Complete works of Victor Hugo EPUB

Victor Hugo, in full Victor-Marie Hugo, (born February 26, 1802, Besanon, Francedied May 22, 1885, Paris), poet, novelist, and dramatist who was the most important of the French Romantic writers. Though regarded in France as one of that country's greatest poets, he is better known abroad for such novels as Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) and Les Miserables (1862).

Early years (180230)

Victor was the third son of Joseph-Leopold-Sigisbert Hugo, a major and, later, general in Napoleon's army. His childhood was coloured by his father's constant traveling with the imperial army and by the disagreements that soon alienated his parents from one another. His mother's royalism and his father's loyalty to successive governmentsthe Convention, the Empire, the Restorationreflected their deeper incompatibility. It was a chaotic time for Victor, continually uprooted from Paris to set out for Elba or Naples or Madrid, yet always returning to Paris with his mother, whose royalist opinions he initially adopted. The fall of the empire gave him, from 1815 to 1818, a time of uninterrupted study at the Pension Cordier and the Lycee Louis-le-Grand, after which he graduated from the law faculty at Paris, where his studies seem to have been purposeless and irregular. Memories of his life as a poor student later inspired the figure of Marius in his novel Les Miserables.

From 1816, at least, Hugo had conceived ambitions other than the law. He was already filling notebooks with verses, translationsparticularly from Virgiltwo tragedies, a play, and elegies. Encouraged by his mother, Hugo founded a review, the Conservateur Litteraire (181921), in which his own articles on the poets Alphonse de Lamartine and Andre de Chenier stand out. His mother died in 1821, and a year later Victor married a childhood friend, Adele Foucher, with whom he had five children. In that same year he published his first book of poems, Odes et poesies diverses, whose royalist sentiments earned him a pension from Louis XVIII. Behind Hugo's concern for classical form and his political inspiration, it is possible to recognize in these poems a personal voice and his own particular vein of fantasy.