They began an affair. The Hugos stayed together as friends, and in 1833 Hugo met the actress Juliette Drouet, who would remain his primary mistress until her death fifty years later.

Personal tragedy pursued Hugo relentlessly. His jealous brother Eugène went permanently insane at Victor’s wedding to Adèle. Three of Victor’s children died before him. His favorite, Léopoldine, together with her unborn child and her devoted husband, died at nineteen in a boating accident on the Seine. The one survivor, Adèle (named after her mother), would be institutionalized for more than thirty years.

Hugo’s early royalist sympathies shifted toward liberalism during the late 1820s under the influences of the fiery liberal priest Félic ite de Lamennais; of his close friend Charles Nodier, an ardent opponent of capital punishment; and of his father, a general under Napoleon I. He first held political office in 1843, and as he became more engaged in France’s social troubles, he was elected to the Constitutional Assembly following the February Revolution of 1848. A lifetime advocate of freedom and justice, often at his own peril, Hugo’s work linked art to the political realm. After Napoleon III’s coup detat in 1851, Hugo’s open opposition created hostilities that ended in his flight abroad from the new government.

Hugo’s exile took him first to Belgium, and then to the Channel Islands of Jersey and Guernsey. Declining at least two offers of amnesty—which would have meant curtailing his opposition to the Empire—Hugo remained abroad for nineteen years, until Napoleon’s fall in 1870. Meanwhile, the seclusion of the islands enabled Hugo to write some of his most famous verse and his masterpiece, the novel Les Misérables. When he returned to Paris, the country hailed him as a hero. Hugo then weathered, within a brief period, the siege of Paris, the institutionalization of his daughter for insanity, and the death of his two sons. Despite this personal anguish, the aging author remained committed to political change. He became an internationally revered figure who helped to preserve and shape the Third Republic and democracy in France. Hugo’s death on May 22, 1885, generated intense national mourning; more than two million people joined his funeral procession in Paris from the Arc de Triomphe to the Pantheon, where he was buried.

The World of Victor Hugo and
The Hunchbach of Notre Dame

1797Hugo’s parents, Joseph-Léopold Hugo and Sophie Trébuchet, marry. They will have three sons: Abel (1798), Eugène (1800), and Victor-Marie (1802), who is born in Be sançon on February 26. An officer in the army of Napoleon Bonaparte (Napoleon I), Léopold must travel constantly during Victor’s youth.
1803 1812Marital problems occur as Sophie cannot tolerate the tran sience of army life; finally, she settles in Paris with her three children. Both parents start extramarital affairs. The family travels to Corsica and Elba, where Léopold is stationed. He later commands the troops that will suppress freedom fight ers in occupied Italy and Spain, sometimes nailing their severed heads above church doors.
1804apoléon proclaims himself Emperor of the French. Liter ary critic Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve is born.
1807Leopold Hugo receives a post in Naples, where his family soon joins him.
1808Leopold 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.
1809Napoleon promotes Major Hugo to general, and honors him with the title of count.
1810The police arrest Lahorie in Mme. Hugo’s house on De cember 30.
1811Sophie journeys to Spain to save her marriage, but problems in the relationship persist. Léopold, knowing of his wife’s in fidelity, asks for a divorce. Sophie and her sons return to Paris.
1812General Lahorie is executed for plotting against Napoleon.
1814Napoléon abdicates and is banished to the island of Elba. The monarchy is reinstated, and Louis XVIII is named king.
1815Napoleon returns from exile. The “Hundred Days” of his re newed reign ends when he is defeated at Waterloo. Louis XVIII returns to power.
1816A marvelously gifted and precocious writer, Victor Hugo pro claims his ambition to rival François-René de Chateaubriand, the most famous Romantic author of his generation. Es tranged from his father and influenced by his mother, a roy alist by expediency, he skillfully curries favor with the conservative literary establishment and the King, whom he praises in odes.
1817Hugo wins honorable mention in the national poetry con test sponsored by l‘Académie française (the French Acad emy).
1818Sophie and Léopold are legally separated (divorce was ille gal in France between 1816 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.
1819Despite his mother’s wishes for a more ambitious union, Victor falls in love with—and secretly asks the hand of—his neighbor, Adèle Foucher.