Victor Hugo

NAME Victor Marie Hugo. He acquired several nicknames during his lifetime, including "Ocean Man" — a term he himself used to describe Shakespeare, which was later turned back on Hugo to capture the vast, turbulent scale of his own genius. He was also known as "Horizon Man" and "Century Man." (1)

WHAT FAMOUS FOR Victor Hugo was the preeminent figure of the French Romantic movement. He is internationally celebrated for his massive novels Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (Notre-Dame de Paris). Beyond his prose, he was a prolific poet, playwright, and a dedicated political activist who campaigned for social justice, the abolition of the death penalty, and the preservation of Gothic architecture.

BIRTH Born February 26, 1802, in Besançon, in eastern France.

FAMILY BACKGROUND He was the youngest (third) son of Joseph Léopold Sigisbert Hugo (1774–1828) and Sophie Trébuchet (1772–1821). 

His father was an army officer who rose to become a general in Napoleon's army — a freethinking republican who considered Napoleon a hero. 

His mother was the daughter of a sea captain, a staunch royalist, Catholic, and follower of Rousseau. 

Hugo's parents were fundamentally incompatible: his father was an atheist and ardent republican; his mother was loyal to the deposed Bourbon dynasty. 

The Hugo family came from Nancy in Lorraine, where Hugo's grandfather was a wood merchant. (2)

Hugo was deeply class-conscious about his origins. Mortified to be descended from commoners, he "adopted" more illustrious Hugo ancestors and designed a coat of arms for himself bearing the words "Ego Hugo." (3) 

In 1810, his father was made Count Hugo de Cogolludo y Sigüenza by the King of Spain; Hugo later styled himself Viscount, and in 1845 was formally appointed pair de France as Vicomte Victor Hugo. 

CHILDHOOD His mother and father did not get on, and most of Victor's early years were spent in Paris, where his mother preferred to live. (3) 

Since his father was an army officer, the family moved frequently from posting to posting — to Elba, Naples, and Madrid. In 1811 the boys were sent to school at the Real Colegio de San Antonio de Abad in Madrid. Back in Paris, Victor and his brother Eugène were placed in the Pension Cordier boarding school in 1815, while also attending lectures at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand. 

As an adolescent, he contributed essays to the Conservateur Littéraire (The Literary Curator) and wrote a tragedy at the age of 14. (3) 

In 1817, he entered a poem for a competition organized by the Académie Française, and the judges refused to believe the author was only fifteen. 

EDUCATION  Hugo attended the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris and studied law between 1815 and 1818, though he never committed himself to legal practice. (4) 

His mother encouraged him to pursue literature instead, and Hugo and his brothers founded a periodical, Le Conservateur Littéraire, in 1819.

CAREER RECORD 1822 Published his first collection of poetry, Odes et poésies diverses. Its success earned him a royal pension from Louis XVIII.

1827 Published the play Cromwell. Its preface became the manifesto of the Romantic movement, making Hugo a leader of the literary romanticists.

1830 His verse play Hernani premiered. It shattered traditional French dramatic rules, leading to the "Battle of Hernani"—literal fisticuffs in the theater between Classicists and Romantics.

1831 Published The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. The novel’s success triggered a national movement to restore the neglected cathedral and preserve Gothic architecture.

1841 Elected to the Académie Française after several previous rejections.

1848 Elected to the Parliament as a conservative but soon broke with them to advocate for the poor and the abolition of the death penalty.

1851-1870 Lived in exile in Brussels, Jersey, and Guernsey after opposing Napoleon III’s coup. During this time, Hugo wrote his most famous political pamphlets and completed his masterpiece, Les Misérables (1862).

1870 Returned to France following the fall of the Second Empire; he was elected to the National Assembly and later the Senate. 

APPEARANCE Though of somewhat short stature, Hugo was a strikingly attractive man both in youth and old age. He had a high forehead and penetrating eyes that seemed simultaneously austere and engaging. (5)

Hugo by Jean Alaux, 1825

 Early portraits show an intense intellectual; by the 1860s photographs reveal he had transformed himself into a sage-like figure, complete with a full white beard.

He was one of the most portrayed men of his time — depicted in drawings, paintings, photographs, and sculptures throughout his long life — and was said to project an extraordinarily commanding personality. (5)

FASHION Hugo’s fashion was often functional but had its quirks; most famously, when he was behind on a deadline, he would have his servants take away all his clothes to force him to stay indoors and write in his underwear or a gray knitted shawl. (3)

CHARACTER Hugo was ambitious, prodigiously energetic, and driven by an almost messianic sense of his own importance. He described himself, in his final years, as "not one of these sweet-tempered old men — I am still exasperated and violent." 

He was a passionate humanitarian and reformer, yet also vain, self-mythologising, and sexually voracious. He was a superb conversationalist, with a reputation for charm and ease in company even into old age. (5) 

Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche included him in his list of "impossible people," describing him as "a lighthouse in a sea of absurdity." (3)

SPEAKING VOICE Hugo had a "fine persuasive bass" voice, and was renowned as an excellent conversationalist. (5)

A visitor who met the elderly Hugo in his Paris home noted that his voice retained "all the freshness and flexible modulations of youth — not a trace of huskiness or weariness." He was also heard from the next room laughing heartily with his grandchildren. (6) 

SENSE OF HUMOUR Hugo had a dry and self-aware wit. When his publishers, eager to know how his latest novel was progressing, sent him a single-character telegram reading "?", Hugo replied with equal economy: "!" 

When one of his grandsons caught him in the arms of a young laundress at the age of seventy, Hugo's reaction was: "Look, little George — this is what they call genius." (3)

RELATIONSHIPS In 1822, aged 21, Hugo married his childhood sweetheart Adèle Foucher. His brother Eugène, secretly in love with Adèle, went mad when Hugo married her and died at Charenton Asylum on February 20, 1837. (3)

Adèle Hugo as a young woman, by Louis Boulanger

They had five children: Léopold (born July 16, died October 10, 1823); Léopoldine (born August 28, 1824 – died September 4, 1843); Charles (born November 4, 1826 – died March 13, 1871); François-Victor (born October 28, 1828 – died December 26, 1873); and Adèle (born July 28, 1830 – died April 21, 1915). 

Hugo's eldest daughter Léopoldine drowned on September 4, 1843, when her boat capsized on the River Seine at Villequier. Her wet, heavy skirts pulled her down; her young husband died trying to save her. Hugo was travelling with his mistress in the south of France and first learned of his daughter's death from a newspaper in a café. He dedicated numerous poems to her memory, notably À Villequier from his 1856 collection Les Contemplations. (3)

Hugo was not faithful to Adèle. From February 1833 until her death in 1883, the actress Juliette Drouet devoted her entire life to him, acting as his secretary and travelling companion, writing some 20,000 letters expressing her passion and jealousy. Hugo never married her even after his wife Adèle died in 1868. 

Hugo gave free rein to his libido until a few weeks before his death, systematically recording his casual affairs in a private code — using Latin abbreviations, Spanish homophones and analogies — to ensure secrecy, much as Samuel Pepys had done in his diaries. On the day Hugo died, all the brothels in Paris reportedly closed in mourning.

Within a brief period in the early 1870s, Hugo suffered a mild stroke, his daughter Adèle was interned in an insane asylum, and his two sons died. His wife Adèle had died in 1868, and his faithful mistress Juliette Drouet died in 1883, just two years before his own death. 

MONEY AND FAME Hugo's first poetry collection earned him a royal pension from Louis XVIII at the age of twenty. 

He was briefly on the edge of bankruptcy until the success of Hernani in 1830 rescued his finances and confirmed his position as the undisputed leader of French Romanticism. (3) 

Hugo became the most popular writer of his time: on his eightieth birthday, one of the largest parades in French history was held in his honour in Paris. 

Letters addressed to him needed only the label "To Mister Victor Hugo, In his avenue, Paris." 

Hugo left 50,000 francs to the poor in his will. 

FOOD AND DRINK During his years in exile on Guernsey, Hugo adopted a strict daily routine: he rose at sunrise and consumed a breakfast of two raw eggs and a cup of cold coffee before beginning work. (7) 

He was reportedly a prodigious and indiscriminate eater — the writer Théophile Gautier described him making extraordinary mixtures on his plate combining chops, haricot beans, beef in tomato sauce, ham omelette, and café au lait laced with vinegar, mustard, and Brie — which he swallowed rapidly and at length. (8) 

Hugo was highly temperate with alcohol: he never drank a drop of spirits nor smoked a cigar in his life. He drank sweetened wine in the same way others would drink water, and was entirely indifferent to whether it was fine Bordeaux or cheap table wine. (8) 

After meals he reportedly chewed lumps of charcoal to combat what he considered the "corruptions and miasmas" caused in his stomach by his unconventional eating habits. (9)

MUSIC AND ARTS Although Hugo's many talents did not include exceptional musical ability, he had an enormous impact on the music world through the inspiration his works provided. Well over a thousand musical compositions have been based on his writings, including more than one hundred operas, among them Donizetti's Lucrezia Borgia (1833), Verdi's Rigoletto (1851) and Ernani (1844), and Ponchielli's La Gioconda (1876). He wrote the libretto for Louise Bertin's opera La Esmeralda (1836), based on The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. 

Hugo himself particularly enjoyed the music of Gluck, Mozart, Weber, and Meyerbeer. He greatly admired Beethoven and, unusually for his time, appreciated earlier composers such as Palestrina and Monteverdi. 

Two famous musicians were his friends: Hector Berlioz and Franz Liszt, the latter of whom played Beethoven in Hugo's home. Hugo joked that, thanks to Liszt's piano lessons, he had learned to play a favourite song — with one finger. 

He was also on friendly terms with Frédéric Chopin, and attended his funeral in 1849. Hugo introduced Chopin to the novelist George Sand, who became Chopin's lover. 

He had low esteem for Richard Wagner, whom he described as "a man of talent coupled with imbecility." (2)

Hugo produced more than 4,000 drawings in his lifetime, working only on paper in dark brown or black pen-and-ink wash. Originally a casual hobby, drawing became his exclusive creative outlet during the period 1848–1851 when he stopped writing to devote himself to politics. (3)

WRITING CAREER  If industriousness were a competitive sport, Victor Hugo would have retired undefeated sometime around 1830 and spent the rest of his life giving motivational talks to lesser mortals. Instead, he carried on for more than sixty years, producing poetry, novels, plays and political journalism at a rate that suggests either divine inspiration or a very aggressive relationship with ink. By the end, he was not just France’s most celebrated 19th-century writer, but also—one suspects—the reason French printers developed wrist problems.

He first caused a stir as a teenager when he entered a poem into a competition run by the Académie française in 1817. The judges, assuming no fifteen-year-old could possibly write anything coherent, decided the entry must be fraudulent. Hugo, who would go on to produce enough writing to fill 45 volumes, must have found this early vote of no confidence faintly amusing. By twenty, he had published Odes et poésies diverses (1822) and secured a royal pension from Louis XVIII—a nice arrangement that allowed him to continue writing at a pace that would alarm modern word processors.

Over the next decade or so he produced a succession of poetry collections with titles of increasing atmospheric ambition—Les Orientales (1829), Les Feuilles d’automne (1831), Les Chants du crépuscule (1835), Les Voix intérieures (1837), and Les Rayons et les ombres (1840). By this point he had established himself as the sort of poet critics describe as “lyric and elegiac,” which is a polite way of saying he could make you feel things whether you wanted to or not.

Hugo did not confine himself to verse. In 1827, his play Cromwell came with a preface that effectively kicked the door in on French theatrical tradition. It argued that drama should mix the sublime with the grotesque—rather like serving soufflé with pickles—and became the founding document of French Romanticism. Three years later, Hernani (1830) caused such uproar at its premiere that audience members reportedly settled aesthetic disagreements with their fists, proving that nothing inflames public opinion quite like irregular verse. His later play Ruy Blas (1838) is generally considered his dramatic high point, though mercifully with fewer punch-ups.

Then came Notre-Dame de Paris (1831), written in a burst of productivity so intense that Hugo supposedly locked away his clothes to prevent himself from going outside—a strategy that, while effective, has yet to catch on in most writing workshops. Published on January 14, 1831, it became an instant European sensation and had the unexpected side effect of shaming Paris into restoring the neglected Notre-Dame Cathedral, thereby saving one of the world’s great buildings through the simple expedient of making it famous again.

His social conscience found sharper expression in Le Dernier Jour d’un condamné (1829), a fierce attack on capital punishment that later influenced writers such as Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Albert Camus—which is rather like saying your pamphlet inspired three entirely separate literary planets. His shorter work Claude Gueux (1834), based on a real execution, would later serve as a kind of rehearsal for his most famous novel.

That novel, of course, was Les Misérables (1862), which Hugo had been planning since the 1830s and took seventeen years to complete—roughly the time it takes most people to learn the violin badly. By the time it was published, following his political exile in 1851, anticipation was so high that the first Paris edition sold out within 24 hours. Hugo, not known for false modesty, had already written to his publisher predicting it would be a crowning achievement. History, irritatingly for the modest, agreed with him.

Exile proved productive in other ways too. While living on Guernsey, he wrote Les Travailleurs de la Mer (1866), featuring a memorable struggle with a giant squid—because if you’re going to write about island life, you might as well include cephalopods. This was followed by L’Homme qui rit (1869), a dark English-set tale, and Quatre-vingt-treize (1874), a novel about the Reign of Terror that many now rank alongside his more famous works.

Meanwhile, he continued to produce poetry of daunting scale and intensity. Les Châtiments (1853) took aim at Napoleon III with the subtlety of a cannon, while Les Contemplations (1856) included deeply personal elegies to his daughter Léopoldine. Then there was La Légende des siècles (1859), an epic poetic sweep through human history which in France is regarded as a towering masterpiece, though elsewhere it is more often admired in theory than actually read—rather like long instruction manuals.

As for his working habits, Hugo wrote at a speed that suggests he may have had several additional arms not mentioned in the historical record—up to 100 lines of verse or 20 pages of prose a day. When inspiration lagged, he resorted to the aforementioned tactic of having his clothes removed, ensuring that distraction was kept to an absolute minimum. It is a method that would undoubtedly improve productivity in many professions, though possibly at the cost of workplace morale.

In total, his output inspired well over a thousand musical compositions, including more than a hundred operas. This means that even if you have never read Hugo, there is a fair chance you have encountered him in song—proof that, in the end, he did not so much write literature as create a small, self-sustaining cultural ecosystem.

LITERATURE His literary output was gargantuan. He sought to capture the entirety of human experience, from the historical depths of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame to the social outcry of Les Misérables.

Illustration by Émile Bayard from the original edition of Les Misérables (1862)

NATURE Hugo's novel Les Travailleurs de la Mer (Toilers of the Sea, 1866), dedicated to the island of Guernsey where he spent fifteen years in exile, features an epic battle between a man and a giant squid. The Guernsey word for squid — pieuvre — entered the French language as a result of its use in the book. 

Hugo's letters show him closely attuned to the landscapes of his exile — the Channel Island coastline and his view across the sea to France are recurring images in his poetry and correspondence. (10)

PETS Hugo had a cat called Chanoine (The Canon). He had originally named it Gavroche (after the street urchin in Les Misérables), but renamed it because it was so idle. He also had a cat called Mouche, French for "fly" — the insect. (3)

HOBBIES AND SPORTS Hugo was an obsessive and prolific draughtsman. He produced over 4,000 drawings, experimenting with pen and ink, washes, and occasionally blotting — creating dramatic, visionary landscapes and grotesque imagery that anticipated Surrealism. 

He was also deeply interested in interior decoration — he renovated Hauteville House in Guernsey entirely according to his own eccentric vision, combining Chinese porcelain, Japanese lacquerwork, East Asian tapestries, and heavy oak panelling. He reportedly said he had "missed his true vocation" and was "born to be a decorator." (11)

SCIENCE AND MATHS As a boy in Naples (1807–1808), Hugo was taught mathematics by Giuseppe de Samuele Cagnazzi, elder brother of the Italian scientist Luca de Samuele Cagnazzi. 

Hugo wrote the preface to a French edition of a scientific work, and his novel Les Travailleurs de la Mer reflects a serious interest in marine biology and the natural sciences. 

PHILOSOPHY & THEOLOGY Hugo's religious views changed radically across his life. Under his mother's influence he began as a practicing Catholic; he then became non-practicing and increasingly anti-clerical. During his exile he participated in séances and spiritism. In his later years he settled into a rationalist deism similar to Voltaire's. When a census-taker asked him in 1872 whether he was Catholic, he replied: "No. A Freethinker." 

Despite his anti-clericalism, Hugo believed in life after death and prayed every morning and night. When his sons Charles and François-Victor died, he insisted they be buried without a crucifix or priest, and made the same stipulation for his own funeral. Yet he left among his last words: "I believe in God." 

He counted 740 attacks on Les Misérables in the Catholic press, and several of his works appeared on the Church's Index of Forbidden Books. 

POLITICS After the death of his daughter Léopoldine in 1843, Hugo entered politics and became a member of the Paris chamber, fighting for left-wing causes. In 1845 he was appointed a peer of France by King Louis-Philippe, where he spoke against the death penalty and social injustice, and in favour of freedom of the press. 

In 1848, Hugo was elected to the National Assembly as a conservative; the following year he broke with the conservatives in a noted speech calling for the end of misery and poverty, universal suffrage, and free education for all children. 

Portrait as member of the National Assembly of the Second Republic, 1848

Hugo participated in the 1848 Paris insurrection, helping to smash barricades. When Napoleon III seized power in 1851 establishing an anti-parliamentary constitution, Hugo openly declared him a traitor and fled to Brussels, then the Channel Islands. While in exile he published his political pamphlets Napoléon le Petit and Histoire d'un Crime, which were banned in France but had a strong impact. (3)

Although Napoleon III offered a general amnesty to all political exiles in 1859, Hugo declined, unwilling to curtail his criticism. He returned only in 1870 when the Third Republic was proclaimed.  He was elected to the National Assembly and the Senate, but his final phase of political life was regarded as a failure — he was a maverick who achieved little in the Senate. (3)

Hugo was a passionate advocate for the creation of a United States of Europe. At the International Peace Congress in Paris in 1849, he declared that the nations of the continent would one day be blended into "a superior unity... a European fraternity." He also campaigned against slavery, writing to abolitionist Maria Weston Chapman in 1851, and pleading with the US government to spare the life of John Brown in 1859. 

SCANDAL In 1845 Hugo was caught in flagrante with the married Léonie d'Aunet and escaped a sentence for adultery only by a royal pardon. His mistress was not so lucky — she spent two months in prison and six in a convent. (3) 

MILITARY RECORD Hugo had no personal military service. His father, however, rose to the rank of general in Napoleon's army, and much of Hugo's childhood was spent travelling with the army through Spain, Italy, and Elba. (4) 

Hugo was present in Paris during the Prussian siege of 1870–1871, famously eating animals from the Paris Zoo as food became scarce, recording in his diary that he had been reduced to "eating the unknown." (2)

HEALTH AND PHYSICAL FITNESS Hugo suffered a mild stroke in 1878. He kept to a strict daily regimen during his Guernsey years — rising at sunrise, having a bucket of cold water poured over him, taking two raw eggs and cold coffee for breakfast, then writing through the morning. 

Despite his voracious and idiosyncratic eating habits, he was highly temperate with alcohol — he never drank spirits or smoked in his life. (8) 

HOMES  As a child, Hugo lived at 12 Impasse des Feuillantines in Paris, which he described in later life with great nostalgia. 

After his marriage in 1822 he lived in various Paris apartments. He was given the use of rooms in the Hôtel de Rohan-Guéménée on the Place des Vosges from 1832 to 1848, now preserved as the Maison de Victor Hugo museum. 

Following his exile in 1851, Hugo lived in Brussels briefly, then on the island of Jersey (1852–1855), before settling on the island of Guernsey at Hauteville House in Saint Peter Port from October 1855, where he remained until 1870. (He renovated Hauteville House in an entirely personal style, combining Chinese and Japanese decorative objects with heavy oak panelling and East Asian silks. 

Hugo returned to Paris in 1870 and lived at 50 Avenue Victor-Hugo (now number 124), where he died. 

TRAVEL As the son of a Napoleonic general, Hugo spent stretches of his childhood in Elba, Naples, and Madrid. 

During the 1830s and 1840s he travelled extensively through France, the Rhine Valley, and Spain with Juliette Drouet, many journeys reflected in his travel writing and poetry. 

His nineteen years of exile (1851–1870) took him to Brussels, Jersey, and Guernsey. After returning from Guernsey in 1870 he lived again briefly on the island in 1872–1873, before finally returning to France for the remainder of his life.

DEATH Victor Hugo died of pneumonia on May 22, 1885, at his home at 50 Avenue Victor-Hugo, Paris, aged 83. Two days before he died he left a note with his final words: "To love is to act."

He had requested a pauper's funeral, but by decree of President Jules Grévy was given a state funeral. An honour guard of twelve young poets flanked his coffin, and all the street lamps en route were draped in black crêpe. More than two million people joined his funeral procession from the Arc de Triomphe to the Panthéon — the largest funeral in French history. (3)

Funeral procession of Victor Hugo arriving at the Panthéon By Arnaud 25

He shares a crypt within the Panthéon with Alexandre Dumas and Émile Zola. Most large French towns and cities have a street or square named after him. 

Hugo left five sentences as his last will, including: "I leave 50,000 francs to the poor. I wish to be buried in their hearse. I refuse funeral orations from all Churches. I ask for a prayer to all souls. I believe in God." 

APPEARANCES IN MEDIA The 1923 silent film The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (Universal), starring Lon Chaney, was Universal's most successful silent film, grossing over $3 million. The 1939 version starred Charles Laughton, and Disney produced an animated adaptation in 1996. 

Les Misérables has been adapted for film, television, and stage countless times worldwide, including the internationally celebrated stage musical (book by Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg), which became London's West End's longest-running musical. 

The story of Hugo's daughter Adèle's obsession with the British army officer Albert Pinson inspired François Truffaut's 1975 biographical film The Story of Adele H., starring Isabelle Adjani. Adjani earned an Academy Award nomination for her role. 

Verdi's opera Rigoletto (1851) is based on Hugo's play Le Roi s'amuse; Ernani (1844) is based on his play of the same name. Donizetti's Lucrezia Borgia (1833) also derives from a Hugo play. 

ACHIEVEMENTS Leader of the French Romantic literary movement, transforming French drama and fiction. 

Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) directly inspired the restoration of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame and a Europe-wide movement to preserve Gothic architecture. 

Les Misérables (1862) placed the issues of poverty and social injustice on the agenda of the French National Assembly. 

His advocacy against the death penalty influenced the removal of capital punishment from the constitutions of Geneva, Portugal, and Colombia. 

Elected to the Académie française (1841), appointed pair de France (1845), elected to the National Assembly (1848 and 1870), and to the Senate (1876). (2)

A founding member of the Association Littéraire et Artistique Internationale, which led directly to the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works — the foundation of modern international copyright law. 

Produced more than 4,000 drawings, now recognised as visionary works of art in their own right. (2)

Received one of the greatest tributes ever paid to a living writer when, on his eightieth birthday, a six-hour parade of Parisians filed past his window and the Avenue d'Eylau was renamed Avenue Victor-Hugo in his honour. 

Sources:(1) Encyclopædia Britannica — Victor Hugo (2) Wikipedia — Victor Hugo (3) Encyclopaedia of Trivia — Victor Hugo (4) Biography.com — Victor Hugo (5) EBSCO Research Starters — Victor Hugo (6) (27) Gavroche.org — Two Visits to Victor Hugo (7) Mental Floss — Breakfasts of History's Most Productive People (8) Le Quotidien du Médecin — L'Hygiène de Victor Hugo (9) Lit With Charles — Seance-haver, Live Bat-Mailer, Zoo Animal-Eater: Victor Hugo (10) Reynolds News — Victor Hugo as Political Symbol (11) Royal Academy of Arts — Three Things You Didn't Know About Victor Hugo