Because the monarchists have split their support among various claimants to the throne, the republicans achieve a working majority. The second volume of Hugo’s poetic history of the world, La Légende des siècles, appears.

1878 A stroke leaves Hugo incapable of composing additional literary works.

1880 After years of efforts, Hugo arranges amnesty for the Com munards, popular-front rebels in the Paris of 1871 opposed to surrender to the Prussians. Some 20,000 of them, including women and children, had been slaughtered by French government troops—more than the total of those guillotined during the Reign of Terror in 1793. Guy de Maupassant’s collected Contes (Stories) are published.

1881 On February 26, Hugo’s birthday, a national holiday is proclaimed, and 600,000 marchers pass his windows. The street where he lives is renamed L‘avenue Victor-Hugo.

1882 Hugo is reelected to the Senate. His play Torquemada (1869) is performed.

1883 Juliette Drouet, Hugo’s mistress since 1833, dies after a prolonged struggle with cancer. The final volume of Hugo’s poetic history of the world, La Légende des siècles, appears.

1885 Victor Hugo dies May 22. Two million mourners pass his coffin underneath the Arc de Triomphe. Hugo is entombed in the Panthéon, the first of a series of culture heroes and great leaders to be placed there. June 1 is declared a day of national mourning. Posthumous publications will enhance his reputation for decades—notably, the verse collections La Fin de Satan (The End of Satan, 1886), Toute la lyre (1888,1893), and Dieu (1891). His experimental plays, eventually published in a Pléïade edition as “Le Theatre en lib erté,” brilliantly anticipate the Theater of the Absurd in the 1950s.

1902 On the centenary of his birth, the French government opens the Maison de Victor Hugo museum in the apartment where he once lived on la place des Vosges.

1912- In collaboration with André Antoine, the director of the 1918 naturalistic Théatre-Libre, the filmmaker Albert Capellani, with the Pathé firm, produces a series of movies based on Hugo’s works: Les Misérables (1912), Marie Tudor (1912), Quatrevingt-treize (1914), and Les Travailleurs de la mer (1918).

1926 The Buddhist sect, Cao Dai, originates in Vietnam. It now has about 2,000 temples and several million followers worldwide. The worshipers venerate Hugo and his two sons, whom they believe, return to earth, reincarnated.

1975 François Truffaut’s film Adèle H., retelling the tragedy of Hugo’s second daughter, wins Le Grand Prix du Cinema Français.

1980 Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schoenberg create a rock-opera version of Les Misérables. Translated into English, the musical has been produced internationally more times than any other—Cats being the previous record holder.

1996 Walt Disney issues an animated, freely altered film version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, distinctive in its politically correct treatment of gypsies, women, and persons with disabilities.

INTRODUCTION

Background

Victor Hugo (1802—1885) was a child prodigy with a precocious vocation as a creative writer. He would excel in the novel, the essay, drama, and poetry. He became an instant celebrity when he received honorable mention in a poetry contest sponsored by the Académie Française in 1817. Concerning the construction of varied versification and stanzaic form, he would soon demonstrate a virtuosity that only Goethe and Shelley could rival in Europe. In 1819 and 1820 he received two annual prizes for odes submitted to the prestigious national contest, the Jeux Floraux in Toulouse. In the latter year he and his two older brothers founded a literary magazine, for which he wrote 112 articles and twenty-two poems in sixteen months. In 1821 he met the priest Félicité de Lamennais, who greatly influenced Hugo’s views on the importance of the social utility of Christianity, a perspective that was to dominate Les Misérables forty years later. He became the leader of the French Romantic movement in 1827. Inspired by Shakespeare, he formulated a romantic esthetic based on the shocking, incongruous juxtaposition of the sublime and the grotesque, which exemplified most of his novels, including Les Misérables, in which the Thénardier couple embody the grotesque.

The visionary bent that is so pronounced in Les Misérables emerges in Les Feuilles d‘automne, one of Hugo’s greatest collections of verse, in 1831. In the early 1830s, Hugo began to elaborate a visionary system of theodicy influenced by the Jewish Kabala that claimed God had had to conceal his grandeur from humans (the sun and stars are his masks), so that they could act independently and earn salvation without being overwhelmed by the unmediated spectacle of God’s glory. Only thus was free will possible. Regarding Creation itself, Hugo held the organic worldview widespread in European romanticism: as the DNA in a single cell allows modern geneticists to identify the creature from which it came, so the spark of spirituality inherent in every part of Creation allowed the visionary romantic writers to intuit its divine source. Thus the physical world can guide humans—more accurately, it allows poet-priests to guide their fellows—toward God. Hugo believed that all creation was ordered by hierarchy as well as affinity; it consisted in an endless gradated array of all conceivable creatures, separated by infinitesimal degrees of spiritual excellence. Humans, he thought, would be rewarded or punished by being reincarnated in “higher” (angels) or “lower” (animals, plants, and objects) forms after death, depending on how meritorious their lives had been. Once reincarnated in lower forms, they could see God directly, but could only suffer passively from memories of their sins and from their remoteness from the Creator, as they gradually expiated those sins. As for the angels, none fell after the fall of Satan and his legions, and the remaining angels plus new angels evolving from the ranks of saintly humans would gradually evolve toward a closer affinity with the Godhead—always separated from it, however, by an infinite spiritual distance.