The complete online text of The History of a Crime by Victor Hugo.

On 22 May 1885 Victor Hugo died, prompting international mourning unprecedented for a literary figure. Within an hour the periodical Gil Blas published a special edition, which sold out everywhere, and soon millions flocked to Paris in a spectacular disp...

No century of French literature has been better represented by a single author than the nineteenth, and no writer better personifies the French nineteenth century than Victor Hugo. His life span corresponds closely to the century's limits; for fully fift...

Victor Hugo, one of France's most prolific nineteenth-century authors, wrote novels, poems, and dramatic works. His career as a playwright began in 1816 and ended almost sixty years later. The dramas and prefaces that he wrote between 1826 and 1843 const...

IN THE CHAOS following the fall of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship, unruly mobs were allowed to commit two disparate kinds of crime. Most horrific were lootings at Iraqi hospitals, where bands of thieves stole baby incubators, medicines, food, and water. At the same time, the...

Lawrence M. Friedman BasicBooks, 10 East 53rd St., New York, NY 10022. 577 pp., $30. Few of us doubt, it seems, that America has a crime problem. Or more precisely, that the tide of lawlessness is lapping at our front doors and...