Eugène Hugo dies confined in the Charenton madhouse.

1838 Ruy Blas, Hugo’s best play, outrages the monarchists by depicting a queen and a valet in love.

1840 Les Rayons et les Ombres (Sunlight and Shadows), the last great poetic collection before Hugo’s exile, is published.

1841 After several failed attempts, Hugo is elected to the French Academy, the body of “Forty Immortals”—the greatest honor a French writer can receive.

1843 A tragic year is punctuated by the failure of Hugo’s Les Burgraves and the drowning of his beloved elder daughter, Léopoldine, her unborn child, and her husband, a strong swimmer who tried to save her after a boating accident. Hugo will dedicate his poetic masterpiece, Les Contemplations, to her. Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo appears.

1845 Hugo is made a pair de France, an appointive position in a body roughly equivalent to the British House of Lords. Ten weeks later, his affair with Mme Léonie Biard (from 1844 to 1851) comes to light when they are arrested in their love nest and charged with adultery. She goes to prison. Hugo’s rank saves him from prosecution.

1847 Balzac publishes La Cousine Bette.

1848 The monarchy is overthrown, and the Second Republic proclaimed. Hugo is elected to its Constitutional Assembly, with the support of the conservatives. With his son Charles, he founds and edits L’ Événement, a liberal paper that unwisely campaigns to have Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, the nephew of the former Emperor, elected President.

1849 Hugo presides over the International Peace Conference in Paris, and delivers the first public speech that proposes the creation of a United States of Europe. Eugène Delacroix paints the ceiling of the Louvre’s Salon d‘Apollon.

1849- Hugo increasingly criticizes the government’s policies, making 1851 fiery speeches on poverty, liberty, and the church. His positions provoke the ire of the government.

1851 The government briefly imprisons Hugo’s two sons in June for having published disloyal articles in L‘Événement. Soon after Louis-Napoléon’s coup d’état (actually, a legal election that creates the Second Empire) in early December, Hugo learns that the imperial police have issued a warrant for his arrest. He flees with his family and mistress to Belgium, and then to the Isle of Jersey, a British possession in the English Channel.

1852- In 1852 Louis-Napoléon declares himself emperor as 1853 Napoleon III. Hugo writes a scathing satire, Napoléon le petit. From 1853 to 1855 he attends seances at which the spirits of both the living and the dead (including Shakespeare, Jesus, and a cowering Napoleon III) seem to communicate by tapping on the table. They explain that all living beings must expiate their sins through a cycle of punitive reincarnations, but that all, even Satan, will finally be pardoned and merge with the Godhead. These ideas figure prominently in Hugo’s visionary poetry for the remainder of his life. Georges Haussmann (1809—1891) begins the urban renewal of Paris.

1853 Hugo publishes Les Châtiments (The Punishments), powerful anti-Napoleonic satire.

1855 Hugo moves to the Channel island of Guernsey.

1856 Hugo’s Les Contemplations, his poetic masterpiece, appears. Profits from its sales allow him to purchase Hauteville House on Guernsey—today a museum.

1857 Gustave Flaubert’s novel of adultery, Madame Bovary—the work most influential on Western novelists until after World War II—is published in book form, as is the first edition of Charles Baudelaire’s poetry, Les Fleurs du mal. Both men and their publishers are placed on trial for offenses to public morals. Baudelaire’s publisher is fined and must remove seven poems treating lesbianism and sadism.

1859 The first volume of Hugo’s poetic history of the world, La Légende des siècles (The Legend of the Centuries), appears.

1861 The danger of arrest having subsided, Hugo’s wife, Adèle, and her sons begin leaving him to stay in Paris during the winter months. She secretly meets with Sainte-Beuve there.

1862 Les Misérables, a 1,200-page epic completed in fourteen months, is published on the heels of a fertile period during which Hugo wrote many political speeches and creative works. Hugo’s famous novel gains an enormous popular audience, although the book is panned by critics and banned by the government. He begins hosting a weekly banquet for fifty poor children.

1866 Guernsey provides the setting for Hugo’s regional novel Les Travailleurs de la mer (The Toilers of the Sea). Edgar Degas commences his series of ballet paintings. Works of Cézanne, Renoir, Monet, and other Impressionists appear. The next year Emile Zola’s novel Thérèse Raquin is published.

1868 Hugo’s wife, Adèle, dies unexpectedly in Brussels. She had been living apart from Victor for several years, but the two had remained friends.

1869 Hugo publishes the historical novel L‘Homme qui rit (sometimes translated By Order of the King). He declines a second offer of amnesty from Napoleon III. Sainte-Beuve dies.

1870 Defeated by the Prussians at Sedan, Napoleon III surrenders to them and is deposed. France’s Third Republic is proclaimed. Hugo returns to Paris in triumph after nineteen years in exile.

1871 Hugo is elected to the National Assembly, but resigns due to the opposition of right-wing members. His son Charles dies.

1872 Consumed by madness, Hugo’s daughter Adèle is institutionalized until her death in 1915. Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days is published.

1873 Hugo’s younger son, Francois-Victor, dies. Arthur Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell is published.

1874 Hugo publishes Quatrevingt-treize (Ninety-three), a historical novel about the counter-revolutionary rebellion in la Vendee, and events leading to the Reign of Terror in 1793. He provides nuanced portraits of both sides.

1876 Hugo is elected to the Senate.

1877 As senator, Hugo plays a leading role in preventing Marshal Marie Edmé MacMahon from becoming dictator of France.