VICTOR HUGO

An Analysis Of Victor Hugo

An Analysis Of Victor Hugo

Introduction

Victor Marie Vicomete Hugo, was one of the most distinguished French writers. He was born on February 26, 1802, in Besancon, France. He was the son of General Count Léopold-Sigisbert Hugo and Sophie Hugo. At the age of 13, he attended the lycée Louis-le Grand in Paris where he showed his talent for writing verse tragedies and poetry. In 1817 he was honoured by a French Academy for a poem that he wrote. In 1822, Hugo married Adèle Foucher who was the daughter of an officer in the French ministry of war.As Voltaire was the virtual sovereign and universal genius of French literature in the eighteenth century, so with even better right was Victor Hugo in the nineteenth. Both lived to a great age and maintained to the end their literary power and fertility. Both outlived most of the opposition and rivalry which had beset their respective careers, and toward the end enjoyed extraordinary personal triumphs in the capital from which they had long been exiled.(Roche.2005) Victor Hugo's exaltation was even greater than Voltaire's, for he received honors and congratulations not from Paris only, but from all parts of the world. Voltaire's body after his death was hurriedly conveyed to a distance and hastily committed to the grave, lest ecclesiastical authority might even then show its condemnation by depriving it of a decent burial. But Victor Hugo's remains were honored with a state burial and a spontaneous demonstration of public grief surpassing in pomp and magnificence any that had been awarded to departed royalty. What had this uncrowned king done to merit this unique tribute? He was, perhaps, regarded by many as the victorious champion and spokesman of the democracy of the world. But his real triumphs were not in his political career, which was full of inconsistency, but in his sublime odes, in his powerful dramas and his still more powerful novels, in which he pleaded the cause of the oppressed and outcast.(Karlins,1998)

Discussion

In his Feuilles d'Automne--Autumn Leaves--and in other writings Hugo has given sketches of his life, as he wished the world to see and admire it. The biography, professing to be "related by a witness of his life," and attributed to his wife, was largely written by himself with characteristic exaggerations and embelishments. With all his genuine love of humanity, extending to the vicious and degraded, there was joined an overweening vanity which demanded that mankind must be interested in him and his doings. As he lived long in public view in an era of unprecedented activity of the press, the records of his career are abundant from every point of view. But his literary works must be their own vouchers at the bar of the world's judgement. (Roche.2005)

For our purpose we cannot do better than give the substance of Prof. Brander Matthews' verdict on Victor Hugo's dramas. He finds that they are melodramas written by a poet, rather than poetic plays written by a ...