Victor Hugo biography

Synopsis

Early years (1802–30)

Victor was the third son of Joseph-Léopold-Sigisbert Hugo, a major and, later, general in Napoleon's army. His childhood was coloured by his father's constant traveling with the imperial army and by the disagreements that soon alienated his parents from one another. His mother's royalism and his father's loyalty to successive governments—the Convention, the Empire, the Restoration—reflected their deeper incompatibility. It was a chaotic time for Victor, continually uprooted from Paris to set out for Elba or Naples or Madrid, yet always returning to Paris with his mother, whose royalist opinions he initially adopted. The fall of the empire gave him, from 1815 to 1818, a time of uninterrupted study at the Pension Cordier and the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, after which he graduated from the law faculty at Paris, where his studies seem to have been purposeless and irregular. Memories of his life as a poor student later inspired the figure of Marius in his novel Les Misérables.

From 1816, at least, Hugo had conceived ambitions other than the law. He was already filling notebooks with verses, translations—particularly from Virgil—two tragedies, a play, and elegies. Encouraged by his mother, Hugo founded a review, the Conservateur Littéraire (1819–21), in which his own articles on the poets Alphonse de Lamartine and André de Chénier stand out. His mother died in 1821, and a year later Victor married a childhood friend, Adle Foucher, with whom he had five children. In that same year he published his first book of poems, Odes et poésies diverses, whose royalist sentiments earned him a pension from Louis XVIII. Behind Hugo's concern for classical form and his political inspiration, it is possible to recognize in these poems a personal voice and his own particular vein of fantasy.

In 1823 he published his first novel, Han d'Islande, which in 1825 appeared in an English translation as Hans of Iceland. The journalist Charles Nodier was enthusiastic about it and drew Hugo into the group of friends, all devotees of Romanticism, who met regularly at the Bibliothque de L'Arsenal. While frequenting this literary circle, which was called the Cénacle, Hugo shared in launching a new review of moderate tendencies, the Muse Franaise (1823–24). In 1824 he published a new verse collection, Nouvelles Odes, and followed it two years later with an exotic romance, Bug-Jargal (Eng. trans. The Slave King). In 1826 he also published Odes et ballades, an enlarged edition of his previously printed verse, the latest of these poems being brilliant variations on the fashionable Romantic modes of mirth and terror. The youthful vigour of these poems