Hugo was born on February 26, 1802. His father, General Joseph Leopold Hugo, was the son of a carpenter who rose through the ranks of Napoleon's citizen army. However, Victor's
mother decided not to subject her three sons to the difficulties of army life, and settled in Paris to raise them. Madame Hugo became the mistress of her husband's commanding officer,
General Lahorie, who was a father figure to Hugo and his brothers until the General's execution in 1812.

Victor was an excellent student who excelled in mathematics, physics, philosophy, French literature, Latin, and Greek. He won first place in a national poetry contest when he was 17.

As a teenager, he fell in love with a neighbor's daughter, Adele Foucher. However, his mother discouraged the romance, believing that her son should marry into a finer family. When
his mother died in 1821, Victor refused to accept financial help from his father. He lived in abject poverty for a year, but then won a pension of 1,000 francs a year from Louis XVIII for
his first volume of verse. Barely out of his teens, Hugo became a hero to the common people as well as a favorite of heads of state. Throughout his lifetime, he played a major role in
France's political evolution from dictatorship to democracy.

In 1822, he married Adele Foucher, who became the mother of his children, Leopold-Victor, Charles-Victor, Francois-Victor, Adele, and Leopoldine.

In 1830, Victor became one of the leaders of a group of Romantic rebels who were trying to loosen the hold of classical literature in France. His play Hernani, whose premiere was
interrupted by fist-fights between Hugo's admirers and detractors, took a large step towards a more realistic theatre and made him a rich man.

During the next 15 years he produced six plays, four volumes of verse, and the romantic historical novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame, establishing his reputation as the greatest
writer in France.

In 1831, Adele Hugo became romantically involved with a well known critic and good friend of Victor's named Sainte-Beuve. Victor became involved with the actress Juliette Drouet,
who became his mistress in 1833. Supported by a small pension from Hugo, Drouet became his unpaid secretary and traveling companion for the next fifty years.

After losing one of his daughters in a drowning accident and experiencing the failure of his play Les Burgraves in 1843, Hugo decided to focus on the growing social problems in
France. He was joined in his increasing interest in politics by a number of other Romantic writers, marking the beginning of the Realistic-Naturalistic era in French literature.

Hugo was a moderate republican who was made a Peer of France in 1845. After the Revolution of 1848 and the founding of the Second Republic, he was elected a deputy to the
Constitutional Assembly. Three years later, when Louis Napoleon abolished the Republic and reestablished the Empire, Hugo risked execution trying to rally the workers of Paris against
the new Emperor. However, his efforts failed, and he had to escape to Brussels.

As a result, Hugo spent the next decade in exile with his family and Mme. Drouet on the islands of Jersey and Guernsey. During these years, he wrote satires about Louis Napoleon,
returned to his poetry and published several novels including Les Misérables, which he had begun years earlier.

When Les Misérables was published in Brussels in 1862, it was an immediate popular success in spite of negative reaction by critics, who considered it overly sentimental, and the
government, who banned it.

After the Franco-Prussian War and the fall of the Empire in 1870, Hugo made a triumphant return to Paris. He remained there through the siege of the city and contributed portions of
his royalties to purchase weapons. He lost two sons, one in 1871 and one in 1873. Although he was elected to the Senate in 1876, poor health caused him to return to Guernsey. Mme.
Hugo died in 1868 and Mme. Drouet in 1882.

Hugo died in 1885 at the age of eighty-three. Although he left instructions that his funeral be simple, over 3 million spectators followed his cortege to the Pantheon, where he was buried
amid France's great men. Hugo's death came at the end of a century of war, civil conflict, brutally repressed insurrections such as the student rebellion in Les Misérables, and social
injustice. Because of his belief in the triumph of good over evil and his pleading for tolerance and non-violence, Victor Hugo was the herald of the new democratic spirit.