Victor Hugo

Independent activity Liberalism and republicanism

1802–1885 ○ Natural causes

Author of Les Misérables, a deputy of the Second Republic who went into nineteen years of exile after opposing the 1851 coup

Born at Besançon in 1802, he led the Romantic movement in literature and made his name with The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831). He was made a peer of France in 1845 and in 1848 was elected to the National Assembly of the Second Republic as a conservative. In September 1848 he urged the Assembly to abolish the death penalty, and in 1849 he broke with the conservatives with a speech calling for an end to poverty. Denouncing Louis Napoleon's coup of 1851 as treason, he went into exile in Jersey and Guernsey until 1870, publishing Napoléon le Petit, Les Châtiments and Les Misérables (1862). He returned after the Third Republic was proclaimed and in 1871 defended the Communards facing repression. He was elected to the Senate in 1876, and on his death in 1885 he was buried in the Panthéon.

Also known as: Victor-Marie Hugo

Activities and affiliations

1845–1848

France state institutions
Legislature and state representation
1848–1851

France state institutions
Legislature and state representation
1876–1885

France state institutions
Legislature and state representation
Independent activityMain
Literature and arts

Career Timeline

1845–1848Peer of France
1848–1851Deputy in the National Assembly of the Second Republic
1851–1870Exile
1876–1885Senator

Related historical events

1848.02–1851.12The French Revolution of 1848 and the Second RepublicDeputy in the National Assembly, resister of the coupElected as a conservative in 1848, he broke with the conservatives with his 1849 speech on poverty. He helped organise the republican deputies' resistance to the December 1851 coup, went into exile, and put the coup's dead at 1,200.