Victor Hugo

Victor Hugo was born in Besançon in 1802, the son of a general in Napoleon's army. He published his first poetry collection at 20 and his first novel at 26; by his mid-twenties he was one of the leading figures of the French Romantic movement, the author of the preface to his play Cromwell (1827) that served as the movement's manifesto. Hernani (1830) caused riots — actual riots, with opposing literary factions fighting in the theater — which gives some sense of how seriously France took its literary politics. He was elected to the Académie française at 39. He was, in other words, famous before he wrote the works he is remembered for.

Notre-Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, 1831) was written in a self-imposed sprint of several months — Hugo reportedly locked himself inside his house with a bottle of ink and refused to leave until the novel was done, fearing his publisher's deadline. The novel's central character is the cathedral itself, which Hugo renders as a massive stone text — a book in stone, predating the printed book, preserving humanity's entire history in its architecture. Quasimodo and Esmeralda are figures in the cathedral's drama. Hugo wrote partly to draw attention to the state of medieval architecture in France, much of which was being demolished or "restored" into unrecognizability; the novel contributed to the Gothic Revival and directly influenced the actual restoration of Notre-Dame by Viollet-le-Duc.

He was elected to the National Assembly and then the Senate, but when Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte staged a coup d'état in 1851 and declared himself Emperor Napoleon III, Hugo denounced him publicly and fled — first to Brussels, then to Jersey, then to Guernsey, where he lived for 15 years. He refused all offers of amnesty that required silence. In Guernsey he wrote Les Misérables, published in 1862. When Napoleon III fell in 1870 and the Third Republic was declared, Hugo returned to Paris; a crowd of several hundred thousand people met him at the train station.

Les Misérables is approximately 1,400 pages in most editions. It is, simultaneously: a novel about Jean Valjean, a paroled convict who spends his life being pursued by the implacable Inspector Javert; a history of France from Waterloo to the June Rebellion of 1832; a sociological study of urban poverty in Paris including one of the most detailed accounts of the city's sewer system ever written; an argument about the relationship between mercy and law; and a philosophical meditation on progress, evil, and the possibility of redemption. Hugo digresses constantly and at length — on the Battle of Waterloo, on Parisian slang, on the religious life of convents — and the digressions are not padding but argument. The novel sold 48,000 copies in its first day of publication in Brussels. It has been continuously in print since.

He died in 1885 at 83. His state funeral drew an estimated two million mourners to Paris, a gathering that had no precedent in French history for a private citizen. He was interred in the Panthéon. The scale of the public response is almost unimaginable now, when literary celebrity of that order no longer exists. What Les Misérables retains, stripped of the historical context, is a story architecture of unusual power and a moral seriousness that the musical adaptation (1980) and the films communicate imperfectly but not falsely — the structure is robust enough to survive many transformations.