Victor Marie Hugo (26 February 1802-22 May 1885) was a French poet, novelist, dramatist, and politician who served in the National Assembly for Seine from 24 April 1848 to 3 December 1851 and for Gironde from 9 February to 1 March 1871, as well as Senator of Seine from 30 January 1876 to 22 May 1885. Hugo was a committed royalist while young, but he later became a passionate supporter of republicanism.
Biography[]
Hugo in the National Assembly, 1848
Victor Hugo was born in Besancon, Franche-Comte, France on 26 February 1802, the son of French general Joseph Leopold Sigisbert Hugo. His father was a freethinking republican who thought of Napoleon Bonaparte as a hero, while his mother was a staunch royalist and the lover of the ill-fated general Victor Lahorie. Hugo himself was a committed royalist as a youth, but he came to support republicanism, going into exile after Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte's self-coup in 1851.
Hugo first distinguished himself as an author in 1823 and as a poet in 1829, composing five volumes of poetry between that year and 1840. In 1831, his work The Hunchback of Notre-Dame was released, shaming the city of Paris into repairing the neglected Notre Dame cathedral. From 1845 to 1862, Hugo worked on his magnum opus, Les Miserables, a book about social misery and injustice. The critical establishment was hostile to the novel, but it proved popular among the masses, and it became his most enduringly popular work.
Hugo's literary activism led to him being appointed to the Academie Francaise in 1841, and King Louis Philippe I elevated him to the peerage in 1845. He spoke against the death penalty and social injustice and in favour of freedom of the press and self-government for Poland. In 1848, he was elected to the National Assembly of the French Second Republic as a conservative, but his calls for the end of misery and poverty, his support for universal suffrage and free education for all children, and anti-death penalty views led to him breaking with the conservatives. In 1851, after Louis-Napoleon seized power, Hugo declared him a traitor to France and went into exile in Brussels and England, living on Guernsey from 1855 to 1870. He returned home after the fall of the Second French Empire in 1870, and he was elected to the National Assembly and the Senate. During the Paris Commune, he was harshly critical of the atrocities committed by both sides. Hugo was regarded as a national hero back in France, and he even believed that he would be offered the dictatorship; however, he lost re-election to the National Assembly in 1872. Hugo died in Paris in 1885 at the age of 83.