Victor Hugo

Victor Hugo was born in 1802 in Besançon, France, the youngest son of a general in Napoleon's army. He began writing poetry as a teenager, and his first collection appeared in 1822, the year he married his childhood friend Adèle Foucher. His plays Cromwell and Hernani (1830) made him a leader of the Romantic movement in French literature. His novel Notre-Dame de Paris (1831), known in English as The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, is set around the great cathedral of Paris in the Middle Ages. In 1843 his daughter Léopoldine drowned in the Seine, aged 19. He entered politics, campaigned against the death penalty, and after Napoleon III seized complete power in 1851 he went into exile, living for fifteen years on the Channel Island of Guernsey. There he finished Les Misérables (1862), the story of the former convict Jean Valjean and of the poor of Paris. He returned to France in 1870. When he died in Paris in 1885, he was given a state funeral and buried in the Panthéon.

Victor Hugo is also an author in the library: author page and works.

Faith: Grew up a royalist and a Catholic; his views changed later in life. Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica (1911) (via Wikisource)