Literary critic Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve is born.

1807 Léopold Hugo receives a post in Naples, where his family soon joins him.

1808 Léopold Hugo follows a cortege of Napoléon’s brother, Joseph, to Spain. Weary of travel, Sophie returns with her young sons to Paris, where she begins an affair with General Victor Lahorie, a conspirator against Napoleon.

1809 Napoleon promotes Major Hugo to general, and honors him with the title of count.

1810 The police arrest Lahorie in Mme Hugo’s house on December 30.

1811 Sophie journeys to Spain to save her marriage, but problems in the relationship persist. Leopold, knowing of his wife’s infidelity, asks for a divorce. Sophie and her sons return to Paris.

1812 General Lahorie is executed for plotting against Napoleon.

1814 Napoleon abdicates and is banished to the island of Elba.

1815 Napoléon is defeated at Waterloo, after “The Hundred Days” of his renewed reign following his secret return from exile. Louis XVIII returns to power, reinstating France’s monarchy.

1816 A marvelously gifted and precocious writer, Victor Hugo proclaims his ambition to rival François-René de Chateaubriand, the most famous Romantic author of his generation. Estranged from his father and influenced by his mother, a royalist by expediency, he skillfully curries favor with the conservative literary establishment and the King, whom he praises in odes.

1817 Hugo wins honorable mention in the national poetry contest sponsored by the l‘Académie française (the French Academy).

1818 Sophie and Léopold are legally separated (divorce was illegal in France between 1814 and 1886). Victor composes a first, brief version of his novel Bug-Jargal, an account of a slave revolt in the Caribbean after the French Revolution; this version will appear in 1820.

1819 Despite his mother’s wishes for a more ambitious union, Victor falls in love with—and secretly asks the hand of—his neighbor, Adèle Foucher. But as a minor, he cannot marry her without his mother’s consent, which is denied. The three Hugo brothers found a literary journal called Le Conservateur litteraire.

1820—Hugo writes over one hundred essays and more than twenty

1821 poems for Le Conservateur.

1821 Victor becomes friends with the famous priest Félicité de Lamennais, who preaches a socially committed Christianity. Victor’s mother dies on June 27. In July his father marries his mistress, Catherine Thomas. Victor becomes reconciled with his father, who does not oppose Victor’s marriage to Adèle.

1822 Granted a small pension by Louis XVIII for his first volume of Odes praising the monarchy, Victor marries Adèle Foucher on October 12. Eugène Hugo, who also loves her, has a psychotic breakdown at the wedding; he will never recover.

1823 Hugo publishes a pioneering historical novel, Han d‘Islande (sometimes translated as The Demon Dwarf), a bloodthirsty melodrama. He helps found the periodical La Muse française and attends weekly gatherings hosted by the then leader of the French Romantic movement, Charles Nodier (1780—1844).

1824 Hugo publishes the Nouvelles Odes. His first child, a daughter Léopoldine is born. Charles X assumes the throne, and Victor serves as the historian of the coronation.

1826 Odes et Ballades is published, as is the full version of Bug-Jargal, noteworthy for its altruistic black hero. Adèle gives birth to Hugo’s second child, Charles-Victor.

1827 Hugo becomes best friends with the critic Sainte-Beuve. The play Cromwell is published: its famous preface proposes a Romantic aesthetic that contrasts the sublime with the grotesque, in emulation of Shakespeare. Hugo declares his independence from the conservative, divine-right royalists.

1828 General Léopold Hugo dies unexpectedly on January 29. Hugo’s third child, François-Victor, is born.

1829 Hugo’s prodigious literary output includes the picturesque verse collection Les Orientales, the tale Le Dernier Jour d‘un condamné d mort (The Last Day of a Condemned Man), opposing capital punishment, and the historical play Marion de Lorme, censored by the French monarchy because it portrays the sixteenth-century ruler François I as a degenerate.

1830 Hugo’s fourth child, a daughter named Adèle, named after her mother, is born. Mme Hugo wants no more children, and from then on sleeps alone. Sainte-Beuve betrays his best friend, Victor, by telling Adèle he loves her. Hugo’s play Hernani, defiantly Romantic in its use of informal language and its violation of the classical “three unities” of time, place, and action, causes riots in the theater where it is performed.

1831 Notre-Dame de Paris: 1482 (The Hunchback of Notre Dame), a tale of the era of the cruel, crafty Charles XI, is published and becomes a bestseller. The visionary poetry collection Les Feuilles d‘automne is published. In it Hugo displays a profundity and a mastery of the art of verse that rival the greatest European poets of the era, Goethe and Shelley.

1832 Hugo’s play Le Roi s‘amuse (The King’s Fool), which will inspire Giuseppi Verdi’s great opera Rigoletto (1851), is banned after opening night owing to its disrespectful portrayal of a king. Hugo occupies an apartment in what is today called la place des Vosges, where he will remain until 1848.

1833 The minor actress Juliette Drouet enters Hugo’s life. He provides her with an apartment near him, forbids her to go out alone, and occupies her with making fair copies of his manuscripts. The couple will continue their liaison until her death fifty years later. The first version of George Sand’s feminist novel Lelia is published.

1834 Hugo ends his friendship with Sainte-Beuve.

1835 Hugo’s great verse collection Les Chants du crepuscule (Songs of Twilight) appears.

1837 Hugo is made an officer of the Legion d‘honneur. Les Voix interieures, the third of four collections of visionary poetry during Hugo’s middle lyric period (1831—1840), appears.