Victor Marie Hugo - Poems

Classic Poetry Series Victor Marie Hugo - poems - Publication Date: 2004 Publisher: Poemhunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive Victor Marie Hugo(26 February 1802 – 22 May 1885) Victor Marie Hugo (French pronunciation: ?[vikt?? ma?i ygo]; was a French poet, novelist, and dramatist. He is considered one of the most well-known French Romantic writers. In France, Hugo's literary fame comes first from his poetry but also rests upon his novels and his dramatic achievements. Among many volumes of poetry, Les Contemplations and La Légende des siècles stand particularly high in critical esteem. Outside France, his best-known works are the novels Les Misérables, 1862, and Notre-Dame de Paris, 1831 (known in English as The Hunchback of Notre-Dame). Though a committed royalist when he was young, Hugo's views changed as the decades passed; he became a passionate supporter of republicanism, and his work touches upon most of the political and social issues and artistic trends of his time. He was buried in the Panthéon. <b>Personal Life</b> Hugo was the third son of Joseph Léopold Sigisbert Hugo (1774–1828) and Sophie Trébuchet (1772–1821); his brothers were Abel Joseph Hugo (1798–1855) and Eugène Hugo (1800–1837). He was born in 1802 in Besançon (in the region of Franche-Comté). Hugo was a freethinking republican who considered Napoléon a hero; his mother was a Catholic Royalist who is believed to have taken as her lover General Victor Lahorie, who was executed in 1812 for plotting against Napoléon. Hugo's childhood was a period of national political turmoil. Napoléon was proclaimed Emperor two years after Hugo's birth, and the Bourbon Monarchy was restored before his eighteenth birthday. The opposing political and religious views of Hugo's parents reflected the forces that would battle for supremacy in France throughout his life: Hugo's father was a high-ranked officer in Napoleon's army until he failed in Spain (one of the reasons why his name is not present on the Arc de Triomphe). Since Hugo's father was an officer, the family moved frequently and Hugo learned much from these travels. On a childhood family trip to Naples, Hugo saw the vast Alpine passes and the snowy peaks, the magnificently blue Mediterranean, and Rome during its festivities. Though he was only five years old at the time, he remembered the six-month-long trip vividly. They stayed in Naples for a few months and then headed back to Paris. www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 1 At the beginning of her marriage, Hugo's mother Sophie followed her husband to posts in Italy (where Léopold served as a governor of a province near Naples) and Spain (where he took charge of three Spanish provinces). Weary of the constant moving required by military life, and at odds with her husband's lack of Catholic beliefs, Sophie separated temporarily from Léopold in 1803 and settled in Paris with her children. Thereafter she dominated Hugo's education and upbringing. As a result, Hugo's early work in poetry and fiction reflect her passionate devotion to both King and Faith. It was only later, during the events leading up to France's 1848 Revolution, that he would begin to rebel against his Catholic Royalist education and instead champion Republicanism and Freethought. Young Victor fell in love and against his mother's wishes became secretly engaged to his childhood friend Adèle Foucher (1803–1868). Because of his close relationship to his mother, Hugo waited until after his mother's death (in 1821) to marry Adèle in 1822. Adèle and Victor Hugo had their first child, Léopold, in 1823, but the boy died in infancy. The following year, on 28 August 1824, the couple's second child, Léopoldine was born, followed by Charles on 4 November 1826, François-Victor on 28 October 1828, and Adèle on 24 August 1830. Hugo's oldest and favorite daughter, Léopoldine, died at age 19 in 1843, shortly after her marriage to Charles Vacquerie. She drowned in the Seine at Villequier, pulled down by her heavy skirts, when a boat overturned. Her young husband Charles Vacquerie also died trying to save her. The death left her father devastated; Hugo was traveling with his mistress at the time in the south of France, and first learned about Léopoldine's death from a newspaper he read at a cafe. He describes his shock and grief in his famous poem À Villequier: Hélas ! vers le passé tournant un oeil d'envie, Sans que rien ici-bas puisse m'en consoler, Je regarde toujours ce moment de ma vie Où je l'ai vue ouvrir son aile et s'envoler! Je verrai cet instant jusqu'à ce que je meure, L'instant, pleurs superflus ! Où je criai : L'enfant que j'avais tout à l'heure, Quoi donc ! je ne l'ai plus ! Alas! turning an envious eye towards the past, inconsolable by anything on earth, www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 2 I keep looking at that moment of my life when I saw her open her wings and fly away! I will see that instant until I die, that instant—too much for tears! when I cried out: "The child that I had just now-- what! I don't have her any more!" He wrote many poems afterwards about his daughter's life and death, and at least one biographer claims he never completely recovered from it. His most famous poem is probably Demain, dès l'aube, in which he describes visiting her grave. Hugo decided to live in exile after Napoleon III's Coup d'état at the end of 1851. After leaving France, Hugo lived in Brussels briefly in 1851 before moving to the Channel Islands, first to Jersey (1852-1855) and then to the smaller island of Guernsey in 1855, where he stayed until 1870. Although Napoleon III proclaimed a general amnesty in 1859, under which Hugo could have safely returned to France, the author stayed in exile, only returning when Napoleon III was forced from power as a result of the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. After the Siege of Paris, Hugo lived again in Guernsey from 1872-73 before finally returning to France for the remainder of his life. <b>Writings</b> Hugo published his first novel the year following his marriage (Han d'Islande, 1823), and his second three years later (Bug-Jargal, 1826). Between 1829 and 1840 he would publish five more volumes of poetry (Les Orientales, 1829; Les Feuilles d'automne, 1831; Les Chants du crépuscule, 1835; Les Voix intérieures, 1837; and Les Rayons et les ombres, 1840), cementing his reputation as one of the greatest elegiac and lyric poets of his time. Like many young writers of his generation, Hugo was profoundly influenced by François-René de Chateaubriand, the famous figure in the literary movement of Romanticism and France's preeminent literary figure during the early 19th century. In his youth, Hugo resolved to be "Chateaubriand or nothing," and his life would come to parallel that of his predecessor in many ways. Like Chateaubriand, Hugo would further the cause of Romanticism, become involved in politics as a champion of Republicanism, and be forced into exile due to his political stances. The precocious passion and eloquence of Hugo's early work brought success and fame at an early age. His first collection of poetry (Odes et poésies diverses) was www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 3 published in 1822, when Hugo was only twenty years old, and earned him a royal pension from Louis XVIII. Though the poems were admired for their spontaneous fervor and fluency, it was the collection that followed four years later in 1826 (Odes et Ballades) that revealed Hugo to be a great poet, a natural master of lyric and creative song. Victor Hugo's first mature work of fiction appeared in 1829, and reflected the acute social conscience that would infuse his later work. Le Dernier jour d'un condamné (The Last Day of a Condemned Man) would have a profound influence on later writers such as Albert Camus, Charles Dickens, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. Claude Gueux, a documentary short story about a real-life murderer who had been executed in France, appeared in 1834, and was later considered by Hugo himself to be a precursor to his great work on social injustice, Les Misérables. Hugo's first full-length novel would be the enormously successful Notre-Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre-Dame), which was published in 1831 and quickly translated into other languages across Europe. One of the effects of the novel was to shame the City of Paris into restoring the much-neglected Cathedral of Notre Dame, which was attracting thousands of tourists who had read the popular novel. The book also inspired a renewed appreciation for pre- Renaissance buildings, which thereafter began to be actively preserved. Hugo began planning a major novel about social misery and injustice as early as the 1830s, but it would take a full 17 years for Les Misérables to be realized and finally published in 1862. Hugo was acutely aware of the quality of the novel and publication of the work went to the highest bidder. The Belgian publishing house Lacroix and Verboeckhoven undertook a marketing campaign unusual for the time, issuing press releases about the work a full six months before the launch. It also initially published only the first part of the novel ("Fantine"), which was launched simultaneously in major cities. Installments of the book sold out within hours, and had enormous impact on French society.

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