Victor Hugo 1802-1885
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Hugo is considered one of the leaders of the Romantic movement in French literature as well as one of its most prolific and versatile authors. Although chiefly known outside France for the novels Notre Dame de Paris (1831; The Hunchback of Notre Dame) and Les misйrables (1862; Les Misйrables), he is renowned in his own country primarily for his contributions as a Romantic poet. Hugos verse has been favorably compared to the works of William Shakespeare, Dante, and Homer; and he has influenced such diverse poets as Charles Baudelaire, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and Walt Whitman. Hugos technical virtuosity, stylistic experimentation, startling range of emotion, and variety and universality of his themes not only established him as a leader of the French Romantic school but anticipated modern poetry.
Born into a military family, Hugo traveled extensively during his childhood until age twelve when his parents separated. He settled with his mother in Paris, where he attended school and attained literary recognition at a young age. In 1819, Hugo founded with his brothers a prominent literary journal, Le conservateur littйraire, and published his first volume of poetry, Odes et poйsies diverses (1822). This volume, which celebrated the monarchy, earned him a pension from French king Louis XVIII and enabled him to marry his childhood sweetheart Adиle Foucher. Hugos home was the center of intellectual activity, and he counted among his devoted friends literary critic Charles Sainte-Beuve and writer Thйophile Gautier. In 1841, Hugo was elected to the Acadйmie franÐ*aise, and four years later he was made a peer. Hugo was also elected to the National Assembly in 1848, when Louiss regime collapsed and Louis Napolйon Bonaparte established the Second Republic. Distressed by Napolиans dictorial ambitions, which were made evident when Napolйan seized power in a coup detat in 1851, Hugo fled to Belgium. He then moved to the English Channel island of Jersey and, later, to the island of Guernsey; he lived in exile on the islands for eighteen years. There he conducted sйances, wrote speeches and appeals concerning world politics, and published some of his greatest poetical works. Hugo returned to Paris a day after the Third Republic was proclaimed in 1870 as a national hero. He continued to write prolifically even as he became increasingly detached from the outside world. When he died in 1885, Hugo was given a statefuneral and was eventually buried in the Panthйon, though his body was transported in a poor mans hearse in accordance with his last wishes.
Hugos early verse consists primarily of odes, ballads, and lyrics. His odes, which are collected in such volumes as Odes (1823) and Nouvelles odes (1824), were written in the neoclassical style and contain traditional poetic devices. In his ballads, Hugo used more experimental forms of versification and began to address such romantic themes as faith, love, and nature. He explained in the preface to Odes et ballades (1826) that the ballad form was a “capricieux” or whimsical genre that lent itself to the telling of superstitions, legends, popular traditions, and dreams. Hugo continued his experiments with versification in Les orientales (1829; Eastern Lyrics), which is set in North Africa and the Near East and focuses on such subjects as the Greek war of independence, passionate love, and exotic cultures. Considered a protest against the materialism of western society, this volume was extremely popular and widely read in France. Hugos lyric poetry of the 1830s primarily addressed such themes as nature, love, and death in a style that was both personal and uninhibted. Collections of this period include Les feuilles dautomne (1831), Les chants du crйpuscule (1835; Songs of Twilight), Les voix intйrieures (1837), and Les rayons et les ombres (1840). Edward K. Kaplan has noted that these four collections “are unified by the poets discovery of faith through uncertainty and doubt. Not a Christian faith, but a modern faith which understood anxiety as an apporopriate response to rapid social, political, and intellectual change.”
During the 1840s, Hugo concentrated