faithful picture of the ebb and flow of life.
The remaining works Hugo completed in exile include the essay William Shakespeare (1864) and two novels: Les Travailleurs de la mer (1866; The Toilers of the Sea), dedicated to the island of Guernsey and its sailors; and L'Homme qui rit (1869; The Man Who Laughs), a curious baroque novel about the English people's fight against feudalism in the 17th century, which takes its title from the perpetual grin of its disfigured hero. Hugo's last novel, Quatrevingt-treize (1874; Ninety-three), centred on the tumultuous year 1793 in France and portrayed human justice and charity against the background of the French Revolution.
Last years (1870–85).
The defeat of France in the Franco-German War and the proclamation of the French Third Republic in 1871 brought Hugo back to Paris. He became a deputy in the National Assembly (1871) but resigned the following month. Though he still fought for his old ideals, he no longer possessed the same energies. The trials of recent years had aged him, and there were more to come: in 1868 he had lost his wife, Adèle, a profound sadness to him; in 1871 one son died, as did another in 1873. Though increasingly detached from life around him, the poet of L'Année terrible (1872), in which he recounted the siege of Paris during the “terrible year” of 1870, had become a national hero and a living symbol of republicanism in France. In 1878 Hugo was stricken by cerebral congestion, but he lived on for some years in the Avenue d'Eylau, renamed Avenue Victor-Hugo on his 80th birthday. In 1885, two years after the death of his faithful companion Juliette, Hugo died and was given a national funeral; his body lay in state under the Arc de Triomphe and was buried in the Panthéon.
Reputation.
Victor Hugo's enormous output is unique in French literature; it is said that he used to write each morning 100 lines of verse or 20 pages of prose. “The most powerful mind of the Romantic movement,” as he was described in 1830, laureate and peer of France in 1845, he went on to assume the role of an outlawed sage who, with the easy consciousness of authority, put down his insights and prophetic visions in prose and verse, becoming at last the genial grandfather of popular literary portraiture and the national poet who gave his name to a street in every town in France.
This instinctive recognition of Hugo as a great poet at the time of his death was followed by a period of critical neglect. A few of his poems were remembered, and Les Misérables continued to be widely read. The generosity of his ideas and the warmth of their expression still moved the public mind, for Hugo was a poet of the common man and knew how to write with simplicity and power of common joys and sorrows. But there was another side to him—what Paul Claudel called his “panic contemplation” of the universe, the numinous fear that penetrates his sombre poems La Fin de Satan and Dieu. Hugo's knowledge of the resources of French verse and his technical virtuosity in metre and rhyme, moreover, rescued French poetry from the sterility of the 18th century. André Gide, when asked whom he considered the greatest French poet, replied “Victor Hugo, alas,” explaining that if it was a regrettable fact at least it was fact.
Jean-Bertrand Barrère
Additional Reading
Biographies include Andre Maurois, Olympio: The Life of Victor Hugo (1956, reissued 1985); Joanna Richardson, Victor Hugo (1976); and Elliott M. Grant, The Career of Victor Hugo (1945, reprinted 1969). John Porter Houston, Victor Hugo, rev. ed. (1988), is an introduction, focusing especially on his poetry and its technical aspects. An analysis of Hugo's romantic drama is found in Charles Affron, A Stage for Poets: Studies in the Theatre of Hugo & Musset (1971). Victor Brombert, Victor Hugo and the Visionary Novel (1984), explores the symbolic and mythological character of Hugo's works and is illustrated with Hugo's drawings.
born Feb. 26, 1802, Besançon, Fr.
died May 22, 1885, Paris
poet, novelist, and dramatist who was the most important of the French Romantic writers. Though regarded in France as one of that country's greatest poets, he is better known abroad for such novels as Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) and Les Misérables (1862).
Early years (1802–30).
Victor was the third son of Joseph-Léopold-Sigisbert Hugo, a major and, later, general in Napoleon's army. His childhood was coloured by his father's constant traveling with the imperial army and by the disagreements that soon alienated his parents from one another. His mother's royalism and his father's loyalty to successive governments—the Convention, the Empire, the Restoration—reflected their deeper incompatibility. It was a chaotic time for Victor, continually uprooted from Paris to set out for Elba or Naples or Madrid, yet always returning to Paris with his mother, whose royalist opinions he initially adopted. The fall of the empire gave him, from 1815 to 1818, a time of uninterrupted study at the Pension Cordier and the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, after which he matriculated at the law faculty at Paris, where his studies seem to have been purposeless and irregular. Memories of his life as a poor student later inspired the figure of Marius in his novel Les Misérables.
From 1816, at least, Hugo had conceived ambitions other than the law. He was already filling notebooks with verses, translations—particularly from Virgil—two tragedies, a play, and elegies. Encouraged by his mother, Hugo founded a review, the Conservateur Littéraire (1819–21), in which his own articles on the poets Alphonse de Lamartine and André de Chénier stand out. His mother died in 1821, and a year later Victor married a childhood friend, Adèle Foucher, with whom he had five children. In that same year he published his first book of poems, Odes et poésies diverses, whose royalist sentiments earned him a pension from Louis XVIII. Behind Hugo's concern for classical form and his political inspiration, it is possible to recognize in these poems a personal voice and his own particular vein of fantasy.
In 1823 he published his first novel, Han d'Islande, which in 1825 appeared in an English translation as Hans of Iceland. The journalist Charles Nodier was enthusiastic about it and drew Hugo into the group of friends, all devotees of Romanticism, who met regularly at the Bibliothèque de L'Arsenal. While frequenting this literary circle, which was called the Cénacle, Hugo shared in launching a new review of moderate tendencies, the Muse Française (1823–24). In 1824 he published a new verse collection, Nouvelles Odes, and followed it two years later with an exotic romance, Bug-Jargal (Eng. trans. The Slave King). In 1826 he also published Odes et ballades, an enlarged edition of his previously printed verse, the latest of these poems being brilliant variations on the fashionable Romantic modes of mirth and terror. The youthful vigour of these poems was also characteristic of another collection, Les Orientales (1829), which appealed to the Romantic taste for Oriental local colour. In these poems it can be remarked that the poet, while skillfully employing a great variety of metres in his verse and using ardent and brilliant imagery, was also gradually shedding the legitimist royalism of his youth. It may be noted, too, that “Le Feu du ciel,” a visionary poem, forecast those he was to write 25 years later. The fusion of the contemporary with the apocalyptic was always a particular mark of Hugo's genius.
Hugo emerged as a true Romantic, however, with the publication in 1827 of his verse drama Cromwell and a once-famous preface. The subject of this play, with its near-contemporary overtones, is that of a national leader risen from the people who seeks to be crowned king; but the play's reputation rested largely on the long, elaborate preface, in which Hugo proposed a doctrine of Romanticism that for all its intellectual moderation was extremely provocative. He demanded a verse drama in which the contradictions of human existence—good and evil, beauty and ugliness, tears and laughter—would be resolved by the inclusion of both tragic and comic elements in a single play. Such a type of drama would abandon the formal rules of classical tragedy for the freedom and truth to be found in the plays of William Shakespeare. Cromwell itself, though immensely long and almost impossible to stage, was written in verse of great force and originality.
Success (1830–51).
The defense of freedom and the cult of an idealized Napoleon in such poems as the ode “À la Colonne” and “Lui” brought Hugo into touch with the liberal group of writers on the newspaper Le Globe, and his move toward liberalism was strengthened by the French king Charles X's restrictions on the liberty of the press as well as by the censor's prohibiting the stage performance of his play Marion de Lorme (1829), in which the character of Louis XIII was portrayed unfavourably. Hugo immediately retorted with Hernani, the first performance of which, on Feb. 25, 1830, gained victory for the young Romantics over the traditional Classicists in a now-famous literary battle. In this play he extolled the Romantic hero in the form of a noble outlaw at war with society, dedicated to a passionate love and driven on by inexorable fate. The actual impact of the play owed less to the plot than to the sound and beat of the verse, which was softened only in the elegiac passages spoken by Hernani and Doña Sol.
Hugo had derived his early renown from his plays; he gained wider fame in 1831 with his historical novel Notre-Dame de Paris (Eng. trans. The Hunchback of Notre-Dame), an evocation of life in medieval Paris during the reign of Louis XI. The novel condemns a society that, in the persons of Frollo the archdeacon and Phoebus the soldier, heaps misery on the hunchback Quasimodo and the gypsy girl Esmeralda. The theme touched the public consciousness more deeply than had that of his previous novel, Le Dernier Jour d'un condamné (1829; The Last Days of a Condemned), the story of a condemned man's last day, in which Hugo launched a humanitarian protest against the death penalty. While Notre-Dame was being written, Louis-Philippe, a constitutional king, had been brought to power by the July Revolution. Hugo composed a poem in honour of this event, Dicté aprés juillet 1830; it was a forerunner of much of his political verse.
Four books of poems came from Hugo in the period of the July Monarchy: Les Feuilles d'automne (1831; “Autumn Leaves”), intimate and personal in inspiration; Les Chants du crépuscule (1835; Songs of Twilight), overtly political; Les Voix intérieures (1837; “Inner Voices”), both personal and philosophical; and Les Rayons et les ombres (1840; “Sunlight and Shadows”), in which the poet, renewing these different themes, indulges his gift for colour and picturesque detail. But Hugo was not content merely to express personal emotions; he wanted to be the “sonorous echo” of his time. In his verse political and philosophical problems were integrated with the religious and social disquiet of the period; one poem evoked the misery of the workers, another praised the efficacy of prayer. He addressed many poems to the glory of Napoleon, though he shared with his contemporaries the reversion to republican ideals. Hugo restated the problems of his century and the great and eternal human questions, and he spoke with a warmhearted eloquence and reasonableness that moved people's souls.
So intense was Hugo's creative activity during these years that he also continued to pour out plays. There were two motives for this: first, he needed a platform for his political and social ideas, and, second, he wished to write parts for a young and beautiful actress, Juliette Drouet, with whom he had begun a liaison in 1833. Juliette had little talent and soon renounced the stage in order to devote herself exclusively to him, becoming the discreet and faithful companion she was to remain until her death in 1883. The first of these plays was another verse drama, Le Roi s'amuse (1832; Eng. trans. The King's Fool), set in Renaissance France and depicting the frivolous love affairs of Francis I while antithetically revealing the noble character of his court jester. This play was at first banned but was later used by Giuseppe Verdi as the libretto of his opera Rigoletto. Three prose plays followed: Lucrèce Borgia and Marie Tudor in 1833 and Angelo, tyran de Padoue (“Angelo, Tyrant of Padua”) in 1835. Ruy Blas, a play in verse, appeared in 1838 and was followed by Les Burgraves in 1843.
Hugo's literary achievement was recognized in 1841 by his election, after three unsuccessful attempts, to the French Academy and by his nomination in 1845 to the Chamber of Peers. From this time he almost ceased to publish, partly because of the demands of society and political life but also as a result of personal loss: his daughter Léopoldine, recently married, was accidentally drowned with her husband in September 1843. Hugo's intense grief found some mitigation in poems that later appeared in Les Contemplations, a volume that he divided into “Autrefois” and “Aujourd'hui,” the moment of his daughter's death being the mark between yesterday and today. He found relief above all in working on a new novel, which became Les Misérables, published in 1862 after work on it had been set aside for a time and then resumed.
With the Revolution of 1848, Hugo was elected a deputy for Paris in the Constituent Assembly and later in the Legislative Assembly. He supported the successful candidacy of Prince Louis-Napoléon for the presidency that year. The more the president evolved toward an authoritarianism of the right, however, the more Hugo moved toward the assembly's left. When in December 1851 a coup d'état took place, which eventually resulted in the Second Empire under Napoleon III, Hugo made one attempt at resistance and then fled to Brussels.
Exile (1851–70).
Hugo's exile was to last until the return of liberty and the reconstitution of the republic in 1870. Enforced at the beginning, exile later became a voluntary gesture and, after the amnesty of 1859, an act of pride. He remained in Brussels for a year until, foreseeing expulsion, he took refuge on British territory. He first established himself on the island of Jersey, in the English Channel, where he remained from 1852 to 1855. When he was expelled from there, he moved to the neighbouring island of Guernsey. During this exile of nearly 20 years he produced the most extensive part of all his writings and the most original.
Immersed in politics as he was, Hugo devoted the first writings of his exile to satire and recent history: Napoléon le Petit (1852), an indictment of Napoleon III, and Histoire d'un crime, a day-by-day account of Louis Bonaparte's coup. Hugo's return to poetry was an explosion of wrath: Les Châtiments (1853; “The Punishments”). This collection of poems unleashed his anger against the new emperor and, on a technical level, freed him from his remaining classical prejudices and enabled him to achieve the full mastery of his poetic powers. Les Châtiments ranks among the most powerful satirical poems in the French language. All Hugo's future verse profited from this release of his imagination: the tone of this collection of poems is sometimes lyrical, sometimes epic, sometimes moving, but most often virulent, containing an undertone of national and personal frustration.
Despite the satisfaction he derived from his political poetry, Hugo wearied of its limitations and, turning back to the unpublished poems of 1840–50, set to work on the volume of poetry entitled Les Contemplations (1856). This work contains the purest of his poetry—the most moving because the memory of his dead daughter is at the centre of the book, the most disquieting, also, because it transmits the haunted world of a thinker. In poems such as “Pleurs dans la nuit” and “La Bouche d'ombre,” he reveals a tormented mind that struggles between doubt and faith in its lonely search for meaning and significance.
Hugo's apocalyptic approach to reality was the source of two epic or metaphysical poems, La Fin de Satan (“The End of Satan”) and Dieu (“God”), both of them confrontations of the problem of evil. Written between 1854 and 1860, they were not published until after his death because his publisher preferred the little epics based on history and legend contained in the first installment (1859) of the gigantic epic poem La Légende des siècles (The Legend of the Centuries), whose second and third installments appeared in 1877 and 1883, respectively. The many poems that make up this epic display all his spiritual power without sacrificing his exuberant capacity to tell a story. Hugo's personal mythology of the human struggle between good and evil lies behind each of the legends: Eve's motherhood is exalted in “Le Sacre de la femme”; mankind liberating itself from all religions in order to attain divine truth is the theme of “Le Satyre”; and “Plein Ciel” proclaims, through utopian prediction of men's conquest of the air, the poet's conviction of indefinite progress toward the final unity of science with moral awareness.
After the publication of three long books of poetry, Hugo returned to prose and took up his abandoned novel, Les Misérables. Its extraordinary success with readers of every type when it was published in 1862 brought him instant popularity in his own country, and its speedy translation into many languages won him fame abroad. The novel's name means “the wretched,” or “the outcasts,” but English translations generally carry the French title. The story centres on the convict Jean Valjean, a victim of society who has been imprisoned for 19 years for stealing a loaf of bread. A hardened and astute criminal upon his release, he eventually softens and reforms, becoming a successful industrialist and mayor of a northern town. Yet he is stalked obsessively by the detective Javert for an impulsive, regretted former crime, and Jean Valjean eventually sacrifices himself for the sake of his adopted daughter, Cosette, and her husband, Marius. Les Misérables is a vast panorama of Parisian society and its underworld, and it contains many famous episodes and passages, among them a chapter on the Battle of Waterloo and the description of Jean Valjean's rescue of Marius by means of a flight through the sewers of Paris. Les Misérables's plot is basically that of a detective story, but by virtue of its characters, who are sometimes a little larger than life yet always vital and engaging, and by its re-creation of the swarming Parisian underworld, the main theme of man's ceaseless combat with evil clearly emerges while the whole gives a faithful picture of the ebb and flow of life.
The remaining works Hugo completed in exile include the essay William Shakespeare (1864) and two novels: Les Travailleurs de la mer (1866; The Toilers of the Sea), dedicated to the island of Guernsey and its sailors; and L'Homme qui rit (1869; The Man Who Laughs), a curious baroque novel about the English people's fight against feudalism in the 17th century, which takes its title from the perpetual grin of its disfigured hero. Hugo's last novel, Quatrevingt-treize (1874; Ninety-three), centred on the tumultuous year 1793 in France and portrayed human justice and charity against the background of the French Revolution.
Last years (1870–85).
The defeat of France in the Franco-German War and the proclamation of the French Third Republic in 1871 brought Hugo back to Paris. He became a deputy in the National Assembly (1871) but resigned the following month. Though he still fought for his old ideals, he no longer possessed the same energies. The trials of recent years had aged him, and there were more to come: in 1868 he had lost his wife, Adèle, a profound sadness to him; in 1871 one son died, as did another in 1873. Though increasingly detached from life around him, the poet of L'Année terrible (1872), in which he recounted the siege of Paris during the “terrible year” of 1870, had become a national hero and a living symbol of republicanism in France. In 1878 Hugo was stricken by cerebral congestion, but he lived on for some years in the Avenue d'Eylau, renamed Avenue Victor-Hugo on his 80th birthday. In 1885, two years after the death of his faithful companion Juliette, Hugo died and was given a national funeral; his body lay in state under the Arc de Triomphe and was buried in the Panthéon.
Reputation.
Victor Hugo's enormous output is unique in French literature; it is said that he used to write each morning 100 lines of verse or 20 pages of prose. “The most powerful mind of the Romantic movement,” as he was described in 1830, laureate and peer of France in 1845, he went on to assume the role of an outlawed sage who, with the easy consciousness of authority, put down his insights and prophetic visions in prose and verse, becoming at last the genial grandfather of popular literary portraiture and the national poet who gave his name to a street in every town in France.
This instinctive recognition of Hugo as a great poet at the time of his death was followed by a period of critical neglect. A few of his poems were remembered, and Les Misérables continued to be widely read. The generosity of his ideas and the warmth of their expression still moved the public mind, for Hugo was a poet of the common man and knew how to write with simplicity and power of common joys and sorrows. But there was another side to him—what Paul Claudel called his “panic contemplation” of the universe, the numinous fear that penetrates his sombre poems La Fin de Satan and Dieu. Hugo's knowledge of the resources of French verse and his technical virtuosity in metre and rhyme, moreover, rescued French poetry from the sterility of the 18th century. André Gide, when asked whom he considered the greatest French poet, replied “Victor Hugo, alas,” explaining that if it was a regrettable fact at least it was fact.
Jean-Bertrand Barrère
Additional Reading
Biographies include Andre Maurois, Olympio: The Life of Victor Hugo (1956, reissued 1985); Joanna Richardson, Victor Hugo (1976); and Elliott M. Grant, The Career of Victor Hugo (1945, reprinted 1969). John Porter Houston, Victor Hugo, rev. ed. (1988), is an introduction, focusing especially on his poetry and its technical aspects. An analysis of Hugo's romantic drama is found in Charles Affron, A Stage for Poets: Studies in the Theatre of Hugo & Musset (1971). Victor Brombert, Victor Hugo and the Visionary Novel (1984), explores the symbolic and mythological character of Hugo's works and is illustrated with Hugo's drawings.
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这个网页也许可以帮你http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/vhugo.htm
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Victor Hugo (1802-1885)
Novelist, poet, and dramatist, the most important of French Romantic writers. In his preface to his historical play CROMWELL (1827) Hugo wrote that romanticism is the liberalism of literature. Hugo developed his own version of the historical novel, combining concrete, historical details with vivid, melodramatic, even feverish imagination.
Victor-Marie Hugo was born in Besançon as the son of Joseph-Léopold-Sigisbert Hugo and Sophie Trébuchet. Hugo's father was an officer in Napoleon's army, an enthusiastic republican and ruthless professional soldier, who loved dangers and adventures. After the marriage of his parents had collapsed, he was raised by his mother. In 1807 Sophie took her family for two years from Paris to Italy, where Léopold served as a governor of a province near Naples. When General Hugo took charge of three Spanish provinces, Sophie again joined her husband. Sophie's lover, General Victor Lahorie, her husband's former Commandin Officer, was shot in 1812 by a firing-squad for plotting against Napoleon.
From 1815 to 1818 Hugo spend in the Pension Cordier in Paris, but most of the classes of the school were held at the Collège Louis-le Grand. He began in early adolescence to write verse tragedies and poetry, and translated Virgil.
In 1822 Hugo married Adèle Foucher (d. 1868), who was the daughter of an officer at the ministry of war. His brother Eugéne, who had mental problems, was secretly in love with her and lost his mind on Hugo's wedding day. Engéne spent the rest of his life in an institution. In the 1820s Hugo come in touch with liberal writers, but his political stand wavered from side to side. He wrote royalist odes, cursed the memory of Napoleon, but then started to defend his father's role in Napoleon's victories, and attack the injustices of the monarchist regime. General Hugo died in 1828; at that time Hugo started to call himself a baron.
Hugo's foreword for his play CROMWELL (1827), a manifesto for a new drama, started a debate between French Classicism and Romanticism. However, Hugo was not a rebel, and not directly involved in the campaign against the bourgeois, but he influenced deeply the Romantic movement and the formulation of its values in France. "The Victor I loved is no more," said Alfred de Vigny, "... now he likes to make saucy remarks and is turning into a liberal, which does not suit him..." Hugo gained a wider fame with his play HERNANI (1830), in which two lovers poison each other, and with his famous historical work NOTRE-DAME DE PARIS, which became an instant success. Since its appearance in 1831 the story has became part of the popular culture. The novel, set in 15th century Paris, tells a moving story of a gypsy girl Esmeralda and the deformed, deaf bell-ringer, Quasimodo, who loves her. Esmeralda aroses passion in Claude Frollo, an evil priest, who discovers that she favors Captain Phoebus. Frollo stabs the captain and Esmeralda is accused of the crime. Quasimodo attempts to shelter Esmeralda in the cathedral. Frollo finds her and when Frollo is rejected by Esmeralda, he leaves her to the executioners. In his despair Quasimodo catches the priest, throws him from the cathedral tower, and disappears. Later two skeletons are found in Esmeralda's tomb - that of a hunchback embracing that of a woman.
In the 1830s Hugo published several volumes of lyric poetry, which were inspired by Juliette Drouet (Julienne-Joséphine Gauvain), an actress with whom Hugo had a liaison until her death in 1882. Adéle had an affair with Hugo's friend Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve.
Hugo's lyrical style was rich, intense and full of powerful sounds and rhythms, and although it followed the bourgeois popular taste of the period it also had bitter personal tones. Hugo's 'Mme Biard poems' - he had an affair with Léonie d'Aunet (Mme Biard's maiden name) in the 1840s - are intensely sexual. According to Verlaine a typical Hugo love poem was "I like you. You yield to me. I love you. - You resist me. Clear off..."
In his later life Hugo became involved in politics as a supporter of the republican form of government. After three unsuccessful attempts, Hugo was elected in 1841 to the Académie Francaise. This triumph was shadowed by the death of Hugo's daughter Léopoldine. She had married Charles Vacquerie in February 1843, and in September she drowned with her husband.
部分摘录
Victor Hugo (1802-1885)
Novelist, poet, and dramatist, the most important of French Romantic writers. In his preface to his historical play CROMWELL (1827) Hugo wrote that romanticism is the liberalism of literature. Hugo developed his own version of the historical novel, combining concrete, historical details with vivid, melodramatic, even feverish imagination.
Victor-Marie Hugo was born in Besançon as the son of Joseph-Léopold-Sigisbert Hugo and Sophie Trébuchet. Hugo's father was an officer in Napoleon's army, an enthusiastic republican and ruthless professional soldier, who loved dangers and adventures. After the marriage of his parents had collapsed, he was raised by his mother. In 1807 Sophie took her family for two years from Paris to Italy, where Léopold served as a governor of a province near Naples. When General Hugo took charge of three Spanish provinces, Sophie again joined her husband. Sophie's lover, General Victor Lahorie, her husband's former Commandin Officer, was shot in 1812 by a firing-squad for plotting against Napoleon.
From 1815 to 1818 Hugo spend in the Pension Cordier in Paris, but most of the classes of the school were held at the Collège Louis-le Grand. He began in early adolescence to write verse tragedies and poetry, and translated Virgil.
In 1822 Hugo married Adèle Foucher (d. 1868), who was the daughter of an officer at the ministry of war. His brother Eugéne, who had mental problems, was secretly in love with her and lost his mind on Hugo's wedding day. Engéne spent the rest of his life in an institution. In the 1820s Hugo come in touch with liberal writers, but his political stand wavered from side to side. He wrote royalist odes, cursed the memory of Napoleon, but then started to defend his father's role in Napoleon's victories, and attack the injustices of the monarchist regime. General Hugo died in 1828; at that time Hugo started to call himself a baron.
Hugo's foreword for his play CROMWELL (1827), a manifesto for a new drama, started a debate between French Classicism and Romanticism. However, Hugo was not a rebel, and not directly involved in the campaign against the bourgeois, but he influenced deeply the Romantic movement and the formulation of its values in France. "The Victor I loved is no more," said Alfred de Vigny, "... now he likes to make saucy remarks and is turning into a liberal, which does not suit him..." Hugo gained a wider fame with his play HERNANI (1830), in which two lovers poison each other, and with his famous historical work NOTRE-DAME DE PARIS, which became an instant success. Since its appearance in 1831 the story has became part of the popular culture. The novel, set in 15th century Paris, tells a moving story of a gypsy girl Esmeralda and the deformed, deaf bell-ringer, Quasimodo, who loves her. Esmeralda aroses passion in Claude Frollo, an evil priest, who discovers that she favors Captain Phoebus. Frollo stabs the captain and Esmeralda is accused of the crime. Quasimodo attempts to shelter Esmeralda in the cathedral. Frollo finds her and when Frollo is rejected by Esmeralda, he leaves her to the executioners. In his despair Quasimodo catches the priest, throws him from the cathedral tower, and disappears. Later two skeletons are found in Esmeralda's tomb - that of a hunchback embracing that of a woman.
In the 1830s Hugo published several volumes of lyric poetry, which were inspired by Juliette Drouet (Julienne-Joséphine Gauvain), an actress with whom Hugo had a liaison until her death in 1882. Adéle had an affair with Hugo's friend Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve.
Hugo's lyrical style was rich, intense and full of powerful sounds and rhythms, and although it followed the bourgeois popular taste of the period it also had bitter personal tones. Hugo's 'Mme Biard poems' - he had an affair with Léonie d'Aunet (Mme Biard's maiden name) in the 1840s - are intensely sexual. According to Verlaine a typical Hugo love poem was "I like you. You yield to me. I love you. - You resist me. Clear off..."
In his later life Hugo became involved in politics as a supporter of the republican form of government. After three unsuccessful attempts, Hugo was elected in 1841 to the Académie Francaise. This triumph was shadowed by the death of Hugo's daughter Léopoldine. She had married Charles Vacquerie in February 1843, and in September she drowned with her husband.
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Weikeduo · Hugo (Victor Hugo), May 22 , 1885 on February 26 , 1802) is leading exponent of France romantism writer , is that the leader , France history of literature that positive 19 centuries romantism the earlier stage literature moves mount the preeminent bourgeois democracy writer. Hugo has experienced all significant 19 centuries French incidents nearly. That a lifetime composes more than the correct or required number headquarter poetry and song , the novel , script , various prose and literary or art criticism reach the political comment article, is that France personage having effect.
Hugo is born in Du province Beisangsong that France tightens in the next to Swiss , his father is Napoleon Bonaparte under the leadership of one General
Hugo is born in Du province Beisangsong that France tightens in the next to Swiss , his father is Napoleon Bonaparte under the leadership of one General
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维克多·雨果（Victor Hugo，1802—1885），法国作家，19世纪前期积极浪漫主义文学的代表作家，人道主义的代表人物，法国文学史上卓越的资产阶级民主作家，被人们称为“法兰西的莎士比亚”。一生写过多部诗歌、小说、剧本、各种散文和文艺评论及政论文章，在法国及世界有着广泛的影响力。
雨果的创作历程超过60年，其作品包括26卷诗歌、20卷小说、12卷剧本、21卷哲理论著，合计79卷。其代表作有长篇小说《巴黎圣母院》、《九三年》和《悲惨世界》，短篇小说有《“诺曼底”号遇难记》（在小学生苏教版六年级上册第七课中称《船长》。《“诺曼底”号遇难记》还被选入教材冀教版五年级下册第二十课和苏教版六年级上册第七课。
Victor Hugo (Hugo Victor, 1802 - 1885), French writer, positive romantic literature in nineteenth Century, the representative of the representative writers, the representative of humanity, the history of French literature, the outstanding bourgeois democratic writers, known as the "French Shakespeare". Life wrote much poetry, novels, plays, essays and literary criticism and essays, in France and the world has a wide influence.
Hugo's creation course over 60 years, his works include 26 volumes of poetry, 20 volumes of novels, 12 volumes of the script, 21 volumes of philosophy, the total volume of 79. On behalf of the novel "Notre Dame de Paris", "93 years" and "les miserables", short story is the "Normandy" killed "(in pupils Su taught version of the sixth grade taxed the seventh class called" Captain ". The "Normandy" killed "was selected into the teaching of Hebei Education Edition of grade five lesson 20 and Su taught version six seventh grade class.
雨果的创作历程超过60年，其作品包括26卷诗歌、20卷小说、12卷剧本、21卷哲理论著，合计79卷。其代表作有长篇小说《巴黎圣母院》、《九三年》和《悲惨世界》，短篇小说有《“诺曼底”号遇难记》（在小学生苏教版六年级上册第七课中称《船长》。《“诺曼底”号遇难记》还被选入教材冀教版五年级下册第二十课和苏教版六年级上册第七课。
Victor Hugo (Hugo Victor, 1802 - 1885), French writer, positive romantic literature in nineteenth Century, the representative of the representative writers, the representative of humanity, the history of French literature, the outstanding bourgeois democratic writers, known as the "French Shakespeare". Life wrote much poetry, novels, plays, essays and literary criticism and essays, in France and the world has a wide influence.
Hugo's creation course over 60 years, his works include 26 volumes of poetry, 20 volumes of novels, 12 volumes of the script, 21 volumes of philosophy, the total volume of 79. On behalf of the novel "Notre Dame de Paris", "93 years" and "les miserables", short story is the "Normandy" killed "(in pupils Su taught version of the sixth grade taxed the seventh class called" Captain ". The "Normandy" killed "was selected into the teaching of Hebei Education Edition of grade five lesson 20 and Su taught version six seventh grade class.
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