Books by Victor Hugo

Victor-Marie Hugo (1802–1885) was a French poet, novelist, dramatist, and statesman universally revered as the towering leader of the French Romantic movement and a national hero of France. Rising to literary prominence in Paris during the 1820s, Hugo shattered classical theatrical conventions with his groundbreaking play Hernani before conquering world prose with Notre-Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre-Dame) in 1831, a magnificent gothic novel that celebrated medieval architecture and championed the marginalized. Following the 1851 coup d'état by Napoleon III, Hugo endured nineteen years of heroic political exile on the Channel Islands, where he completed his supreme humanitarian masterpiece, Les Misérables (1862). Interweaving thrilling narrative suspense with passionate social advocacy, Hugo championed prison reform, universal education, and the abolition of capital punishment. Upon his death in 1885, more than two million mourners joined his state funeral procession to the Panthéon, celebrating him as a champion of freedom and human dignity.