Victor-Marie Hugo, famously known as Victor Hugo was born in Besancon, France on February 26, 1802. Hugo grew up surrounded by conflict between his father, a general in Napolean’s army, and his mother, a royalist. He spent his childhood traveling from Paris where he lived with his mother, to whatever new city his father occupied, and back to Paris. Initially, Hugo connected with the ideas his mother taught him in Paris, he did not change his opinion until after his mother died.

Before he became a writer, however, Hugo was studying to be a lawyer at the Pension Cordier and Lycee Louis-le-Grande from 1815 to 1818. Throughout school, Hugo filled notebooks with poems, plays, and translations. He realized after graduating that he had no desire to become a lawyer and published his first book of poems Odes et poesies diverses in 1822, the same year he married Adele Foucher and one year after his mother died. Odes et poesies diverses was a book so based in royalist ideas that King Louis XVIII gifted Hugo a pension.

Hugo published his first novel, Han d’Islande, in 1823 and started surrounding himself with Romanticists. Throughout this time, Hugo started opening his mind to Romanticism as opposed to Royalism and in 1829 he published Les Orientales, his first work that showed he had left his Royalist ideas in the past.

In 1831 Hugo’s fame took off with the publication of Notre-Dame de Paris, or The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. The next few years Hugo spent pumping out poems and novels that expressed his personal opinions as well as his political philosophies. Hugo was far from his Royalist beginnings as his works now featured ideas of praising Napoleon, and illustrating the harsh lives of the poor.

Hugo became an important political figure in the fight against the monarchy and was eventually banished in 1851 to Brussels, and then later to the British islands of Jersey and Guernsey. While exiled, Hugo continued to write about his experiences fighting and his political philosophies, publishing three books of poetry before returning to a novel he had abandoned long ago. This story centered on a convict who had been imprisoned for nineteen years after stealing a loaf of bread. After being released and breaking parole, the protagonist is stalked by an officer until eventually, both men die. In that time, however, the hard convict has softened and discovered that “to love another person is to see the face of God.” Les Miserables was published in 1862 and has since been turned into a world-famous musical, seven different movies, and a BBC TV show.

Hugo died in 1885 due to cerebral congestion and was given a national funeral. He was buried in the Pantheon.