Victor Hugo

Victor Hugo was the dominant French writer of the nineteenth century — novelist, poet, playwright, and politician. A royalist in his youth, he became a committed republican after Napoleon III's coup and spent nineteen years in exile on the Channel Islands, writing Les Misérables (1862) and The Toilers of the Sea. He returned to Paris after the fall of the Second Empire to a hero's welcome, was elected to the Senate, and died at eighty-three. His state funeral drew two million mourners. Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame remain among the most widely adapted works in the history of fiction.