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...

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...

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...

When Victor Hugo died in 1885 at the age of eighty-three, one million mourners gathered in the streets of Paris to see his corpse borne to the Pantheon. Buried with honors usually reserved for heads of state, the author outlived neither his celebrity...

The French author Victor Marie, Vicomte Hugo (1802-1885), was the supreme poet of French romanticism. He is noted for the breadth of his creation, the versatility that made him as much at ease in the novel as in the short lyric, and the mystical...