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VICTOR HUGO - French Dramatist

Music expresses that which can not be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.

Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters.

-- Victor Hugo (1802-1885)

 

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Victor Hugo:
A Biography

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Like Proust, his fellow countryman, Victor Hugo is a writer whose works are discussed more often than they are actually read. Perhaps we had Les Misérables force-fed to us in high school or saw one of the many film versions of his novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame. But of his many other works of prose, poetry, and drama, most modern readers are ignorant -- as they are of the details of Hugo's life. In Victor Hugo, Graham Robb brings a fresh eye to an old subject with laudable results.

During his lifetime, Hugo himself was the author of most of the legend that has grown up around him, from his pastoral conception on a mountainside to his heroic republican opposition to Napoleon. Robb turns these myths inside out as he searches for the underlying compulsions that led Hugo to obsessively recreate his own history. Robb thoroughly and compassionately presents the tangled, sometimes sordid, often ridiculous events of Hugo's life, at the same time commenting knowledgeably on his work. Victor Hugo is a terrific biography of a fascinating man, a great motivator for readers to start agitating for more translations of Hugo's work.

A Biography of Victor Hugo

by Graham Robb

Paperback - 720 pages
Published May 1999 by
W.W. Norton & Co.
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ISBN: 0393318990
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Frenchman Jean Valjean, imprisoned for stealing bread, is paroled after nearly two decades of hard labor. A gift of silver candlesticks from a kindly priest helps him begin anew. Forging a decent and profitable existence, he finds success as a businessman and as the mayor of a small town. He even takes in a pregnant young woman and raises her daughter as his own. When a former prison guard (Geoffrey Rush) -- now a cop -- recognizes Valjean, his past catches up to him. The relentless Javert gives hot pursuit, intent on putting Valjean back in prison.


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Les Misérables
A New Unabridged Translation


by Victor Hugo,
Lee Fahnestock (Translator)

Mass Market Paperback -
1463 pages
Reissue edition
Published March 1987 by
New American Library.
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ISBN: 0451525264

Les Miserables

Other editions: Audio CD (ISBN: 962634105X), Audio Cassette - Abridged (ISBN: 1559352736), Audio Cassette - Unabridged (ISBN: 1570190658), Hardcover (ISBN: 0375403175), VHS videotape, starring Liam Neeson, Geoffrey Rush, Uma Thurman, Claire Danes.

DiscoverFrance.net

The novelist, poet, and dramatist Victor Marie Hugo {hue'-goh or ue-goh'}, b. Besançon, France, Feb. 26, 1802, d. May 22, 1885, was the preeminent French man of letters of the 19th century and the leading exponent and champion of romanticism. A conservative in youth, Hugo later became deeply involved in republican politics, and his work touched upon many of the major currents of artistic and political thought of his time. Victor HugoAlthough best known in the English-speaking world for his two major novels, Notre-Dame de Paris (1831; trans. as The Hunchback of Notre Dame, 1833) and Les Misérables (1862; Eng. trans., 1862), Hugo was also the outstanding French lyric poet of the 19th century.

Until age 10, Hugo traveled with his father, a general under Napoleon. He then settled (1812) in Paris with his mother, whose strong royalist sympathies young Hugo shared. He had early success as a poet and novelist and in 1822 married his childhood sweetheart, Adele Foucher. The home of the young couple became a meeting place of romantic writers -- among them Alfred de Vigny and the critic Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve -- whose search for freedom in art is exemplified in Hugo's epic play Cromwell (1827; Eng. trans., 1896). The play's preface was the most widely read and influential manifesto of romantic literary theory. In it, Hugo spoke of freeing art from the formal constraints of classicism so that it might reflect the full extent of human nature. Hugo's romantic theory is exemplified by Hernani (1830; Eng. trans., 1830), whose first performance on the stage of the Comédie Française, scene of many productions of plays by the classical dramatist Jean Racine, was a triumph for romantic writers. Quasimodo carrying the gypsy girl EsmeraldaMany of Hugo's novels, like his dramas, use historical settings. The Hunchback of Notre Dame is a powerfully melodramatic story of medieval Paris that deals with a deformed bell ringer's devotion to a wild gypsy girl. Les Misérables centers on the life of Jean Valjean, a victim of social injustice, but includes a multitude of scenes and incidents that offer a panoramic view of post-Napoleonic France and the early years of the 19th century.

The publication of Hugo's third collection of poems, Odes and Ballads (1826), marked the beginning of a period of intense creativity. During the next 17 years Hugo published essays, three novels, five volumes of poems, and the major part of his dramatic works. In 1843, however, the failure of his verse drama Les Burgraves (Eng. trans., 1896), followed by the death of his beloved daughter Leopoldine, interrupted his prodigious creativity. In 1845 he accepted a political post in the constitutional government of King Louis Philippe and in 1848 became a representative of the people after Louis Napoleon Bonaparte became president of the Second Republic. When Napoleon seized complete power in 1851, Hugo's republican beliefs drove him into exile, first to Brussels and then to the Channel Islands, where he continued to write savage denunciations of the French government.

When a woman is talking to you, listen to what she says with her eyes.

There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come.

-- Victor Hugo

In exile, accompanied by his devoted mistress Juliette Drouet, Hugo reached maturity as a writer, producing the first volumes of his visionary epic poem Legend of the Centuries (1859-83; Eng. trans., 1894), Les Miserables, and Contemplations (1856; Eng. trans., 1887), often considered his finest collection of poems. He returned to Paris after the fall of the Second Empire (1870) to find himself a national hero. He was elected a member of the National Assembly, then a senator of the Third Republic.

The last two decades of his life were saddened by the deaths of his sons, wife, and mistress, but he continued to write poetry and remained active in politics until 1878, when his health began to fail. His death was an occasion of national mourning, and he received a state funeral.

Hugo's works have survived controversy and critical indifference and remain, by the challenge of their thematic range and the richness of their style, among the most significant of the 19th century.


Charles Affron, Professor of French, New York University, New York City.
Source: 1997 Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia v.9.0.1
Bibliography: Charles Affron, A Stage for Poets: Studies in the Theatre of Hugo and Musset (1971); Victor Brombert, Victor Hugo and the Visionary Novel (1984; repr. 1986); Samuel Edwards, Victor Hugo: A Tumultuous Life (1971); Elliott M. Grant, The Career of Victor Hugo (1945); Richard B. Grant, The Perilous Quest: Image, Myth, and Prophecy in the Narratives of Victor Hugo (1968); Adele Hugo, Victor Hugo, by a Witness of His Life, trans. by Charles E. Wilbour (1964); Matthew Josephson, Victor Hugo: A Realistic Biography of the Great Giant (1942); André Maurois, Olympio: The Life of Victor Hugo (1956); Henri Peyre, Victor Hugo, trans. by R.P. Roberts (1980); Joanna Richardson, Victor Hugo (1977).
Image Source: Portrait of Victor Hugo, Quasimodo carrying the gypsy girl Esmeralda to safety - The Bettmann Archive.

Playwright Biographies:

Links

Hugo Links:

Links

Chronology of Hugo's Life & Times
Overview of political climate in France, Hugo family geneology, and works.

Disney's Hunchback of Notre Dame
Official page for the animated film from Disney Studios.

Drawings by Victor Hugo
Annotated reproductions of Hugo's work.

Historical Perspective of Notre Dame de Paris
Earthlore offers commentary and photos, including the barricades of the 1871 Commune.

Hunchback of Notre Dame
Turner Classic Movies reviews the 1939 classic featuring Charles Laughton.

Les Misérables
Official page of the popular Broadway show.

Maison de Victor Hugo
6 Place des Vosges, 75004 Paris: Hugo's house for 17 years, restored to its original character, now a museum. The Paris Pages and Pariserve offer brief descriptions of the museum, hours of operation, and Hugo's works which were completed here.

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