Victor Hugo Biography

Victor Hugo is a novelist, poet, and dramatist. He is one of the most important of French Romantic writers. Victor Hugo was born February 26, 1802 in Besançon, France. He is the third son of Joseph Léopold Sigisbert Hugo and Sophie Trébuchet. His mother was a staunch royalist supporter while his father was a general under Napoleon. Due to his father's being in the military and his mother's frequent returns to Paris, much of Victor's early life was spent on the move.

He studied at the Pension Cordier and the Lycée Louis-le-Grand. During this time, he had begun to write plays and poems. He was an excellent student in literature and mathematics, in 1817 he received an honorable mention from the Académie Française for a poem entered in a competition, and in 1819 he won first place in another national poetry contest. At the encouragement of his mother, Victor started a periodical in 1819 called Conservateur Littéraire devoted to poetry and literary essays. It only ran for 2 years but, then in 1821 Victor's mother would die. Later the next year he would marry Adèle Foucher and go on to have four children and also publish his first book of poetry, Odes et poésies diverses. In 1823 he published his first novel Hans of Iceland. This began his journey toward Romanticism. Victor's reputation as a Romantic literary genius skyrocketed with the production and success of his dramatic Romantic masterpiece Cromwell in 1827.

In 1830, he became one of the leaders when his historical drama Hernani won the theater audience and broke the stranglehold of the classical format on the stage. It also made him rich, and during the next fifteen years, six plays, four volumes of verse, and the novel Notre Dame de Paris established his position as the leading writer of France. In 1831, a rupture developed in the Hugo household when Sainte-Beuve, one of Hugo's closest friends, fell in love with Adéle. The next year, Hugo met a young actress, Juliette Drouet, who in 1833 became his mistress and quit the stage. Supported by a modest pension from Hugo, she became for the next fifty years his unpaid secretary and traveling companion.

In 1843, following the failure of Hugo's last drama, Les Burgraves, and the death of his eldest daughter, drowned on her honeymoon, caused him to abandon poetry temporarily for politics. The French society was rapidly growing and changing with a number of social problems of all kinds. Many