Victor Hugo

Biography

Victor Hugo (1802–1885) was France's most celebrated writer by the time Les Misérables appeared — poet, playwright, novelist, politician, exile. He had been a Peer of France, a monarchist, then a republican, exiled by Louis-Napoleon after the 1851 coup d'état that ended the Second Republic. He spent nineteen years in exile on the islands of Jersey and Guernsey, writing Les Misérables in sustained bursts from 1845 onward (he had begun it in the 1840s, abandoned it, returned). He published it in 1862 from exile, and the first print run sold out within hours in Paris. He returned to France as a hero after the fall of the Second Empire in 1870. He died in 1885; two million people attended his funeral procession in Paris.

Victor Hugo at a glance