Viktor Mari Gyugo

Victor-Marie Hugo was a French writer (poet, novelist, and playwright), leader and theorist of French Romanticism. He was a member of the French Academy (1841) and the National Assembly (1848).

The writer’s father was Joseph Léopold Sigisbert Hugo (1773–1828), a general in Napoleon’s army, and his mother was Sophie Trébuchet (1772–1821), the daughter of a shipowner, a royalist Voltairean.

Hugo’s early childhood was spent in Marseille, on Corsica, on Elba (1803–1805), in Italy (1807), and in Madrid (1811), where his father was serving, after which the family returned each time to Paris. These journeys left a deep impression on the future poet and prepared his Romantic outlook. Hugo himself later said that Spain was for him “a magical source whose waters intoxicated him forever.” In 1813, Hugo’s mother, who had become romantically involved with General Lahorie, separated from her husband and settled in Paris with her son.

In October 1822, Hugo married Adèle Foucher; five children were born of this marriage: Léopold (1823–1823), Léopoldine (1824–1843), Charles (1826–1871), François-Victor (1828–1873), and Adèle (1830–1915).

Victor Hugo’s first mature work of fiction was written in 1829 and reflected the writer’s acute social conscience, which continued in his later works. The novella Le Dernier jour d’un condamné (The Last Day of a Condemned Man) had a major influence on writers such as Albert Camus, Charles Dickens, and Fyodor M. Dostoevsky.

Claude Gueux, a short documentary tale about a real-life murderer executed in France, was published in 1834 and was later regarded by Hugo himself as a precursor to his great work on social injustice, Les Misérables.

But Hugo’s first full-length novel was the immensely successful Notre-Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre-Dame), published in 1831 and quickly translated into many languages across Europe. One