Victor Hugo

Victor Hugo was born at Besançon in 1802, the son of one of Napoleon's generals, and spent his childhood following his father through Italy and Spain. He won prizes in poetry competitions in his teens, published his first collection of poems at twenty, and at twenty-eight saw the première of his play Hernani set off a battle in the theatre between Romantics and Classicists that marked the triumph of Romanticism. The next year he published Notre-Dame de Paris. A royalist in youth, he moved gradually towards the republic. When Louis Napoleon staged his coup in 1851 Hugo called on the people to resist, and after its failure spent nearly twenty years in exile, mostly on the island of Guernsey in the English Channel, writing with the sea before him; there he finished Les Misérables. After the fall of the Empire in 1870 he returned to Paris to a hero's welcome. Two million people followed his funeral, and he lies in the Panthéon.