Biography – Victor Hugo

Origin and education

Victor Hugo was the youngest in the family of General Joseph Hugo and the royalist daughter of a wealthy shipowner, Sophie Trebouchet. He was born in 1802 in Besançon, and for the next 9 years he moved with his parents from place to place. In 1811 the family returned to Paris. In 1813, Victor's parents divorced, and the youngest son remained to live with his mother.

According to a brief biography of Victor Hugo, from 1814 to 1818 the boy was educated at the prestigious Paris Lyceum of Louis the Great. At this time, he began to write: he created several tragedies, translated Virgil into French, wrote several dozen poems, poems and even an ode, for which he received a medal from the Paris Academy and several other prestigious awards.

Memory[ | ]

USSR postage stamp, 1952

• The French Post Office issued postage stamps dedicated to Victor Hugo in 1933, 1935, 1936, 1938 and 1985. [ source not specified 431 days
  ]
• House-Museum of Victor Hugo in Paris.
• Monument at the Sorbonne by Laurent Marquest.
• House-Museum of Victor Hugo in Luxembourg.
• Bust of Hugo by Auguste Rodin.
• Monument to Hugo in the Hermitage Garden. Created by Laurent Marquest, the bronze bust was created in 1920. Gift of the City Hall of Paris to Moscow, established on May 15, 2000.
• V. Hugo Street in Kaliningrad.
• Victor Hugo Street in Tver, approved by the decision of the Tver City Duma on September 20, 2011.[10]
• A crater on Mercury is named after Victor Hugo.
• Hugo is canonized in the Vietnamese Cao Dai religion[11].
• Paris metro station Victor Hugo on line 2.

The beginning of professional literary activity

In 1819, Victor Hugo began to engage in publishing. He published in several magazines, and then began publishing his own. The contents of the magazine indicated that young Hugo was an ardent supporter of the monarchy and adhered to ultra-royalist views.

In 1823, Hugo published his first novel, which was criticized. The writer was not upset, but on the contrary began to work more and more carefully on his works. He even became friends with critics, for example, with Charles Nodier, who, in turn, had a great influence on the writer’s work. Until 1830, Hugo adhered to the classical school, but after the novel “Cromwell” he decided to finally “go” into romanticism. It was Hugo who laid the foundations of the so-called romantic drama.

Works of Hugo in other forms of art[ | ]

Victor Hugo began drawing at the age of 8. Now private collectors and museums have about 4,000 works by the writer (they are still successful to this day and are sold at auctions). Most of the works were written in ink and pencil between 1848 and 1851. He made sketches with pen and black ink on plain paper. Delacroix declared to Hugo: “If you became an artist, you would eclipse all the painters of our time” (Delacroix made costume sketches for Hugo’s first play “Amy Robsart”)[12].

Hugo knew many artists and illustrators, the Deveria brothers, Eugene Delacroix, and Louis Boulanger was his close friend. Admiration for the writer and poet resulted in deep mutual friendship; visiting Hugo’s house every day, Boulanger left a lot of portraits of people grouped around the writer. He was attracted to fantastic plots, inspired by the same poems by Hugo: “The Phantom”, “Lenore”, “The Devil’s Hunt”. Lithograph “Night Sabbath”, where devils, naked witches, snakes and other “evil spirits” appearing in Hugo’s ballad rush in an eerie and rapid round dance. A whole series of lithographs was inspired by Boulanger's novel Notre Dame.

Six characters of Victor Hugo. Canvas, oil. Museum of Fine Arts, Dijon

In March 1866, the novel “Toilers of the Sea” was published with illustrations by Gustave Doré. “Young, gifted master! “Thank you,” Hugo writes to him on December 18, 1866. “Today, despite the storm, I came across an illustration for “Toilers of the Sea” that was no less powerful than it. In this drawing you depicted a shipwreck, a ship, a reef, a hydra, and a man. Your octopus is scary. Your Gilliatt is great.”[13]

Rodin received the order for the monument to Hugo in 1886. The monument was planned to be installed in the Pantheon, where the writer was buried a year before. Rodin's candidacy was chosen, among other things, because he had previously created a bust of the writer, which was received positively. However, Rodin's work, when it was completed, did not meet the customers' expectations. The sculptor depicted Hugo as a mighty naked titan, leaning on a rock and surrounded by three muses. The nude figure seemed out of place in the tomb, and the project was eventually rejected. In 1890, Rodin reworked the original plan, removing the figures of the muses. A monument to Hugo was erected in the garden of the Palais Royal in 1909.

The most famous illustrator of Hugo's books is the artist Emile Bayard (Les Misérables). [ source not specified 431 days

] The emblem of the musical “Les Misérables” is a painting in which the abandoned Cosette sweeps the floors in Thénardier’s tavern.
In the musical, this scene corresponds to the song "Castle on a Cloud "
. Typically a cropped version of the painting is used, where only the girl's head and shoulders are visible, often with a waving French flag woven into the background. This image is based on an engraving by Gustav Brion, who in turn based a drawing by Emile Bayard.

In the USSR, his books were designed by P. N. Pinkisevich; the last book, which was illustrated by the famous engraving master A. I. Kravchenko, was “Notre Dame Cathedral” (1940)[14]. Also famous are the illustrations of the contemporary French artist Benjamin Lacombe

) (born in 1982).
(Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris, Partie 1 -
2011,
Partie 2 -
2012. Éditions Soleil).

The pinnacle of a writing career

Despite problems with critics, Hugo was a fairly famous writer and moved in relevant circles. Such famous artists as Lamartine, Merimee, Delacroix were invited to the house for the holidays. Hugo maintained good relations with Liszt, Chateaubriand, and Berlioz.

In the novels of 1829-1834, Hugo showed himself not only as a writer, but also as a politician. He openly opposed the practice of the death penalty, which was especially important for post-revolutionary France.

From 1834 to 1843 the writer worked mainly for theaters. His tragedies and comedies caused great public resonance - scandals in the French literary world, but, at the same time, they were staged in the best Parisian theaters. His plays “Ernani” and “The King Amuses Himself” were even withdrawn from performances for some time, but then they were again included in the repertoire, and they were a resounding success.

Last years

In 1841, Victor Hugo became a member of the French Academy, and in 1845 he began a political career, which was by no means easy, although it was in 1845 that he received the title of peer of France.

In 1848 he was elected to the National Assembly, where he remained until 1851. Not supporting the new revolution and the accession to the throne of Napoleon III, Hugo went into exile and returned to France only in 1870. In 1876 he became a senator.

The writer died in 1885. In France, mourning was declared for 10 days. Victor Hugo was buried in the Pantheon.

Life and creativity[ | ]

Childhood[ | ]

Victor Hugo was the youngest of three brothers (the elders were Abel[fr], (1798-1865) and Eugene[fr], (1800-1837)). The writer's father, Joseph Leopold Sigisbert Hugo[fr] (1773-1828), became a general in the Napoleonic army, his mother Sophie Trebuchet[fr] (1772-1821) - the daughter of a Nantes shipowner, was a Voltairian royalist.

Hugo's early childhood took place in Marseille, Corsica, Elba (1803-1805), Italy (1807), Madrid (1811), where his father worked, and from where the family returned to Paris each time[6]. Traveling left a deep impression on the soul of the future poet and prepared his romantic worldview.

In 1813, Hugo's mother, Sophie Trebuchet, who had an affair with General Lagorie, separated from her husband and settled with her son in Paris.

Youth and the beginning of literary activity[ | ]

Victor Hugo in his youth
From 1814 to 1818, Hugo studied at the Lycee Louis the Great. At the age of 14, he began his creative activity: he writes his unpublished tragedies - “ Yrtatine

”, which he dedicates to his mother;
and " Athelie ou les scandinaves
", a drama by "
Louis de Castro
", translated by Virgil.
At the age of 15, he already received an honorable mention at the Academy competition for the poem “ Les avantages des études
”, in 1819 - two prizes at the “Jeux Floraux” competition for the poem “The Maidens of Verdun” (
Vierges de Verdun
) and the ode “For the restoration of the statue of Henry IV” (
Rétablissement de la statue de Henri IV
), which laid the foundation for his "Legend of the Ages".
Then he published the ultra-royalist satire Telegraph
, which first attracted the attention of readers.
From 1819 to 1821 he published Le Conservateur littéraire[fr]
, a literary supplement to the royalist Catholic magazine
Le Conservateur[fr]
.
Filling out his own publication under various pseudonyms, Hugo published there “ Ode on the Death of the Duke of Berry
,” which for a long time secured his reputation as a monarchist[6].

In October 1822, Hugo married Adele Foucher [fr] (1803-1868), from which five children were born:

• Leopold (1823—1823)
• Leopoldina, (1824—1843)
• Charles[fr], (1826—1871)
• François-Victor[fr], (1828—1873)
• Adele (1830-1915).

In 1823, Victor Hugo's novel Han d'Islande

), which received a reserved reception. Well-reasoned criticism of Charles Nodier led to a meeting and further friendship between him and Victor Hugo. Soon after this, a meeting was held in the library of the Arsenal, the cradle of romanticism, which had a great influence on the development of Victor Hugo's work.

The friendship of Hugo and Nodier would last from 1827 to 1830, when the latter began to speak out more and more critically about the writer’s works. Somewhat earlier, Hugo resumes relations with his father and writes the poem “Ode to My Father” ( Odes à mon père

, 1823), "
Two Islands
" (1825) and "After the Battle" (
Après la bataille
). His father died in 1828.

Hugo's play Cromwell

), written especially for the great actor of the French Revolution, François-Joseph Talme and published in 1827, caused heated controversy. In the preface to the drama, the author rejects the conventions of classicism, especially the unity of place and time, and lays the foundations of romantic drama.

The Hugo family often holds receptions in their home and establishes friendly relations with Sainte-Beuve, Lamartine, Merimee, Musset, and Delacroix.

From 1826 to 1837, the writer's family often lived in the Château de Roches[fr], in Bièvre[fr], the estate of Louis-François Bertin, editor of the Journal des débats

.
There Hugo meets Berlioz, Liszt, Chateaubriand, Giacomo Meyerbeer; compiles collections of poems “Oriental Motifs” ( Les Orientales
, 1829) and “Autumn Leaves” (
Les Feuilles d'automne
, 1831). The theme of "Oriental Motives" is the Greek War of Independence, where Hugo speaks in support of Homer's homeland.

In 1829, “The Last Day of a Man Condemned to Death” ( Dernier Jour d'un condamné)

), in 1834 - “
Claude Gueux
.
In these two short novels, Hugo expresses his negative attitude towards the death penalty. The novel Notre-Dame de Paris
was published between these two works, in 1831.

Hugo becomes the recognized leader of French romanticism and its theoretician.

Caricature by Benjamin Roubaud “The Great Road to the Future” (1842). At the front of the column is Hugo, dressed as a dragoon, with the slogan “The Ugly is the Beautiful.” He is followed by T. Gautier, Cassagnac, F. Vey, Lamartine, a certain P. Fouche, E. Xu, A. Dumas, F. Soulier, L. Gozlan, C. Delavigne, J. Mary, A. Carr, A. de Vigny.

Years dedicated to the theater[ | ]

From 1830 to 1843, Victor Hugo worked almost exclusively for the theater. Nevertheless, he published several collections of poetic works at this time:

• "Autumn Leaves"[fr] ( Les Feuilles d'automne
  , 1831),
• "Songs of Twilight" ( Les Chants du crépuscule
  , 1835),
• "Inner Voices" ( Les Voix interiores
  , 1837),
• "Rays and Shadows" ( Les Rayons et les Ombres
  , 1840).

In Songs of Twilight, Victor Hugo exalts the July Revolution of 1830 with great admiration.

Scandal during the first production of
Ernani
(1830).
Lithograph by J.-I. Granville (
1846)

As early as 1828 he staged his early play Amy Robsart

"
1829 is the year of the creation of the play “Ernani” (first staged in 1830), which became the reason for literary battles between representatives of old and new art. An ardent defender of everything new in dramaturgy was Théophile Gautier, who enthusiastically accepted this romantic work. These disputes remained in literary history under the name “ Battle of Ernani
”. The play Marion Delorme, banned in 1829, was staged at the Port-Saint-Martin theater; and “The King Amuses himself” - at the Comedy Française in 1832 (removed from the repertoire and banned immediately after the premiere, the show was resumed only 50 years later).

The ban on the latter prompted Victor Hugo to write the following preface to the original 1832 edition, which began: “ The appearance of this drama on the stage of the theater gave rise to unprecedented actions on the part of the government. The day after the first performance, the author received a note from Monsieur Juslin de la Salle, stage director at the Théâtre-France. Here is its exact content: “It is now ten o’clock and thirty minutes, and I have received orders to stop the performance of the play “The King Amuses himself.” Monsieur Taylor conveyed this order to me on behalf of the Minister

».

It was November 23rd. Three days later - November 26 - Victor Hugo sent a letter to the editor-in-chief of the newspaper Le National, which said: “ Monsieur, I have been warned that some of the noble students and artists are going to come to the theater this evening or tomorrow and demand the showing of the drama “The King Amuses himself”, and also to protest against the unheard of act of arbitrariness, because of which the play was closed. I hope, monsieur, that there are other means to punish these illegal actions, and I will use them. Let me use your newspaper to support the friends of freedom, art and thought, and prevent violent demonstrations that could lead to the riot so desired by the government for a long time. With deep respect, Victor Hugo. November 26, 1832

».

The plot conflict in all of Hugo's dramas is based on a brutal duel between a titled despot and a powerless plebeian. This is the clash between the unknown young man Didier and his girlfriend Marion and the all-powerful minister Richelieu in the drama “Marion Delorme” or the exile Hernani with the Spanish king Don Carlos in “Hernani”. Sometimes such a clash is brought to a grotesque point, as in the drama “The King Amuses himself,” where the conflict plays out between the darling of fate, invested with power - the handsome and heartless egoist King Francis, and the hunchbacked freak, offended by God and people - the jester Triboulet.

In 1841, Hugo was elected to the French Academy.

Political activity[ | ]

Hugo was a strong opponent of the death penalty. He managed to get the king to pardon Barbes on the eve of the day appointed for the execution.

In 1845, Hugo was elevated to the peerage. In 1846-48, he defended the interests of Poland in the House of Peers, demanded the Bonapartes the right to return to their homeland, and defended copyright.[7],

After the February Revolution in 1848, elected to the constituent assembly, Hugo founded the anti-radical newspaper “Evénement”, where he spoke out against national workshops and other, in his opinion, extremes, but at the same time defended freedom of the press, the abolition of the death penalty and exceptional laws. Elected to the legislative assembly in 1849, Hugo, from a moderate liberal, soon became an extreme republican, stood for universal suffrage and against the revision of the constitution.

Hugo took a great part in opposing the coup d'etat on December 2, 1851: under his dictation, Bodin wrote an outlaw of Louis Napoleon; he fought on the barricades and barely escaped to Belgium, from where he was soon expelled; then he settled in the Channel Islands (first Jersey, then Guernsey). In exile, Hugo wrote pamphlets in verse and prose against Napoleon III. He assisted Garibaldi in collecting money, defended those sentenced to death, stood up for political exiles of all countries, and corresponded with Herzen.

In 1870, he returned to France, was elected to the national assembly, but soon left it, indignant at the conclusion of peace with Prussia and at the ingratitude shown by the assembly towards Garibaldi. While Paris was under the rule of the commune, Hugo lived in Brussels. In 1876 he was elected senator[7].

Death and funeral[ | ]

Tombstone of Victor Hugo in the Paris Pantheon
Victor Hugo died on May 22, 1885, at the age of 84, from pneumonia in Paris. The funeral ceremony of the famous writer lasted ten days; About a million people took part in it.

On June 1, Hugo's coffin was displayed for two days under the Arc de Triomphe, which was covered with black crepe.

After a magnificent national funeral, the writer’s ashes were placed in the Pantheon[7].

Interesting Facts

• Such great works of the author as the epic novel “Les Miserables”, the novel “The Last Day of a Man Condemned to Execution”, and the novel “The Man Who Laughs” caused great public resonance. Figures of world art and culture, such as F. Dostoevsky, A. Camus, Charles Dickens, highly appreciated Hugo’s literary talent, and Dostoevsky generally believed that his “Crime and Punishment” was in many ways inferior to Hugo’s novels.
• It is known that about a million people came to the writer’s funeral to say goodbye to him.

Biography

Born on February 26, 1802 in Besançon, Victor Marie was the third son of captain (later general) J. L. S. Hugo (originally from Lorraine) and Sophie Trebuchet (originally from Brittany). The parents were completely unsuitable for each other and often separated; On February 3, 1818, they received official permission to live separately. The boy was brought up under the strong influence of his mother, a strong-willed woman who shared royalist and Voltairian views. After the death of his wife in 1821, the father managed to return his son's love. For a long time, Hugo's education was unsystematic. He spent several months at the Nobles College in Madrid; in France, the former priest Father de la Rivière became his mentor. In 1814 he entered the Cordier boarding school, from where the most capable students moved to the Lyceum of Louis the Great. His earliest poetic experiments, mostly translations from Virgil, date back to this period. Together with his brothers, he undertook the publication of the magazine “The Literary Conservator” (“Le Conservateur litt raire”), where his early poetic works and the first version of the melodramatic novel Bug Jargal (1821) were published. He was accepted into the royalist "Society of Fine Literature". The infatuation with childhood friend Adele Foucher met with her mother’s decisive disapproval. After her death, the father allowed the lovers to meet, and this period of courtship was reflected in Letters to the Bride (Lettres la fianc e). Hugo's first book of poetry, Odes et po sies diverses (1822), was noticed by King Louis XVIII, who liked the odes in the royalist spirit. The mature poet, who was too mature for his years, was awarded an annual pension of 1,200 francs, which allowed Victor and Adele to get married on October 12, 1822. The definition of “melancholy romantic” does not in any way fit Victor Hugo of the 1820s. A happy husband, a loving father and an unusually successful writer, he did not know the sorrows that are immortalized in prose or poetry. In 1823 he published his second novel, Han d'Islande, a narrative in the Gothic style, in the tradition of H. Walpole's The Castle of Otranto and M. Lewis's The Friar. In 1828, the canonical edition of Odes et ballades was published; the vivid imagery of the ballads testified to the strengthening of romantic tendencies in his work. Among Hugo's friends and acquaintances were such writers as A. de Vigny, A. de Saint-Valry, C. Nodier, E. Deschamps and A. de Lamartine. Having formed the Cenacle group (French for “community”, “commonwealth”) at the magazine “French Muse”, they often met in the salon of Nodier, the keeper of the Arsenal library. Hugo had a particularly close relationship with C. Sainte-Beuve, who wrote a laudatory review of Odes and Ballads in the Globe. In 1827 Hugo published the play Cromwell, which was too long to be staged; her famous Preface became the culmination of all the simmering debates in France about the principles of dramatic art. Having given enthusiastic praise to Shakespeare's theater, Hugo attacked the unity of time, place and action so dear to the French, spoke out in favor of a more flexible system of versification and advocated for combining the sublime with the grotesque. This manifesto, as well as the poignantly human story The Last Day of a Man Condemned to Death (Le dernier jour d'un condamn, 1829) and the poetry collection Oriental Motifs (Les Orientales, 1829) brought Hugo fame. The period from 1829 to 1843 was extremely productive in Hugo's work. In 1829, a play by Marion de Lorme appeared, banned by censorship for its impartial portrait of Louis XIII. In less than a month, Hugo wrote the romantic drama Hernani. The scandalous premiere (February 25, 1830) was followed by other equally noisy performances. “The Battle of Hernani” ended not only with the triumph of the author of the play, but also with the victory of romanticism, which was finally consolidated by the success of Notre-Dame de Paris (1831). In a novel depicting Paris in the 15th century. and the great creation of Gothic, Hugo first appeared as a prose writer. Marion Delorme was nevertheless installed on August 11, 1831; behind her they saw the light of the footlights The King Amuses himself (Le Roi s'amuse, 1832), Lucrece Borgia (Lucr ce Borgia, 1833), Marie Tudor (Marie Tudor, 1833), Angelo (Angelo, 1835), Ruy Blas (Ruy Blas, 1838 ) and Burgraves (Les Burgraves, 1843). All of them, incl. the best of them, Ruy Blas, embodied the principles formulated in the “Preface” to Cromwell. Important events occurred in Hugo's personal life. Sainte-Beuve fell in love with his wife, and the former friends went their separate ways. Hugo himself developed a passion for the actress Juliette Drouet, whom he met at the beginning of 1833. Their relationship continued until her death in 1883. The collections of lyric poems published from 1831 to 1840 were largely inspired by the poet’s personal experiences. Autumn Leaves (Les Feuilles d'automne, 1831) alternates themes of nature and childhood. Songs of Twilight (Les Chants du cr puscules, 1835) included several poems of a political nature, the rest were inspired by feelings for Juliette. Melancholic in tone are Inner Voices (Les Voix int rieures, 1837), with their unusually touching poem dedicated to Brother Eugene, who died in a mental hospital. Thematically diverse, Rays and Shadows (Les Rayons et les ombres, 1840) reveal a craving for the acquisition of faith. An act of humanity was Hugo's novel Claude Gueux (1834), which was not only directed against the death penalty, but also saw the root of all evil in the problem of poverty. In 1834, a collection of critical essays previously published in full or in fragments, Literary and Philosophical Mixture (Litt rature et philosophie ml es), was also published. In 1841, Hugo's merits were recognized by the French Academy, which elected him as a member. In 1842, he published a book of travel notes, Rhine (Le Rhin, 1842), in which he sets out his program of international relations, calling for cooperation between France and Germany. In 1843, the poet experienced a tragedy: his beloved daughter Leopoldina and her husband Charles Vacry drowned in the Seine. Having retired from society for a while, Hugo went to work on the great novel Misfortunes (Les Mis re), interrupted by the revolution of 1848. Hugo entered politics and was elected to the National Assembly; after the coup d'etat on December 2, 1851, he fled to Brussels, from there he moved to the island of Jersey, where he spent three years, and then (1855) settled on the island of Guernsey. During his long exile, Hugo created his greatest works. In 1853, Retribution (Ch timents) appeared, a brilliant poetic satire with devastating criticism of Napoleon III; in 1856 a collection of lyrical and philosophical poetry, Contemplations (Les Contemplations), was published; in 1859, Hugo published the first two volumes of the Legend of the Ages (La Gende des si cles), which established his fame as an epic poet. In 1860–1861, Hugo returned to the novel Misfortunes he had begun. The book was published in 1862 under the now famous title Les Mis rables. During his stay in Guernsey, Hugo published a treatise by William Shakespeare (William Shakespeare, 1864), a collection of poems, Songs of Streets and Forests (Les Chansons des rues et des bois, 1865), as well as two novels, Toilers of the Sea (Les Travailleurs de la mer, 1866) and The Man Who Laughs (L'Homme qui rit, 1869). After the collapse of Napoleon III's regime in 1870, at the very beginning of the Franco-Prussian War, Hugo returned with Juliette to Paris. For many years he resisted the empire and became a living symbol of the republic. His reward was a deafeningly solemn meeting. Having the opportunity to leave the capital before the advance of enemy troops, he chose to remain in the besieged city. Elected to the National Assembly in 1871, Hugo soon resigned as a deputy in protest against the policies of the conservative majority. The death of his son Charles and the worries associated with caring for his grandchildren explain his absence from Paris during the Commune and the Civil War. Evidence of his patriotism and loss of illusions regarding Germany, to an alliance with which he had been calling for France since 1842, was the collection The Terrible Year (L'Ann e terrible, 1872). In 1874, indifferent to the successes of the naturalistic school, Hugo again turned to the historical novel, writing the novel The Ninety-Third Year (Quatre-vingt-treize). At the age of 75, he published not only the second part of the Legend of the Ages, but also the collection The Art of Being a Grandfather (L'Art d'tre grand-p re), the creation of which was inspired by Charles's children. The final part of the Legend of the Ages was published in 1883. In the same year, Juliette Drouet died. After this, Hugo began to noticeably lose control. In May 1885, Hugo fell ill and died at home on May 22. The state funeral became not only a tribute to a great man, but also the apotheosis of the glorification of Republican France. Hugo's remains were placed in the Pantheon, next to Voltaire and J.-J. Rousseau. Posthumous publications of Hugo: The End of Satan (La Fin de Satan, 1886), Theater and Freedom (Th tre et libert, 1886), Experiences (Choses vues, 1887), Amy Robsart (Amy Robsart, 1889), Alps and Pyrenees (Alpes et Pyr n es, 1890), God (Dieu, 1891), France and Belgium (France et Belgique, 1892), The Complete Set (Toute la lyre, 1888, 1893), Ocean (Oc an, 1897), The Last Sheaf (Derni re gerbe, 1902), Afterword to my life (Postscriptum de ma vie, 1895), Sinister years (Les Ann es funestes, 1898), Stones (Pierres, 1951), Personal memories (Souvenirs personnels, 1952). great French poet, novelist , playwright; leader of the romantic movement in France. Born on February 26, 1802 in Besançon, Victor Marie was the third son of captain (later general) J. L. S. Hugo (originally from Lorraine) and Sophie Trebuchet (originally from Brittany).