Victor Hugo

Statesman, Author

1802 – 1885

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Who was Victor Hugo?

Victor Marie Hugo was a French poet, novelist, and dramatist of the Romantic movement. He is considered one of the greatest and best known French writers. In France, Hugo's literary fame comes first from his poetry but also rests upon his novels and his dramatic achievements. Among many volumes of poetry, Les Contemplations and La Légende des siècles stand particularly high in critical esteem. Outside France, his best-known works are the novels Les Misérables, 1862, and Notre-Dame de Paris, 1831.

Though a committed royalist when he was young, Hugo's views changed as the decades passed; he became a passionate supporter of republicanism, and his work touches upon most of the political and social issues and artistic trends of his time. He was buried in the Panthéon.

Famous Quotes:

  • Initiative is doing the right thing without being told.
  • When grace is joined with wrinkles, it is adorable. There is an unspeakable dawn in happy old age.
  • Life is the flower for which love is the honey.
  • The brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over we realize this: that the human race has been roughly handled, but that it has advanced.
  • God created the flirt as soon as he made the fool.
  • The book which the reader now holds in his hands, from one end to the other, as a whole and in its details, whatever gaps, exceptions, or weaknesses it may contain, treats of the advance from evil to good, from injustice to justice, from falsity to truth, from darkness to daylight, from blind appetite to conscience, from decay to life, from bestiality to duty, from Hell to Heaven, from limbo to God. Matter itself is the starting-point, and the point of arrival is the soul. Hydra at the beginning, an angel at the end.
  • A library implies an act of faith.
  • It is from books that wise people derive consolation in the troubles of life.
  • Close by the Rights of Man, at the least set beside them, are the Rights of the Spirit.
  • Separated lovers cheat absence by a thousand fancies which have their own reality. They are prevented from seeing one another and they cannot write; nevertheless they find countless mysterious ways of corresponding, by sending each other the song of birds, the scent of flowers, the laughter of children, the light of the sun, the sighing of the wind, and the gleam of the stars --all the beauties of creation.

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Born
Feb 26, 1802
Besançon
Also known as
  • Victor Marie Hugo
  • Victor-Marie Hugo
Parents
Siblings
Spouses
Children
Religion
  • Deism
Ethnicity
  • French people
Nationality
  • France
Profession
Education
  • Lycée Louis-le-Grand
Lived in
  • Besançon
  • Jersey
  • Guernsey
Died
May 22, 1885
Paris
Resting place
Panthéon, Paris

Submitted
on July 23, 2013

Citation

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"Victor Hugo." Biographies.net. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 28 Mar. 2024. <https://www.biographies.net/people/en/victor_hugo>.

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