Hugo, Victor
French poet, playwright, novelist, essayist, visual artist, statesman, human rights campaigner, and perhaps the most influential exponent of the Romantic movement in France.
In France, Hugo's literary reputation rests primarily on his poetic and dramatic output and only secondarily on his novels. Among many volumes of poetry, Les Contemplations and La Legende des siecles stand particularly high in critical esteem, and Hugo is sometimes identified as the greatest French poet. In the English-speaking world his best-known works are the novels Les Miserables and Notre-Dame de Paris (sometimes translated into English as The Hunchback of Notre-Dame).
Total eBooks of selected author: 12
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Set in medieval Paris, Victor Hugo’s powerful historical romance The Hunchback of Notre-Dame has resonated with succeeding generations ever since its publication in 1837. It tells the story of the beautiful gypsy Esmeralda, condemned as a witch by the tormented archdeacon Claude Frollo, who lusts after her. Quasimodo, the deformed bell ringer of Notre-Dame Cathedral, having fallen in love with the kindhearted ... more...
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This volume of memoirs has a double character--historical and intimate. The life of a period, the XIX Century, is bound up in the life of a man, VICTOR HUGO. This is not a diary of events arranged in chronological order, nor is it a continuous autobiography. It is less and it is more, or rather, it is better than these. It is a sort of haphazard chronique in which only striking incidents and occurrences are brought ... more...
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The Man Who Laughs is a romantic masterpiece of a man whose face has been disfigured into a laughing mask in childhood, the loyal blind girl who gives him her heart, and the cruelty of the privileged aristocracy whose laughingstock and saviour he becomes, is remarkable in its emotional impact. But do not be deceived. The timeless trope of Beauty and the Beast is redefined here, for surfaces are misleading, and not ... more...
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Napoleon the Little was an influential political pamphlet by Victor Hugo which condemned the reign of Napoleon III, Emperor of the French. Hugo lived in exile in Guernsey for most of Napoleon III's reign, and his criticism of the monarch was significant as he was one of the most prominent Frenchmen of the time, and was revered by many. It includes the concept of two and two make five as a denial of truth by ... more...
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The History of a Crime: The Testimony of an Eye-Witness by Victor Hugo was published in 1877, long after it was written. It is an account of the 1852 coup d'etat that brought Napoleon into power and forced Hugo into an exile of eighteen years. The work covers those momentous early days of Napoleon rule that changed the course of French history. The deepest feelings and patriotic emotions of the author are reflected ... more...
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One of the most widely read novels of all time, Les Miserables was the crowning literary achievement of Victor Hugo’s stunning career. Though he was considered the greatest French writer of his day, Hugo was forced to flee the country because of his opposition to Napoleon III. While in exile he completed Les Miserables, an enormous melodrama set against the background of political upheaval in France following the ... more...
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CHAPTER I.
"SECURITY"
On December 1, 1851, Charras[1] shrugged his shoulder and unloaded his pistols. In truth, the belief in the possibility of a coup d'etat had become humiliating. The supposition of such illegal violence on the part of M. Louis Bonaparte vanished upon serious consideration. The great question of the day was manifestly the Devincq election; it was clear that the Government was only ... more...
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INTRODUCTION
Victor Hugo was thinking much of Æschylus and his Prometheus at the time he conceived the figure of Gilliatt, heroic warrer with the elements. But it is to a creature of the Gothic mind like Byron's Manfred, and not to any earlier, or classic, type of the eternal rebellion against fate or time or circumstance, that Hugo's readers will be tempted to turn for the fellow to his Guernsey hero: ... more...
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PRELIMINARY CHAPTER.
URSUS.
I.
Ursus and Homo were fast friends. Ursus was a man, Homo a wolf. Their dispositions tallied. It was the man who had christened the wolf: probably he had also chosen his own name. Having found Ursus fit for himself, he had found Homo fit for the beast. Man and wolf turned their partnership to account at fairs, at village fêtes, at the corners of streets where ... more...
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Towards the close of the First French Revolution, Joseph Leopold SigisbertHugo, son of a joiner at Nancy, and an officer risen from the ranks in theRepublican army, married Sophie Trébuchet, daughter of a Nantes fitter-outof privateers, a Vendean royalist and devotee.
Victor Marie Hugo, their second son, was born on the 26th of February, 1802, at Besançon, France. Though a weakling, he was ... more...
