Victor-Marie Hugo

Victor Hugo (1802–1885) was the towering literary conscience of 19th-century France. Leading the Romantic rebellion with the 1827 preface to Cromwell and the riotous premiere of Hernani (1830), he saved Gothic architecture from destruction with Notre-Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, 1831), starring Quasimodo and Esmeralda.

A fierce opponent of Napoleon III's 1851 coup d'état, Hugo spent nineteen years in defiant exile on the Channel Islands of Jersey and Guernsey, penning blistering anti-tyrannical satires (*Les Châtiments*) and his colossal humanist magnum opus, Les Misérables (1862), tracing Jean Valjean's spiritual redemption. Returning in triumph upon the declaration of the Third Republic, Hugo died at eighty-three; his coffin was laid beneath the Arc de Triomphe, where two million citizens marched in his funeral procession to the Panthéon.