69 Facts About Victor Hugo

Victor-Marie Hugo was a French Romantic writer and politician.

Victor Hugo is considered to be one of the greatest French writers of all time.

In France, Hugo is renowned for his poetry collections, such as and.

Victor Hugo was at the forefront of the Romantic literary movement with his play Cromwell and drama Hernani.

Victor Hugo produced more than 4,000 drawings in his lifetime, and campaigned for social causes such as the abolition of capital punishment.

Victor Hugo's work touched upon most of the political and social issues and the artistic trends of his time.

Victor-Marie Hugo was born on 26 February 1802 in in Eastern France.

Victor Hugo was the youngest son of Joseph Leopold Sigisbert Hugo, a general in the Napoleonic army, and Sophie Trebuchet ; the couple had two other sons: Abel Joseph and.

The Hugo family came from Nancy in Lorraine where Victor Hugo's grandfather was a wood merchant.

Victor Hugo was an atheist and an ardent supporter of the republic created following the abolition of the monarchy in 1792.

Since Victor Hugo's father was an officer in Napoleon's army, the family moved frequently from posting to posting, Sophie had three children in four years.

Leopold Victor Hugo wrote to his son that he had been conceived on one of the highest peaks in the Vosges Mountains, on a journey from Luneville to Besancon.

In 1810, Victor Hugo's father was made Count Victor Hugo de Cogolludo y Siguenza by the then King of Spain Joseph Bonaparte, though it seems that the Spanish title was not legally recognized in France.

In that city, Victor Hugo was taught mathematics by Giuseppe de Samuele Cagnazzi, elder brother of Italian scientist Luca de Samuele Cagnazzi.

Soon Victor Hugo's father was called to Spain to fight the Peninsular War.

Victor Hugo became a mentor to Victor and his brothers.

Victor Hugo moved in with his mother to 18 the following year and began attending law school.

Victor Hugo fell in love and secretly became engaged, against his mother's wishes, to his childhood friend Adele Foucher.

Like, Victor Hugo furthered the cause of Romanticism, became involved in politics, and was forced into exile due to his political stances.

Victor Hugo became the figurehead of the Romantic literary movement with the plays Cromwell and Hernani.

Victor Hugo's novel was published in 1831 and quickly translated into other languages across Europe.

Victor Hugo began planning a major novel about social misery and injustice as early as the 1830s, but a full 17 years were needed for to be realised and finally published in 1862.

Victor Hugo had used the departure of prisoners for the Bagne of Toulon in one of his early stories, "Le Dernier Jour d'un condamne".

Victor Hugo went to Toulon to visit the Bagne in 1839 and took extensive notes, though he did not start writing the book until 1845.

Victor Hugo queried the reaction to the work by sending a single-character telegram to his publisher, asking.

The novel was not as successful as his previous efforts, and Victor Hugo himself began to comment on the growing distance between himself and literary contemporaries such as and, whose realist and naturalist novels were now exceeding the popularity of his own work.

In 1848, Victor Hugo was elected to the National Assembly of the Second Republic as a conservative.

When Louis Napoleon seized complete power in 1851, establishing an anti-parliamentary constitution, Victor Hugo openly declared him a traitor to France.

Victor Hugo moved to Brussels, then Jersey, from which he was expelled for supporting a Jersey newspaper that had criticised Queen Victoria.

Victor Hugo finally settled with his family at Hauteville House in Saint Peter Port, Guernsey, where he would live in exile from October 1855 until 1870.

Victor Hugo composed or published some of his best work during his period in Guernsey, including, and three widely praised collections of poetry.

Victor Hugo had pleaded for Benito Juarez to spare the recently captured emperor Maximilian I of Mexico but to no avail.

Victor Hugo was in Paris during the siege by the Prussian Army in 1870, famously eating animals given to him by the Paris Zoo.

Victor Hugo had been in Brussels since 22 March 1871 when in the 27 May issue of the Belgian newspaper l'Independance Victor Hugo denounced the government's refusal to grant political asylum to the Communards threatened with imprisonment, banishment or execution.

Victor Hugo, who said "A war between Europeans is a civil war," was an enthusiastic advocate for the creation of the United States of Europe.

Victor Hugo expounded his views on the subject in a speech he delivered during the International Peace Congress which took place in Paris in 1849.

The Congress, of which Victor Hugo was the President, proved to be an international success, attracting such famous philosophers as Frederic Bastiat, Charles Gilpin, Richard Cobden, and Henry Richard.

Victor Hugo frequented spiritism during his exile and in later years settled into a rationalist deism similar to that espoused by Voltaire.

Victor Hugo felt the Church was indifferent to the plight of the working class under the oppression of the monarchy.

Victor Hugo counted 740 attacks on Les Miserables in the Catholic press.

Victor Hugo greatly admired Beethoven, and rather unusually for his time, he appreciated works by composers from earlier centuries such as Palestrina and Monteverdi.

Victor Hugo worked with composer Louise Bertin, writing the libretto for her 1836 opera La Esmeralda, which was based on the character in The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

In particular, Victor Hugo's plays, in which he rejected the rules of classical theatre in favour of romantic drama, attracted the interest of many composers who adapted them into operas.

Today, Victor Hugo's work continues to stimulate musicians to create new compositions.

When Victor Hugo returned to Paris in 1870, the country hailed him as a national hero.

Victor Hugo was a maverick and achieved little in the Senate.

Victor Hugo suffered a mild stroke on 27 June 1878.

The celebrations began on 25 June 1881, when Victor Hugo was presented with a vase, the traditional gift for sovereigns.

Victor Hugo was not only revered as a towering figure in literature, he was a statesman who shaped the Third Republic and democracy in France.

Victor Hugo left five sentences as his last will, to be officially published:.

Victor Hugo worked only on paper, and on a small scale; usually in dark brown or black pen-and-ink wash, sometimes with touches of white, and rarely with colour.

Victor Hugo kept his artwork out of the public eye, fearing it would overshadow his literary work.

Some of his work was shown to, and appreciated by, contemporary artists such as van Gogh and ; the latter expressed the opinion that if Victor Hugo had decided to become a painter instead of a writer, he would have outshone the artists of their century.

Victor Hugo, who was still banished from France, was unable to attend her funeral in Villequier where their daughter Leopoldine was buried.

Adele and Victor Hugo had their first child, Leopold, in 1823, but the boy died in infancy.

The death left her father devastated; Victor Hugo was travelling at the time, in the south of France, when he first learned about Leopoldine's death from a newspaper that he read in a cafe.

Victor Hugo describes his shock and grief in his famous poem "A Villequier":.

Victor Hugo wrote many poems afterward about his daughter's life and death, and at least one biographer claims he never completely recovered from it.

Victor Hugo decided to live in exile after Napoleon III's coup d'etat at the end of 1851.

In 1871, after the death of his son Charles, Hugo took custody of his grandchildren Jeanne and Georges-Victor.

Victor Hugo took her on his numerous trips and she followed him in exile on Guernsey.

Victor Hugo wrote some 20,000 letters in which she expressed her passion or vented her jealousy on her womanizing lover.

On 25 September 1870 during the Siege of Paris Victor Hugo feared the worst.

Victor Hugo left his children a note reading as follows:.

Many years after their separation, Victor Hugo made a point of supporting her financially.

Victor Hugo gave free rein to his sensuality until a few weeks before his death.

Victor Hugo's legacy has been honored in many ways, including his portrait being placed on French currency.

Victor Hugo is the namesake of the city of Hugoton, Kansas.

Victor Hugo is venerated as a saint in the Vietnamese religion of, a new religion established in Vietnam in 1926.