Victor Hugo

Victor Hugo (1802–1885) was a French poet, novelist and dramatist, the dominant figure of French Romanticism. The son of a Napoleonic general, he was famous by his twenties; the riot at the first night of his play Hernani in 1830 and the novel Notre-Dame de Paris the following year made him the leader of the new school. A peer and then a deputy, he opposed Louis-Napoleon's coup and spent nineteen years in exile, chiefly on Guernsey, where he wrote Les Misérables and The Toilers of the Sea. He returned to Paris in 1870 as a national hero, and two million people followed his coffin to the Panthéon.