In 1832, at 30 years old, French poet, novelist and playwright Victor Hugo moved into an apartment on Place Royale, now Place des Vosges, in Paris. He already had a considerable reputation as a writer. One of the books that would ensure his later renown with English readers (and musical audiences), The Hunchback of Notre Dame, had come out a year before, in 1831, although he wasn’t to complete the other favorite, Les Misérables, until 1862.
Hugo, the son of a republican general in Napoleon’s army and a royalist mother, had been writing – and receiving recognition – since his teens. By age 23, he was a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur. And by the time he moved into the apartment on Place Royale, he was also the father of five children, two boys, two girls: a first child, Léopold, died in infancy.
The youngest child, Adèle, for whom Hugo had ambivalent feelings not least because, some suggest, he thought she might not be his, was two years old. She was named for her mother, the childhood sweetheart he married when he was 20 and she 19. His wife had at least one extra-marital dalliance but was by no means entrenched – as her husband became – in this behavior.
Maison Victor Hugo
Strolling past 6, Place des Vosges on Paris’s oldest planned square – constructed as an ensemble, with attached brick town-house-style buildings all the way around it – it is hard to imagine the tumultuous experiences and creative fervor inside that second floor apartment when it was occupied by this precocious talent and his family. Today, the square is restored and expensive, and Nr 6 is the Victor Hugo Museum, but it was not the fashionable neighborhood it is now, or had been in the 17th-18th centuries, when the Hugos moved in.
A year after the move, Hugo met actress Juliette Drouet who was starring in one of his plays. They began a 50-year relationship (until her death), during which Hugo was to prove as little faithful to her as he was to his wife. Drouet gave up acting to become his secretary/traveling companion, and he supported her albeit modestly. She was abjectly beholden to him, some say because he demanded nothing less. To a man whose personal motto was ‘’Ego Hugo’’, she could not but please in the many letters she wrote him, here from a 1935 missive: ‘’You are superior to all. I see and admire – you are all!’’
Hugo’s Life From 1832
During the years 1832-48, Hugo wrote plays and a true-crime 'docu-tale' – Claude Gueux (1834), essentially a plea against the death penalty. He worked on Les Misérables. Some of his best poetry saw the light of day, three volumes published in 1835, 1837 and 1840 following travels with Drouet in France, when Hugo not only wrote but also drew, and a later trip to parts of Germany and Switzerland that resulted in more drawings and The Rhine (1842).
In 1841, Hugo finally achieved his goal of becoming a French Academician, which had been resisted by conservatives there due to the Romanticism he was associated with.
All of this hard work and hard living needs to be seen against a backdrop of passionate involvement in the intellectual and social life of the time, exchanges with some of the most influential figures in the arts and otherwise, and multiple affairs. Hugo was nothing if not larger than life.
Tragedy Hits Victor Hugo
However, the accidental death in 1843 of his daughter Léopoldine sent Hugo into an emotional tailspin, exacerbated by the failure earlier that year of a play. The result was writer’s block, which Hugo appears to have alleviated with drawing using free association and unconventional techniques. His life’s work, several thousand drawings, has received critical acclaim but, as he would have wished (he kept his art in the background), he still remains best known as a writer.
Hugo was named a Peer of France in 1845 which status allowed him to escape being jailed for adultery when he was caught in flagrante with a woman he was having a fling with. Politically, however, he was undergoing a sea change, and by 1848 Hugo had switched to republicanism and was elected to the National Assembly. He delivered a speech that year in the park at the center of Place Royale when a Tree of Liberty was planted. But political stances he later took resulted in rioters invading the Hugo apartment. The Hugos subsequently moved away. So ended their 16-year residency.
Hugo From 1848 To 1885
Now entering an intensely political time in his life, Hugo was prey to the ups and downs of the massive upheaval that marked post-Napoleonic France, hence too his periods of exile. In 1851, he left Paris for Brussels then Jersey (Channel Islands). It was here that he became interested in spiritism, taking part in seances not least, according to John Chambers’s Victor Hugo's Conversations with the Spirit World: A Literary Genius's Hidden Life, in an attempt to communicate with his dead daughter.
It was also here that 22-year-old Adèle met an army officer – a tale all its own, immortalized in the 1975 François Truffaut movie The Story of Adèle H., in which after what may have been a brief affair and his subsequent loss of interest she stalked him with a singularly obsessive passion all the way to Halifax, Nova Scotia, and then to Barbados, until she was brought back to France in 1872 (aged 42) and institutionalized.
Hugo’s Last Years
When Hugo returned definitively to Paris in the 1870s, his focus was on politics. General consensus then as now is that he was more effective writing about the need for social reforms than he was in legislating them. He died in 1885 and received a state funeral reportedly attended by over two million people.
The controversial titan had outlived his wife, Juliette Drouet, his two remaining sons. Aside from two grandchildren, only Adèle, ‘’La Misérable’’ as she was dubbed by a biographer, survived him.
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