See also: Hugo, Victor Hugo (homonymy)

Victor-Marie Hugo , born the February 26th 1802 with Besancon and dead the May 22nd 1885 with Paris, is a writer, Dramaturge, Poète, politician, academician and committed Intellectuel French considered as most important of the writer S romantic of French language.

Its work is very diverse: Romance S, lyric Poetry, dramas in Towards and Prose, Political speech S with the Room of the Pars, abundant Correspondence.

Biography

Childhood and youth

It was born on February 26th 1802 with Besancon in the Doubs, in Franche-Comté, where his/her father is in garrison, Charles Nodier in 1780 and where will be born also the Frères Light in 1862 and 1864) -- What wants to say this sentence? To use: Camster June 1st, 2007--> then its childhood passes to Paris. Victor is the son of the Count and Napoleonean Général of the First Empire Joseph Léopold Sigisbert Hugo (1773 - 1828) and of Sophie Trébuchet (1772 - 1821) and junior by three children Abel Joseph Hugo (1798 - 1855) and Eugene Hugo (1800 - 1837). Frequent stays with Naples and in Spain, following the military assignments of his/her father, will mark his first years. Towards 1813, it settles in Paris with his/her mother who separated from her husband, because it maintains a connection with the general Empire Victor Fanneau of Horie. Fourteen years hardly, Victor, in July old 1816, note on a newspaper: “I want to be Chateaubriand or nothing” Its vocation is early and its ambitions are immense.

In 1817, it takes part in a contest given by the Académie of the floral plays. The jury is with two fingers to address the price but the title of his poem to him (" Three glosses hardly ") suggest too its young age and the Academy is frightened by it. The prize is thus awarded to someone else.

With his brothers Abel and Eugene, it founds in 1819 a review, “the literary Conservative”, who draws already the attention to his talent. The same year, it gains the contest of the Académie of the floral Plays (see Clémence Isaure ). Twice prize winner (1819 and 1820), also preceded by the academy, Victor Hugo forsakes the Mathématiques, for which it has a marked taste (it follows the courses of the preparatory classes), and embraces the literary career. Its first collection of poems, Odes , appears in 1821: it is then nineteen years old and its studies with the Louis-the-Large Lycée enable him to make known quickly this work. It takes part in the meetings of the Coterie of Charles Nodier with the Bibliothèque of the Arsenal, cradle of the Romantisme, which will have a great influence on its development. As of this time, Hugo is all at the same time Poète, novelist, Dramaturge and even Journaliste: he undertakes all and succeeds much.

The young writer

It is with Cromwell , published in 1827, that it will make glare. In the foreword of this drama, Victor Hugo opposes traditional conventions, in particular the unit of time and the unity of place. He truly into practice puts his theories in the part Hernani (1830), part which inaugurates the kind of the romantic Drame. This work is the cause of a literary confrontation founder between old and modern, the latter, the first of which Théophile Gautier, being filled with enthusiasm for this romantic work - combat which will remain in the history of the literature under the name of “battles of Hernani. ” Consequently, the production of Hugo does not know any more limits: novels ( Notre-Dame de Paris , 1831); poetry ( Songs of the twilight , 1835); theater ( Ruy Blas , 1838).

He marries, the October 12th 1822, Adèle Foucher who gives him five children:

  • Léopold (July 16th 1823 - October 10th 1823)
  • Léopoldine (August 28th 1824 - September 4th 1843)
  • Charles (November 4th 1826 - March 13rd 1871)
  • François-Victor (October 28th 1828 - December 26th 1873)
  • Adele Hugo (August 24th 1830 - April 21st 1915), the only one which will survive his/her famous father but whose mental state, very early failing, will be worth to him long years in private hospital.

Of 1826 with 1837, it frequently remains with the Château of the Rocks to Bièvres, property of Bertin Elder the, director of the Journal of the debates . During these stays, it there meets Berlioz, Chateaubriand, Liszt, Giacomo Meyerbeer and writes collections of poetry whose celebrates it work of the Feuilles of autumn .

It will have, until a advanced age, many mistresses. Most famous will be Juliette Drouet, actress met in 1833, which will devote its life to him and will save it imprisonment at the time of the coup d'etat of Napoleon III. He will write for her many poems. Both pass together the birthday of their meeting and fill, on this occasion, year after year, a common book which they name tenderly the “Book of the birthday”

Hugo reaches the French Academy in 1841.

In 1843, Léopoldine dies tragically in Villequier, drowned with her husband Charles Vacquerie in the shipwreck of their boat. Hugo will be terribly affected by this death which will inspire to him several poems of the Contemplations - in particular, his famous “Tomorrow, at dawn…”

The exile

Its idea is that “where knowledge is only at one man, the Monarchie is essential. Where it is in a group of men, it must make place with the Aristocratie. And when all have access to the lights of the knowledge, then time came from the Démocratie”.

At the beginning of the Revolution of 1848, he is elected Député of the second Republic in 1848 and sits among the conservatives. He supports the candidature of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte elected President of the Republic in December, with which he breaks in 1849 and he fights gradually against his former political friends of which he rejects the policy reactionary. Hugo exiles himself after the Coup d'etat of December 2nd, 1851 which he vigorously condemns for reasons morals ( Histoire of a crime ). Under the Second Empire, opposed to Napoleon III, it lives in exile with Brussels, then with Jersey and finally with Guernesey. It belongs to some proscribed which refuses the amnesty decided some time after (“And if there remains only one about it, I will be that one”). During these difficult years, it will publish in particular the Punishments (1853), work in worms which takes for target the Second Empire; Contemplations , poetries (1856); the Legend of the Centuries (1859), like the Poor wretches , novel (1862). The painful memory of Léopoldine - as its curiosity - the growth to be tried with Jersey, of strange experiments of spiritism consigned in S3eance tables of Jersey .

During the Years 1860, it crosses several times the Grand-Duché of Luxembourg like tourist, whereas it goes on the the German Rhine (1862, 1863,1864,1865). In 1871, after the Commune of Paris, while it is expelled of Belgium to have offered asylum there to the Communard S continued in the French capital, it finds refuge for three months and half in the Grand Duchy (June 1st - September 23rd). It remains successively with Luxembourg, with Vianden (two months and half), with Diekirch and Mondorf, where it follows a cure at a watering-place.

The return in France and death

After the fall of the Second Empire consecutive with the war free-Prussian of 1870, it is the advent of the Third Republic: Hugo can finally return after twenty years of exile. Until its death, in 1885, there will remain one of the guardian figures of the found republic - at the same time as a literary reference incontestée.
He dies the May 22nd 1885, pronouncing, according to the legend, these last words: “This is the combat of the day and the night. ” In accordance with its last wills, it is in the “hearse of the poor” that the ceremony took place. It is initially question of the Père Lachaise but on June first it will be finally led to the the Pantheon, the young person Third Republic benefitting from this event for retransformer the church Holy-Genevieve in the Pantheon. It is considered that three million people moved then to pay a last homage to him.

A monumental work

The unit of what survived of the writings of Victor Hugo (several personal letters were voluntarily destroyed by its executors Paul Meurice and Auguste Vacquerie) was published at Jean-Jacques Pauvert and represents almost forty million characters!
“The whole of my work will make one day an indivisible whole. A multiple book summarizing one century, here what I will leave behind me. ” (Letter of December 9th, 1859)

Through these words, one guesses a savage will to practice all the kinds: Romance, Poésie, Théâtre, Essai, etc - as much as a passion of the Verb, in condition however that this last is anchored in the History. Consequently, to distinguish the fiction itself from the political commitment is, at Hugo more than at very other writer, a challenge.

The novelist

An unclassable novelist

Hugo left nine novels. The first, Bug-Jargal was written at sixteen years; the last, Quatrevingt-treize , with soixante-douze. The novel crossed all the ages of the writer, all the fashions and all the literary currents of its time without never merging completely with any. Indeed, one always finds at Hugo a will of parody and shift: Han of Iceland in 1823, Bug-Jargal published in 1826, Notre-Dame de Paris in 1831 resemble the historical novels in vogue at the beginning of the 19th century but are not really; it is that Hugo is certainly not Walter Scott; at his place indeed, modern times always point behind the History.

the Last Day of one condemned in 1829 and Claude Gueux in 1834 are not easier to define. In fact at the same time historical and social novels are, especially, engaged in a combat - the abolition of the capital punishment - which exceeds the framework of the fiction by far. One could say of it as many the Misérables which appears in 1862, in full realistic period , but which borrows few characteristics to him. This phenomenal popular success will embarrass criticism besides because it wavers constantly between popular melodrama, realistic table and didactic test…

In the same way, in the Workers of the sea (1866) and in the Man who laughs (1869), Hugo approaches more romantic esthetics of the beginning of the century, with his deformed characters, his monsters and his alarming Nature.

Lastly, in 1874, Quatrevingt-treize sign romantic concretization of an old topic hugolien: the founder role of the French revolution in the literary, political, social conscience and morals of the 19th century.

A work of combat

The novel hugolien is not a “entertainment”: it is - almost always - with the service of the ideological debate. One saw it with the free trade novels of his youth, one still sees it in his maturity, through the many ones, and sometimes invading, digressions on material and moral misery, in the Poor wretches . However, in this last novel started in 1845 and 1848, one detected the influence of Balzac in particular that of the Curé village with which Monseigneur Myriel has common points. And the relationship between Vautrin and Jean Valjean (the second being the positive back of the other) is rather obvious, the world and the habits of the convicts being described in Splendeurs and miseries of the courtesans. and to also see: Hugo reader of Balzac] His heroes are, as the heroes of tragedy (the playwright is not far), with the catches with external pressures and a sometimes ascribable relentless fate at the company (Jean Valjean; Claude Gueux; the hero of the Last day of one condemned ), sometimes with the History ( Quatrevingt-treize ) or with their birth (Low Sunday). It is that the taste of the epopee, of the men to the catches with the forces of Nature, the Company, of fate, forever left Hugo; the writer always found his public without never yielding to the whims of fashions: who will be astonished that it could become traditional of alive sound?

The playwright

To twenty-six years, in the famous foreword of Cromwell , Victor Hugo provides the foundations of a new kind: the romantic Drama. In this text, the ambitious young man calls into question the well laid down rules of the theater traditional, and introduced the romantic topics on the scene: multiplication of the characters, the places, mixes registers - the vulgar one and the required one, sublimates it and the grotesque one - and puts thus more life in a too measured with compasses theater. Other side of the coin: Cromwell , part with the 6000 worms and the innumerable characters is not played - “unplayable” some say…

It is thanks to Hernani that the playwright reaches truly, in 1830, with the celebrity and takes a determining place among the modern ones. The following years, Hugo will come up himself against the material difficulties (scene with Italian the, not very favourable with the spectacles of scale) and human (reserves of the French Actors in front of the audacities of its dramas). He will alternate triumphs ( Lucèce Borgia ) and failures ( the King has fun ), before deciding, with Alexandre Dumas, creating a room dedicated to the romantic drama: it will be the Théâtre of the Rebirth where it will make give, in 1838, Ruy Blas .

In 1843, the failure of the Burgraves affects it hard. Hugo despairs to arrive to an at the same time demanding and popular theater. The playwright, struck moreover by mourning (Léopoldine dies this same year), forsakes the scene.

Victor Hugo will mark his return to the theater with the writing, starting from 1866, several parts, of which the series of the Théâtre in freedom .

The poet

Worms of youth

In twenty years, Hugo publishes the Odes , collection who already lets foresee, in the young writer, the recurring topics hugoliens: the contemporary world, History, the religion and the role of the poet, in particular. Thereafter, it is made more and more less and less traditional, romantic, and Hugo allures the young reader of his time to the wire of the successive editions of the Odes (four editions between 1822 and 1828).

In 1828, Hugo joins together under the title Odes and Ballades all his poetic production former. Historical frescos, evocation of childhood; the form is still agreed, undoubtedly, but the romantic young person takes already freedoms with the meter and the poetic tradition. This unit makes it possible moreover to perceive the first steps of an evolution which will last all its life: the enthusiastic catholic shows himself there little by little more tolerant, his monarchism which is done less rigid and grants an important place to the very recent Napoleonean epopee; moreover, far from dodging his double paternal heritage (Napoleonean) and maternal (royalist), the poet confronts himself with it, and endeavors to put in scene the opposites (the famous antithesis hugolienne!) for better exceeding them:

“Centuries, in turn, these gigantic brothers,
Different by their fate, similar in their wishes,
Find a goal similar by contrary roads. ”

Then Hugo moves away in his work from the immediate political concerns to which he prefers - a time - art for Article He launches out in the Eastern the (the East is a topic in vogue) in 1829, (the year of the Dernier day of one condemned ).

Success is important, its ensured fame of romantic poet and especially, its style continues clearly while it puts in scene the war of independence of the Greece (the exemplarity of these people which get rid of their kings is not innocent French political context) which also inspired Lord Byron or Delacroix.

The first maturity

As of the Sheets of autumn (1832), the Songs of the twilight (1835) the interior Voices (1837), to the collection the Rays and the shades (1840), take shape the major topics of a still lyric poetry - the poet is a “heart with the thousand votes” which address to the woman, God, to the friends, Nature and finally (with Songs of the twilight ) with powerful which is accountants of the injustices of this world.

These poetries touch the public because they approach with an apparent simplicity of the familiar topics; however, Hugo cannot resist his taste for the épique one and the large one so that, as of the first towards Feuilles of autumn , one can read the famous one:

“This century was two years old! Rome replaced Sparte
Already Napoleon bored under Bonaparte”

It is seen, Hugo endeavors from the start to anchor the poet in the History. He will never make it leave, throughout his work.

The exile

Starting from the exile one period of literary creation starts which is characterized by its richness, its originality and by its power. At this point in time will be born certain from most famous poems of the French language ( the Atonement in the Châtiments , Booz deadened in the Légende of the centuries , to quote only these two examples). the Punishments are worms of combat which have the role, in 1853, to make public the “crime” of the “poor wretch” Napoleon III: the coup d'etat of December 2nd. Prophet of misfortunes which await Napoleon III, executor of the nephew honni, Hugo made there cruel, satirical, even coarse to punish “the criminal”. But Hugo is made also poet of better times such as for example in Stella ; the poet takes then tons almost religious. As for the form of the Châtiments , it is of an extreme richness since Hugo resorts as well to the Fable, as with the epopee, the Chanson or the reduced , etc

A few years later, Hugo declares, in connection with the Contemplations which appear in 1856: “What Contemplations ? - Memories of a heart” lyric Apotheosis, marked by the exile with Guernesey and the death (cf Pauca Meae ) of the adored girl: emotional exile, political exile: Hugo leaves to the solitary discovery ego and the universe. The poet, just like in the Punishments , has even prophet, voice of beyond, seeing secrecies of the life after the death and which tries to bore the secrecies of the divine intentions. But, in same time, Contemplations , with lyricism in love and sensual, contains some of the most famous poems inspired by Juliette Drouet. Contemplations : multiform work thus as it is appropriate for the “memories of a heart”.

Lastly, the Legend of the centuries , its masterpiece, less synthesizes anything than the history world in an immense epopee published in 1859; “The man going up of darkness to the Ideal”, i.e. the slow one and painful rise of humanity towards Progress and the Light.

In June 1878, Hugo was victim of a cerebral congestion which put practically fine at its activity of writing. However of very many collections, joining together in fact of the poems going back to its years of exceptional inspiration (1850-1870) continued to appear regularly ( supreme Pity in 1879, the Ass , Four Winds of the spirit in 1881, the last series of the Legend of the centuries in 1883…) , contributing to the legend of the old inexhaustible man until death.

A special place in its century

Sometimes lyric, sometimes epic; untiring combatant and overcome father; in turn traditional and daring, Hugo is all that at the same time and more: that which deeply moved its contemporaries (who does not know very famous the Demain, at dawn ?), exasperated the powerful ones and inspired the largest poets of his time and times to come.

The witness traveller

See also: Victor Hugo travels from there

Its political thought

Starting from 1849, Victor Hugo devotes a third of his work to the Politique, a third with the Religion and the last with the Philosophie human and social. The thought of Victor Hugo is complex and sometimes diverting. He refuses any judgment of the people and all Manichéisme, but is not less severe for the company of its time. Progressively, its political thought will evolve/move, leave conservatism and will approach reformism.

Interior policy

In his youth, Victor Hugo is close to the conservative party. During the restoration, it supports Charles X of France. In that, it fits in the political line of Chateaubriand.

At the time of the French revolution of 1848, Victor Hugo, par of France, take initially the defense of monarchy (the president of the Council Odilon Barrot, charges it with defending the idea of a regency of the Duchess of Orleans). The republic being proclaimed, Lamartine proposes to him a post of minister (State education) in the Provisional government of 1848, it refuses. With the elections of April 1848, although not candidate it obtains nearly 55.500 votes in Paris but is not elected. On the other hand with the elections complementary of May 24th, he is elected in Paris with nearly 87.000 votes. He sits with the conservative right. During the Days of June 1848, it leads governmental groups of force to the attack of the barricades in the street Saint-Louis. He votes the law of August 9th, 1848, which suspends certain republican newspapers under the terms of the state of siege. Its sons found the newspaper the Event which conducts a campaign against the president of the council the republican Cavaignac and will support the candidature of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte for the presidential election of 1848. Being against the principle of the single legislative assembly, he does not vote the Constitution of 1848. At the beginning of the presidency of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte he attends the new president. In May 1849, he is elected with the legislative Assemblée. It is at the summer 1849, that gradually it is diverted preserving majority of the legislative Parliament of which it disapproves the policy reactionary. In January 1850, Victor Hugo fights the Loi Falloux reorganizing teaching in favor of the Catholic church, in May it fights the law which restricts the vote for all and in July it intervenes against the law Rouher which limits freedom of the press. In July 1851 it gives an opinion against the law which proposes the revision of the constitution in order to permetre the re-election of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte. In June 1851, with the law courts of Paris it defends his son who is continued to have published an article against the capital punishment in his newspaper the Event . At the evening of the Coup d'etat of December 2nd, 1851 with an about sixty representatives it writes a call to armed resistance. Pousuivi, it manages to pass to Belgium on December 14th. It is the beginning of a long exile.

Reformist, it wishes to change the company. If it justifies enrichment, it denounces the system of social inequality violently. It is against the rich person who capitalize their profits without reinjecting them in the production. The elite middle-class E will not forgive it to him. In the same way, he is opposed to violence if this one is exerted against a democratic capacity but he justifies it (conformément besides with the declaration of the human rights) against an illegitimate capacity. Thus in 1851, it launches a call to the weapons - “To charge its rifle and to be held ready” - which is not heard. It maintains this position until in 1870. When the Franco-German war bursts, Hugo condemns it: war of “whim” and not of freedom. Then, the Empire is reversed and the war continues, against the Republic; the plea of Hugo in favor of fraternization remains unanswered. Then, the September 17th, the patriot takes the step on the pacifist one: it publishes this time a call with the levy in masse and resistance. The moderate republicans are horrified: for those indeed, better Bismarck is worth than the “partageux ones”! The people of Paris, as for him, mobilize themselves and one tears off the Punishments .

The Commune

In agreement with itself, Hugo could not be Communard:

“What the Commune represents is immense, it could make large things, it makes only the small ones. And of the small things which are odious things, it is lamentable. We hear, I am a man of revolution. I thus accept the great needs, in only one condition: it is that they are the confirmation of the principles and not their shock. All my thought oscillates between these two poles: “civilization-revolution”. The construction of a levelling company could rise only from one recombining of the liberal company itself. ”

It does not support either the reaction of Adolphe Thiers. Thus, Victor Hugo defends the thanks of the young protesting officer become Ministre for the war of the Commune Louis-Nathaniel Rossel vis-a-vis Adolphe Thiers. An young man whom it estimates and judges different from the other communards. In front of the repression which falls down on the communards, the poet says his dislike:

“Out of the gangsters 64 hostages killed. One retorts by killing 6.000 prisoners! ”

Social combat

Victor Hugo took very distinct social positions, and very advances some over its time.

The social question

Denouncing until the end the social segregation, Hugo declares during the last public meeting that it chairs: “The social question remains. It is terrible, but it is simple, it is the question of those which have and those which do not have! ”. It was precisely a question of collecting funds to make it possible 126 deputy workmen to go to the first socialist Congress of France, with Marseilles.

The capital punishment

Hugo is a savage abolitionist. In its childhood, it witnessed capital executions and all its life, it will fight against. the last day of one condemned (1829) and Claude Gueux (1834), two novels of youth, underline at the same time cruelty, the injustice and the inefficiency of the supreme punishment. But the literature is not enough, Hugo knows it. Room of the Pars, Parliament, Senate: Victor Hugo will seize all the platforms to defend abolition:

“The capital punishment is the special sign and eternal of cruelty. ” (speech of September 15th, 1848 in front of the constituent National Assembly)

Speech

Victor Hugo made during his political career several great speeches; the majority of them are gathered in Actes and words :

  • against the child work (Room of the pars, 1847)

  • against misery ( Speech on misery , July 9th, 1849);
  • on the female condition (with funerals of George Sand, June 10th, 1876);
  • against religious teaching and for the public school and free ( Speech in connection with the bill on teaching , January 15th, 1850, and extracted);
  • several pleas against the Capital punishment ( Which the law says? “You will not kill”. How does she say it? While killing! );
  • several speeches in favor of peace ( Speech opening of the Congress of peace , August 21st, 1849);
  • for the universal right to vote;
  • on the defense of the littoral.
  • against the invalidation of the election of Garibaldi to the National Assembly in 1871, which was at the origin of its own resignation ( Against the invalidation of Garibaldi , Discours with the National Assembly, March 8th, 1871, Great moments of parliamentary eloquence)

Peace by the trade

Victor Hugo does not cease insisting on the fact that the trade will replace the war . In this vision of the commercial order replacing the military order, he announces in germ the philosopher Alain.

This positive vision of the mission of the man is condensed in one of its most famous worms:

“Collaborates with God. Envisage. Appeals. Take care. ”

Colonization and slavery

See also: Victor Hugo and the conquest of Algeria

Victor Hugo expressed himself little on the question of the Colonisation of the Algérie, which constituted however the principal colonial adventure of France of its time. This relative silence should not however be too quickly comparable with a consent on behalf of the author of the Misérables . Indeed, if Hugo were sensitive to the speech legitimating colonization in the name of “civilization”, an attentive analysis of its writings - and its silences - watch that in connection with the “Algerian question” its positions were far from being stripped of ambiguities: skeptic with regard to the civilizing virtues of military “pacification”, it was especially to see in colonized Algeria the place where the French Army “was made tiger”, and where the resistant ones to the coup d'etat of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte were off-set.

On the question of slavery, that which, in the years 1820, showed through Bug-Jargal that it divided in its vision of the black people the same prejudices as its contemporaries, and who kept an astonishing silence during the abolition of slavery in 1848, was to intervene to ask the grace of the American abolitionist John Brown.

Hugo and his contemporaries

The time of the rivals

Hugo maintains the relations of regard and admiration mutual insurance companies with Balzac (a little of mistrust, the ego of large the creators provides for it) or Nerval. Friendly relations with Dumas, her companion of romanticism, which will last, with many tops and some bottoms, all life. The competition is exacerbated with Lamartine, to which Hugo does not cease proclaiming his admiration but does not concede to him any more, coming success, of real artistic preeminence.

In front of the talent of Hugo, his originality and its brilliant rise, it is however difficult not to be inclined. Moreover, its nobility of soul and its integrity force admiration: twenty years of exile, partly voluntary, it is nothing and makes conceal many detractors…

The statue of the commander

As from the years of exile, and more still on its return, Hugo becomes a kind of statue of the commander: popular, admired by its pars and fears by the policies, Victor Hugo is impossible to circumvent. That one is novelist, poet or playwright, one is defined compared to him - for or against this figure definitely too imposing…

Hugo, one sees it, has too much to be able not to be not haï by some. As for the policy, the republicans on the left doubt its conversion, while the monarchists do not forgive easily with that which betrayed its medium. The public, dedicates already a worship to him with the old man and the young poets continue to send theirs to him towards - while others are shown readily disrespectful…

“Hugo: the apocalyptic Man,
Man-This-tûra-that,
Dies, gardenational epic;
There remains only one about it - that one -”
- Tristan Corbière, “a young person who from goes away”, yellow Loves (1873)

Baudelaire admires Hugo passionately, but tests sometimes irritation in front of this poet who makes “political” worms: this irritation translates the ambiguous relation which will be that, at the bottom, of many writers of the end of 19th. Zola will reproach him its tepidity with regard to the communards - it will not be only - as D `others will reproach him on the contrary its too social positions.

Flaubert, if he admires the romantic one of 1830, is wary of the “old crocodile” of which he considers the digressions philosophical, in the Poor wretches in particular, indigestible. Baudelaire and Verlaine shares this point of view as all those which think that art and the political commitment should not be mixed.

In the final analysis, Hugo is a man able to exasperate his admirors and to be admired of his enemies. What could be more natural for a Master of the antithesis…

Even a long time after his death, Hugo will continue, by his work or his action, to cause the most various reactions: execration of Maurras, admiration of Mauriac which declares, in 1952: “It hardly starts to be known. Here it is with the threshold of its true glory. Its purgatory is finished. ”

Drawings of Victor Hugo

For the many talents of the writer, it is necessary to add the Dessin. The artist did not certainly eclipse the poet, but one continues nevertheless to redécouvrir the pictorial work of Victor Hugo - to which one devoted many and prestigious Exposition S during the twenty last years (at the time of the centenary of his death, in 1985, “Sun of Ink” to the Petit Palais and “Drawings of Victor Hugo” Place of the Vosges in the house that he lived under the Monarchie of July; but also, more recently, with New York, Venice, Brussels, or Madrid).

In Self-educated good , Hugo does not hesitate to use the most rustic or experimental methods: he mixes with the Encre the black coffee, coal, the soot of chimney, painting end of the match or by means of the barbs of a Plume.

Its works are, in general, of small size and it makes use of it sometimes to illustrate its writings ( Workers of the sea ), sometimes to send them to his friends for the New Year's Day or other occasions. This art, which it will practice all its life, diverts it.

At the beginning, its work is of rather realistic invoice; but with the exile and mystical confrontation of the poet with the Sea, they will acquerront a dimension almost Fantastique.

This facet of the talent of Hugo will not escape his contemporaries and will be worth the praises to him, in particular, of Charles Baudelaire: “I did not find in the exhibitors of the Living room the splendid imagination which runs in the drawings of Victor Hugo like the mystery in the sky. I speak about his drawings to the Indian ink, because it is too obvious that in poetry, our poet is the king of the Paysagiste S”.

Adaptations

Works of Hugo gave place to innumerable adaptations to the Cinéma, the Télévision or the Théâtre. The largest actors fought to incarnate the heroes hugoliens, at the head of which Jean Valjean, interpreted, in France, by Harry Baur, Jean Gabin, Lino Ventura or Gerard Depardieu.

Cinema

Nearly a hundred adaptations on the whole including more than one forty for the Poor wretches , followed closely by Notre-Dame de Paris . The universality of Hugo appears in a bright way there because the most various cinemas seized its work: American (1915, Gift Caesar de Bazan , drawn from Ruy Blas ); English, Indian ( Badshah Dampati , in 1953, adaptation of Notre-Dame de Paris ); Japanese (in 1950 Re Mizeraburu: Kami To Akuma : adaptation within a Japanese framework, under the era Meiji); Egyptian (ex: 1978, Al Bo' asa adaptation of the Miserable ); Italian (1966, Uomo che wrinkle , adaptation of the Man which laughs ), etc

One will add to it films inspired of the life of Victor Hugo, the History of Adele H. of François Truffaut being one of most known.

Television

A very significant number of adaptations, more or less faithful. In France, one will retain the considerable success of the Misérables of Robert Hossein (1985) with Lino Ventura, Jean Carmet and Michel Bouquet.

Opera

In a general way, Victor Hugo is hardly fond of delicacies such adaptations which would have inspired this cruel injunction to him: “Defense to deposit music with the foot of my worms! ”

Nevertheless, his/her friend Franz Liszt composes several symphonic parts inspired of his poems: what one hears on the mountain , drawn from the Feuilles of autumn , and Mazeppa , drawn from the Orientales . Many other type-setters will free themselves from the interdict hugolien, of Bizet to Wagner while passing by Camille Saint-Saëns or Fauré.

Musical comedies

  • the Poor wretches , (adaptation of Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg) in 1980, became one of the most famous musical comedies: played in 29 countries and nearly 200 cities, translated into 18 languages and sight by 42 million spectators on the whole!

  • Notre-Dame de Paris , 1999 (adaptation Luc Plamondon and Richard Cocciante).

Cartoon films

Several successes, of which the Uneven one of Notre-Dame (1996) ( The Hunchback off Notre Dame , by the studios Disney) or the Poor wretches (1979), Japanese cartoon film.

Work

Note: the year indicated between brackets is the date of the first parution

Theater

Novels

Poetries

Posthumous collections:

Choice of poems among the manuscripts of Victor Hugo, carried out by Paul Maurice:

Other texts

posthumous Works

  • Things seen - 1st series (1887, memories and comments taken on the sharp one, the title is not Victor Hugo)
  • Choses seen - 2nd series (1900)
  • the Alps and the Pyrenees (1890, notebooks of voyage)
  • France and Belgium (1892, notebooks of voyage)
  • Correspondances - Volume I (1896)
  • Correspondances - Volume II (1898)
  • Postscript of my life (1901, compilation of philosophical texts of the years 1860)
  • Thousand Francs of reward (1934, theater)
  • Stones (1951, fragments handwritten)

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