Victor Hugo
1802–1885
Biography
Victor Hugo was born in Besançon in 1802 and died in Paris in 1885. He wrote novels, poems, plays and essays, and he is one of the central names of French Romanticism. He was also a public man: he began as a royalist, became a convinced republican, and served as a deputy and later as a senator.
Notre-Dame de Paris and Les Misérables brought him readers across Europe and beyond. His poetry, including Les Contemplations and La Légende des siècles, and his plays, such as Hernani, helped drive the Romantic movement in France. His stories have since inspired operas and musicals, and he left more than four thousand drawings. He campaigned against capital punishment and slavery.
His opposition to Napoleon III's seizure of power in 1851 sent him into exile for almost two decades, mostly on the Channel Islands, and he came home only after the Second Empire had fallen. When he died in 1885 he was given a state funeral and laid to rest in the Panthéon in Paris, and by one account more than two million people attended.
Three of his novels are on this site: L'homme qui rit (The Man Who Laughs), Les Misérables and Notre-Dame de Paris. The first is less familiar, the story of a man whose face was cut into a permanent grin in childhood, set in seventeenth-century England.
This biography was written by a language model. The sources below are where to check it; treat details with care.
Books
L'homme Qui Rit
by Victor Hugo
A boy abandoned on the coast of England one winter night is taken in by a travelling showman, together with a blind baby girl. His face has been carved into a permanent smile, and his origins lie in the court of Queen Anne. This book uses the racial and other slurs of its period…
Summary written by Claude Opus 5.5.Les Misérables
by Victor Hugo (translated by Isabel Florence Hapgood)
Les Misérables is a French epic historical novel by Victor Hugo, first published on 31 March 1862, that is considered one of the greatest novels of the 19th century. Les Misérables has been popularized through numerous adaptations for film, television, and the stage, including a…
Summary from Wikipedia: Les Misérables (CC BY-SA 4.0)Notre-Dame de Paris
by Victor Hugo
In Paris in 1482, the dancer Esmeralda draws the eyes of the city, of a tormented archdeacon and of Quasimodo, the deaf bell-ringer of Notre-Dame. Hugo sets their fates against a richly drawn medieval city and its cathedral. This book uses the racial and other slurs of its…
Summary written by Claude Opus 5.5.Notre-Dame de Paris
by Victor Hugo (translated by Isabel Florence Hapgood)
In fifteenth-century Paris, a gypsy dancer, a priest, a captain and the bell-ringer Quasimodo are bound together beneath the cathedral. Victor Hugo's 1831 novel, in Isabel Hapgood's translation. This book uses the racial and other slurs of its period as written; the Book Guide…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.Os Trabalhadores do Mar
by Victor Hugo (translated by Machado de Assis)
Machado de Assis's Portuguese translation of Victor Hugo's Toilers of the Sea. On Guernsey, the solitary fisherman Gilliatt is promised the hand of a shipowner's niece if he can recover the engine of a steamer wrecked on a reef, and he goes out alone against the sea.
Summary written by Claude Opus 5.5.