Photo: Étienne Carjat · Dominio público · Source
Author
1802–1885
Victor Hugo was born in Besançon in 1802 and died in Paris in 1885. He was a poet, playwright, novelist and politician, and one of the central figures of French Romanticism. When he died, an enormous crowd took to the streets to say goodbye.
His play Hernani, first staged in 1830, sparked real battles between audiences loyal to tradition and the young Romantics. A year later he published The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, the story of Quasimodo, Esmeralda and a cathedral that is almost a character in its own right. He spent long years in exile for opposing Napoleon III, and it was there that he finished Les Misérables, published in 1862: the life of Jean Valjean, a former convict trying to start again while a relentless police inspector hunts him.
His novels are huge, passionate and full of digressions, but also of scenes that stay with you for good.
Victor Hugo
A former convict tries to build a new life in post-Napoleonic France, pursued by a relentless police inspector and by the weight of his past. Hugo spins a sweeping epic that flows toward the Paris barricades of 1832, pausing to reflect on law, mercy, faith and love. A vast, passionate read that stays with you for weeks.
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Victor Hugo
In Paris in 1482, beneath the towers of the great cathedral, the lives of Quasimodo the bell-ringer, the Romani dancer Esmeralda and the brooding Archdeacon Claude Frollo become fatally entwined. Hugo conjures a teeming medieval city of outcasts, crowds and forbidden longing, with Notre-Dame itself as a living presence. A sweeping, passionate novel whose long detours reward the patient reader.
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Victor Hugo
In the Spain of Charles I, the outlaw Hernani and young Doña Sol love each other against the odds, with an aged duke set on marrying her and the king himself pursuing her. Written in fiery rhymed verse, this Romantic drama weighs passion against honour amid gothic shadows. Its 1830 premiere sparked a famous clash between Romantics and classicists.
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