Victor-Marie Hugo

Victor Hugo was the French poet, novelist, and dramatist who dominated French literary life for most of the nineteenth century and whose two great novels — Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) and Les Misérables (1862) — remain among the most widely read works in the world. Born in Besançon in 1802, the son of a Napoleonic general, he was a celebrity poet and playwright by his twenties and a peer of France by his thirties. Opposed to the coup of Napoleon III in 1851, he went into exile in Guernsey and did not return to France for nineteen years. Les Misérables, written largely in exile, turned his commitment to social justice — the rights of the poor, the failure of law, the possibility of redemption — into a story that has never stopped being performed and adapted. An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come: the most often quoted sentence of a writer who believed ideas were the primary force in human history.

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