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 Félicité 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 Revolution of 1848. A lifetime advocate of freedom and justice, often at his own peril, Hugo spearheaded the Romantic movement that linked artists to the political realm. After Napoleon III’s coup d‘état 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 Napoléon’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 Panthéon where he was buried.
THE WORLD OF VICTOR HUGO AND
LES MISÉRABLES
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 Besançon on February 26. An officer in the army of Napoleon Bonaparte (Napoléon I), Léopold must travel constantly during Victor’s youth.
1803—Marital problems occur as Sophie cannot tolerate the transience
1812 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 fighters in occupied Italy and Spain, sometimes nailing their severed heads above church doors.
1804 Napoleon proclaims himself Emperor of the French. Literary critic Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve is born.
1807 Léopold Hugo receives a post in Naples, where his family soon joins him.
1808 Léopold 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 December 30.
1811 Sophie journeys to Spain to save her marriage, but problems in the relationship persist. Leopold, knowing of his wife’s infidelity, asks for a divorce. Sophie and her sons return to Paris.
1812 General Lahorie is executed for plotting against Napoleon.
1814 Napoleon abdicates and is banished to the island of Elba.
1815 Napoléon is defeated at Waterloo, after “The Hundred Days” of his renewed reign following his secret return from exile. Louis XVIII returns to power, reinstating France’s monarchy.
1816 A marvelously gifted and precocious writer, Victor Hugo proclaims his ambition to rival François-René de Chateaubriand, the most famous Romantic author of his generation. Estranged from his father and influenced by his mother, a royalist 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 contest sponsored by the l‘Académie française (the French Academy).
1818 Sophie and Léopold are legally separated (divorce was illegal in France between 1814 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 Conservateur litteraire.
1820—Hugo writes over one hundred essays and more than twenty
1821 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 recover.
1823 Hugo publishes a pioneering historical novel,
Han d‘Islande
(sometimes translated as
The Demon Dwarf),
a bloodthirsty melodrama. He helps found the periodical
La Muse française
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 daughter 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
Bug-Jargal,
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 tale
Le Dernier Jour d‘un condamné d mort (The Last Day of a Condemned Man),
opposing capital punishment, and the historical 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, named 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,
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 Charles XI, is published and becomes a bestseller. The visionary poetry collection
Les Feuilles d‘automne
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, Goethe and Shelley.
1832 Hugo’s play
Le Roi s‘amuse (The King’s Fool),
which will inspire Giuseppi Verdi’s great opera
Rigoletto
(1851), is banned after opening night owing to its disrespectful portrayal 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 provides 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 crepuscule (Songs of Twilight)
appears.
1837 Hugo is made an officer of the Legion d‘honneur.
Les Voix interieures,
the third of four collections of visionary poetry during Hugo’s middle lyric period (1831—1840), appears. Eugène Hugo dies confined in the Charenton madhouse.
1838
Ruy Blas,
Hugo’s best play, outrages the monarchists by depicting 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
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. Hugo will dedicate his poetic masterpiece,
Les Contemplations,
to her. Alexandre Dumas’s
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 Balzac publishes
La Cousine Bette.
1848 The monarchy is overthrown, and the Second Republic proclaimed. 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 unwisely 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- Hugo increasingly criticizes the government’s policies, making 1851 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- In 1852 Louis-Napoléon declares himself emperor as 1853 Napoleon III. Hugo writes a scathing satire,
Napoléon le petit.
From 1853 to 1855 he attends seances at which the spirits of both the living and the dead (including Shakespeare, Jesus, and a cowering Napoleon III) seem to communicate 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 pardoned 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),
powerful 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.
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 audience, although the book is panned by critics and banned by the government. He begins hosting a weekly banquet for fifty poor children.