Victor Hugo, the exile who refused to come home until France deserved him

Victor Hugo

Photo: Charles Hugo / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	February 26, 1802 Besançon, France
Died	May 22, 1885 (83)
Occupation	Writer
Awards	Grand Prix de poésie, Académie française · Académie française · Pair de France / Vicomte Hugo · Légion d'honneur

There were three times when Victor Hugo could have come home, and three times he chose not to. Napoleon III’s government offered amnesty in 1859. Hugo declined in a single sentence: “When liberty returns, I will return.” The Atlantic kept its weather; Hugo kept his desk. He was not sulking. He was publishing.

He was born in Besançon on February 26, 1802, to a general father and a royalist mother whose irreconcilable worldviews he would spend his entire literary life trying to synthesize. The contradictions were built in early. He published his first volume of poetry at seventeen, won an Académie française prize for a poem written at fifteen, and was granted a royal pension by Louis XVIII before he was old enough to shave properly.

The Romantic movement found in him its most impatient champion: when his play Hernani debuted at the Comédie-Française in 1830, the audience divided so sharply that the riot that followed became known simply as the Bataille d’Hernani — a skirmish over theatrical form that everyone understood was really about everything else. Classicists pelted the stage; Romantics howled back. Hugo had written a play about a Spanish outlaw and accidentally started a cultural war.

Victor Hugo, portrait by Léon Bonnat, 1877 — Portrait of Victor Hugo, oil on canvas by Léon Bonnat, 1877. Maison de Victor Hugo, Paris.

His two great novels arrived either side of his political rupture. Notre-Dame de Paris, published in 1831, was immediately misread: readers called it a Gothic romance; Hugo meant it as an argument about architecture, history, and the fate of things that cannot defend themselves. The hunchback Quasimodo was a symbol draped in flesh, and the cathedral was more protagonist than setting. Then came the years of politics — election to the Académie française in 1841, elevation to the peerage in 1845, public speeches against the death penalty — and then the disaster of Louis-Napoléon’s coup in December 1851.

Hugo was forty-nine when he went into exile. He spent nineteen years producing the work that would outlast everything. On Guernsey, without Paris and without French literary society, he wrote Les Châtiments (1853), a book of political satire so scalding it could not be legally sold in France, and Les Contemplations (1856), widely considered the finest French lyric poetry of the nineteenth century. Then came Les Misérables in 1862 — a book that had taken him fifteen years of notes, drafts, and revision, and that lands with the weight of everything he had witnessed: poverty in the Paris streets, the machinery of criminal justice, the cost of grace, the peculiar cruelty of a society that punishes people for surviving.

The standard verdict on Hugo casts him as France’s sentimental national monument — the Victor Hugo of museum visits and stadium musicals. That reading misses the discomfort his contemporaries felt. Flaubert found him vulgar. Baudelaire respected his power and distrusted his populism. The truth is that Hugo was a deliberate maximalist: he wanted literature to reach people who had never been inside a theater, never been handed a book in school, never been invited to care about how sentences were made. Les Misérables was not a novel about poor people written for educated readers. It was a novel about poor people written for poor people, and that made it an offense to the literary culture that wanted to own it.

He came back to France in September 1870, three days after the fall of Napoleon III’s empire, and was met at the Gare du Nord by a crowd estimated at several hundred thousand. He served in the National Assembly during the siege of Paris, witnessed the Commune and its brutal suppression with horror, and went on writing into his eighties. L’Art d’être grand-père appeared in 1877 when he was seventy-five; a second series of La Légende des siècles followed in 1877. He never stopped.

His private life carried its own contradictions at full volume. He was married to Adèle Foucher from 1822 until her death in 1868, and had four children. One of them — Léopoldine — drowned in a boating accident in 1843 at nineteen, a loss so severe that Hugo stopped publishing prose for years; when he finally read about it in a newspaper weeks after the fact, he had been told nothing by his family. He had a relationship with the actress Juliette Drouet that lasted fifty years, through exile and return and everything in between; Drouet copied his manuscripts by hand, managed his correspondence, and kept him functioning when he could not keep himself.

Victor Hugo died on May 22, 1885. The state of mourning lasted ten days. Two million people walked behind his coffin from the Arc de Triomphe to the Panthéon — the largest funeral procession in French history. His explicit wish was burial in a pauper’s coffin; the nation gave him the Panthéon instead. He had not wanted the monument. He had wanted the literature. He got both, and the literature keeps arguing with the monument on his behalf: Les Misérables still in print in every language, Notre-Dame de Paris receiving new translations every decade, new readers finding in the exile from Guernsey the same fury and precision they bring to their own contested present.

Tags: writers, Victor Hugo, French literature, Hernani, Les Misérables, Notre-Dame de Paris