The genius of Victor Hugo is everywhere, in all the literary kinds which it upsets and adapts itself - novel with the drama, poetry with criticism, ode with the lampoon - as in this facility to be made the actor of the great public roles: of the leader of the romanticism to the patriarch of the Republic.

This official and scandalous virtuoso cumulates the celebrity of notable and the glory of exiled; this middle-class man kills the tyranny of Napoleon III, defends the communards and denounces the capital punishment.

1811: the conflict turns to the wound. In Madrid, after the crossing of occupied and bloody Spain, a shock awaits small Hugo. Their father, instead of celebrating them, locks up them with the college of Noble, black catholic pension and antifrançaise, for which Eugene and Victor are avenged by their crushing school superiority. Returned to Sophie by the intervention of king Joseph, they find into 1812 the Feuillantine pastries, the libraries where they “wallow”, and the small comrade, Adèle Foucher. With the autumn, the Lahorie general, decree with the Feuillantine pastries right before the departure for Spain, are shot. Victor Hugo is ten years old. 1815: the Empire crumbles. Sophie exults. The father obtains the divorce and the guard of his sons, whom it again puts in pension, and whom it wants polytechnicians. But Eugene and Victor become, in clandestinity, poets and burning in favor of the Restoration, which, in 1818, returns them to their mother and to freedom. Victor is sixteen years old, his childhood is completed, matured by violence of the war, the disunion, the injustices, of the abandonments, to which Quasimodo, Cosette and Gavroche will make echo.  
 
Launched Hugo

The Floral plays of Toulouse, by crowning the poet, greet his virtuosity and its political docility. But the small young man well thinking appears not very reasonable. He is in love with the childhood friend, Adèle Foucher. He declares, in secrecy, “promised in marriage”, impassioned, jealous - and pure one. The thing is discovered; Mrs. Hugo prohibits the meetings. Once more torn and betrayed, Victor keep silent himself, but does not incline themselves and waits. His/her mother dies in 1821, and the wedding is done the following year, at the cost of a culpability worsened by the indifference of the father, the delirious jealousy of Eugene and a precarious situation. The energy of Victor - “victorious” - is without terminal: it “will make career”. In the wake of Chateaubriant, it founds very monarchical literary Conservateur, and with some tears and some worms on the death of the duke of Berry a small pension of Louis XVIII obtains. Hugo has a family and a position.  

Of the official poet to the protestor
Launched by the success of its Odes, it radiates already like one of the chiefs, with his friends Vigny and Lamartine, of a new movement, the romanticism, of which the idols are André Chénier, Byron, Chateaubriand. Charles X offers to this beautiful team, which disputes the traditional ones but incenses the throne, the entry in an official career. Convened with the sacring of Rheims, in 1825, Hugo pays of an ode his recognition and the Legion of honor. The Odes and Ballades and the Eastern ones devote the notoriety of a promising poet, dazzling of address and audacity. This Balzac profile of young go-getter however colors nonconformism. The death of his/her father, in 1828, reveals in Victor, as in the Marius of the Poor wretches, the sizes of the Napoleonean era. It is diverted its monarchical devotion, asserts the paternal heritage, makes engrave on its charts “baron Victor Hugo”. The same year, he writes a deviating novel, the Last Day of one condemned, which says the horror of the capital punishment and denounces the price of inhumanity whose the social order is paid. It is the first time - not the last - which Hugo compromises his success.  

The private image is also contrasted. The idol of a whole generation of young “savages”, whose noisy and republican eccentricity, the long hair, the cigarettes and the “orgies” startle the middle-class man, is itself glabrous, sober, strict. In front of these Bohemian single people, the poet pouponne a charming family of - already - four children: Léopoldine, Charles, François Victor, Adele.  

The revival of the theater
Head of the family and gang leader, such is Hugo who attacks his last Bastille: the theater, protected from the romanticism by the tradition and the censure. The offensive is done in three times. In 1827, act I, theoretical: Cromwell and his Foreword proclaim freedom in art, the death of the traditional “rules”, the modern beauty of “grotesque”. In 1829, act II, policy: Charles X fact of prohibiting Marion de Lorme for attack with the royal majesty; Hugo breaks with the mode. In 1830, the curtain rises on Hernani. Finally mobilized for its cause, here the army of faithful, violently avoided and décoiffés, visible, indicators, sound; in first line, the red waistcoat of Gautier and the mane of Dumas. Against the academic “wigs” and “greyish the” traditional ones, them “blazing” defend, step by step, the romantic alexandrine. Success of scandal, the battle of Hernani is completed on a financial triumph and the victory of the art nouveau.

End of the illusions
In July 1830, the people of Paris believe to have finished some with retrograde repression and the kings. But this revolution pirated by the middle-class only comes to anything to change the dynasty to modernize monarchy. Land-mark, Hugo notes the bankruptcy of his “old royalist and catholic conviction” and the impotence of still immature people. Very collapses, even the desired family unit with eagerness. Adele got excited of the friend of Victor, her brother of election: Holy-Beuve, godfather of the small Adele. The family history is repeated; Holy-Beuve revives the dramas of formerly by taking again, without its knowledge, the role of Lahorie, like him friendly of the father and godfather, before being the lover. Of this double crisis, morals and personal, a text testifies, Notre-Dame de Paris. In the medieval night in vain struggle people excluded from the word, disabled person and painful, a too desirable young girl not to suffer from it, a priest excluded from the love but not from its tearing tortures. 

Fashionable life and intense production
The red living room of its new residence, places Royale, is quickly a smart place, more especially as its host still makes scandal: its new drama, the king has fun (1832), is prohibited. But one will not make conceal the writer, who, two months later, gives Lucrèce Borgia: its name will not leave any more the pediment of the theaters during ten years. Successes of Marie Tudor, Angelo and Ruy Blas, the resumptions of Hernani and Marion de Lorme come to confirm the vitality of a poet, who, in parallel, publishes his large lyric collections, Feuilles of autumn, the Songs of the twilight, the interior Voices, the Rays and the Shades.  

Already extremely occupied by a family life and fashionable charged, by the concern for multiple publications, Hugo finds the force, the audacity, to discover another mode of existence, passion. It is a who charms actress, Juliette Drouet, who reveals the violent ones to him giddinesses of the pleasure; with the supervised connection, Hugo prefers the unlimited love and risks his reputation for a courtesan, of which it decides to repurchase the “fault” and the enormous debts. In return, it will dedicate to him, fifty years during, a courageous worship, an energetic devotion. They travel; rêveuses forwardings involve them towards the ignored charms of Normandy, of Belgium, of the edges of the Rhine, the Spanish Pyrenees.  

The “Hugo Viscount”
Hugo climbs with same happiness the steps of notoriety. Protected from the duke of Orleans, admitted in the familiarity of the king, it aims at the peerage, which will convert its celebrity into moral authority. To enter to the Academy is the condition. The “old badgers” will resist five years the attacks of the “barbarian”. Only one vote is to him from the acquired start, that of Chateaubriant. “Sat”, secured, the “Hugo Viscount” is notable, but notable who did not forget that the guillotine, the prison and the prostitution exist, which testifies in a police station in favor of a wrongfully stopped prostitute, who observes the street, kids, the riot - and notes in its notebooks “the scum of misfortune”.  
 
Hugo alone

The death of Léopoldine
These years of the dedication will be soon those of the disaster. If the failure of Burgraves (1843), which buries the romantic drama, leaves almost indifferent Hugo, he saw like a dispossession “happiness afflicting to marry his daughter”. As passionately father of Léopoldine as will be to it its hero Jean Valjean de Cosette, it subjects himself with overwhelming pressure to this wrenching. “Didine” will not be a long time radiant Mrs. Charles Vacquerie. On September 4th, 1843, it and her husband drowns in the Seine, in Villequier. Hugo, broken, keep silent himself, cease to publish. Depressive, it is thrown then in a passion dazzled and suicidal for very an young woman, Léonie Biard: without speaking of the reputation of one candidate to peerage, it exposes the two households - his, with Juliette, and that of Léonie, in hillock with the marital jealousy. On July 2nd, 1845, Hugo, par of France for two months, has been surprised in red-handed of adultery; Léonie is imprisoned, Victor, in spite of the parliamentary privilege, is the high-speed motorboat of a ridiculous scandal, with the great rapture of its rivals, who, after having seen in him an “honorary” writer, regard it as a finished man.  

Hugo will however emerge from this season in hell: he puts himself - without of anything to say to anybody, except in Juliette - to write Miseries, first version of the Poor wretches, and the poems of a new tone, starting point of Contemplations.  

Hugo in policy
February 1848 stops these companies. Hugo, preserving appointed elected official, are not very sensitive to a “spring of the people” of which he deplores the disorder. The terrible social war of June 1848 shakes it and, while the republic, with in the chair Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, slips towards an increasingly clerical and police reaction, Hugo chooses - for always - the other camp: that of the light against misery, of progress against ignorance, the secularity of the instruction against the moral order which, by the law Falloux, gave teaching under the control of the Church. After the coup d'etat of the prince-president, on on December 2nd, 1851, and the failure of republican rising, Hugo enters clandestinity. Thanks to the false paper gotten by Juliette, who did not cease taking care on him, it leaves Paris for Brussels. The administration pronounces its prohibition of stay. The exile will last twenty years.  

Exiled Hugo

His/her sons are in prison in Paris, where “sells off itself”, with the furniture sold with the biddings, all the last success. But Hugo exults: “I like the proscription, I like the exile.” The here free one to exert, in a fatherland which has from now on the dimension of humanity, its “right to the word” and to be fully the deputy of an ideal republic.  

Jersey
At once he initially invents the “word which kills” and machine-guns the usurper, in prose, with Napoleon the Small one. Threatened of expulsion, it is established in Jersey, there installs its tribe, reconstituted in the middle of the waves, and launches its second salvo, in worms this time, the Punishments. The life is organized in Marine Terrace, which holds of the Olympus and the workshop of writing. Hugo discovers new delights, to wear fedoras, to bathe by all times, to pose in front of the objective, to listen to the sea. He completes Contemplations.  

Guernesey
In 1855, a news “expioulcheune”, English courtesy towards Napoleon III, sends them to Guernesey. Not to be “moved more”, Hugo becomes owner. The incomes of Contemplations pay Hauteville-House, whose genius handyman of Hugo will make a work “autograph”: bluish squares, old wood luisants, mirrors, Latin currencies, glosses house, “red Hugo” print soon with this residence a feudal inimitable complication. Hugo himself changes, takes shape another head, bearded, already legendary. But if the “périssime” opens out, the clan decays, made secession. Adele then her brothers remain more and more a long time in Belgium or in Paris. Adele II leaves in her turn to join one been engaged chimerical. His/her mother, a few years afterwards, will only return at Hugo to die in her arms.  

In Guernesey, here only with the faithful Juliette. “I work, it is my force.” In fact, the work of the exile is colossal. In addition to completion of Poor wretches, it carries out face poetry (the Legend of the centuries, Songs of the streets and wood, God, End of Satan), novel (the Workers of the sea, the Man which laughs), critical (William Shakespeare), theater (Theater in freedom, Thousand Francs of reward). Lastly, “recluse, interdependent”, Hugo indefatigably defend oppressed world, Poland, Mexico, Garibaldi - champion of the Italian unification -, John Brown - white American hung to have taken defense, army, black slaves.  
Return and new exiles

After the disaster of Sedan, on on September 1st, 1870, the republic is proclaimed the 4, and, as of the 5, Hugo is in Paris, which celebrates in him the return of freedom. Its name or its effigy is everywhere: medals, balloons, even guns. In Paris besieged, one sings the Punishments. The family finds itself, increased of the wife and the two children of Charles, Georges and Jeanne. Hugo supports the deprivations of the seat merrily - “we eat unknown”. His/her sons launched a republican newspaper of resistance, the Recall.  

“Hideous” peace is signed on on March 1st, 1871. Elected official appointed of the Republican left, Hugo, terrified by the Parliament of Bordeaux, monarchist and provocative, resigns the 10; the 13, the death of Charles draw aside it from the political life at the time when the Commune of Paris starts. He sees the adventurism of it, disunites himself some in spite of his sympathy and remains in Brussels, where he regulates the family business. But the bloody week and its massacres determine it to publicly offer asylum, at his place, with the communards in escape. What is worth a draft of lynching and an expulsion moreover to him. After a summer in Luxembourg, where art to be calm grandfather his bitterness, Hugo returns to Paris to defend the victims of political cleaning, shot and off-set in mass. With this republic in evil of monarchy, repressive, he prefers the exile of Guernesey again, where, in 1872-1873, he writes of a Quatrevingt-Treize feature: the Revolution and the Commune are answered it.  

Death recalls it to Paris; François Victor dies to Christmas 1873. Only remains to him his/her Adèle daughter, dead-alive in her madness. Hugo, at seventy years, is not any more the tyrannical father of anybody. He is discovered “grandfather without brake”, grandfather until anarchy. A last life starts. For Georges and Jeanne, it is “papapa”; for Juliette, who knows it easily in love, a “horrible rabble”. For accustomed of its living room, Goncourt, Gambetta, Flaubert, he is “the immense old man”, impossible and essential. Senator in 1876, it asks for the amnesty of the communards in vain; in charge of a union of the left and liberals, it contributes effectively, in 1877, to save the republic.  

The apotheosis of the Hugo father
The homages rain on Hugo. The communal one in the Sorbonne, all the School, finally laic, recites its worms. On February 26th, 1881, nearly 600 ' 000 Parisian, working, schoolboys, male choirs and brass bands, break in an ocean of crowd and flowers under her windows of the avenue of Eylau, renamed soon of its name, glory without precedent for an alive poet. The middle-class republic buries under the honors the old anarchist scoffer.  

At the end of his life and inventive century of the accursed poets, Hugo has all: official and popular dedication, moral authority and policy, fortune. From there undoubtedly an irritation that a reputation of stinginess, extremely unmerited expresses by an often generous man towards the poor and which work always maintained a whole extravagant and idle tribe. In 1883, its will envisages: “I give fifty thousand francs <2,5 actuels> million to the poor. I wish being carried to the cemetery in their hearse. I refuse the speech of all the Churches. I request a prayer from all the hearts. I believe in a God.”  

Victor Hugo dies shortly after Juliette, on on May 22nd, 1885. The hearse of the poor carries the coffin towards national funeral, Triumphal arch in the Pantheon, returned on this occasion by the republic with its revolutionary vocation: to receive the great men of the fatherland. Facing the force of death, 2 million men and women shout “Vive Victor Hugo!”.

Its originality and its crushing royalty on the literature of its time are due initially to the vastness of an irreducible work to a kind (like Balzac), with a style (like Flaubert), with a project (like Zola), with an adventure (like Rimbaud). Where to classify a writer who practiced not only all literary forms, but cultivated of each one a calculated diversity?  

Poetry, theater and novels
In poetry, the same book joint noble Odes with the light Ballades and an elegiac nostalgia of the Former regime to the first thunders of the Napoleonean legend. In the lyric collections, like Sheets of autumn, the intimate voice of the love is neighborly, the visions of “the slope of the daydream” which will develop the Legend of the centuries and the vocation of a poet prophet, who announces the Punishments. Art to be grandfather embraces childhood and the people under only one name: the “small ones”.  

With the scene, Hugo does not limit the innovation with the drama. He there returns after 1860 and, released by the exile of the constraints of the representation, invents parts of a misunderstood modernity until these very last years: poetic comedies of the Theater in freedom, social comedy of Thousand Francs reward, tackles lively middle-class values safe from safes.  

The novels also escape any labelling. Though Hugo documents himself as much as Balzac, Flaubert or Zola, its narration chooses other ways that realism to say truth, and out of the movement of the century its own way follows. Without giving up the resources of the romantic strategy that are the adventure of the intrigue, the heroes moving towards themselves, the truth of the social study (Poor wretches) or history (Notre-Dame de Paris and Quatrevingt-Treize), the account hugolien bad cold executives of the probable fiction, diverted towards disproportionate horizons: meditation of “This will kill that” in Notre-Dame de Paris, epopee of Waterloo, “bracket” of the convent, philosophy of the slang in the Poor wretches, immense description of revolutionary Paris in Quatrevingt-Treize. These fractures of the account are not off-hand digressions, but a fabulous or mythical way to translate irreducible reality with the fiction.

Various fragments and drawings
This whole is added - and is opposed - an innumerable collection of fragments accumulated in margin of the publications. A part is published by it under the Choses title seen. Dialogs heard in the street or with the Room, notes of voyage, portraits of contemporaries, scenes of lawsuit or riot testify, on the sharp one, of the acute attention and constant range by Hugo with the tiny things of the life as to the great events and correct fortunately the pompous image of the poet lionized by his legend. The same manuscripts reveal a true talent of draftsman. Caricatures, landscapes, oneiric architectures of the Rhenish burgs or the headlights of Guernesey, marines, carried out with the most various materials, attest inventiveness without limits of their author.  

Hugo finally is only, by the duration even of his life and his coincidence with his century, to bring closer the edges to them: Balzac dies in 1850, Zola is born in 1840. No one other that Hugo could not measure of only one work the disproportion of the XIXe century. It incarnates at the same time the romantic youth of the century, its violent maturity and its legend. If Gautier, Musset and Dumas were like him them enfant terribles of the romanticism, death or assagissement excluded them from this radiation increased by the combat of the exile and republican glory, from this metamorphosis amalgamating the man and his work in a mythical character.