were married, and in the same year he published his
first volume of
Odes. He was now fully
launched on a literary career, and for twenty years
or more the story of his life is mainly the story
of his literary output. In 1827 he published
his drama of
Cromwell, the preface to which,
with its note of defiance to literary convention,
caused him to be definitely accepted as the head of
the Romantic School of poetry.
Les Orientales,
Le dernier jour d’un condamne,
Marion
de Lorme, and
Hernani followed in quick
succession. The revolution of 1830 disturbed for
a moment his literary activity, but as soon as things
were quiet again he shut himself in his study with
a bottle of ink, a pen, and an immense pile of paper.
For six weeks he was never seen, except at dinner-time,
and the result was
Notre-Dame de Paris.
During the next ten years four volumes of poetry and
four dramas were published; in 1841 came his election
to the Academy, and in 1843 he published
Les Burgraves,
a drama which was less successful than his former
plays, and which marks the close of his career as
a dramatist. In the same year there came to him
the greatest sorrow of his life. His daughter
Leopoldine, to whom he was deeply attached, was drowned
with her husband during a pleasure excursion on the
Seine only a few months after their marriage.
In 1845 Hugo began to take an active part in politics.
Son of a Vendean mother, he had been in early life
a fervent royalist, and even in 1830 he could write
of the fallen royal family with respectful sympathy.
Yet by that time his democratic leanings had declared
themselves, and he accepted the constitutional monarchy
of Louis Philippe only as a step towards a republic,
for which he considered France was not yet ripe.
In 1845 the king made him a peer of France, but this
did not prevent him from throwing himself with all
the ardour of his nature into the revolution of 1848.
Divining the ambition of Louis Napoleon, he resisted
his growing power, and when the Second Empire was established
the poet was among the first who were exiled from
France. He took refuge first in Jersey, and afterwards
in Guernsey, where he lived in a house near the coast,
from the upper balcony of which the cliffs of Normandy
could sometimes be discerned. Thence he launched
against the usurper a bitter prose satire, Napoleon
le Petit, and a still bitterer satire in verse,
Les Chatiments, and there he wrote two of his
greatest novels, Les Travailleurs de la Mer
and Les Miserables, two of his finest volumes
of poetry, Les Contemplations, the greater part
of the first series of La Legende des Siecles,
and the two remarkable religious poems, Dieu
and La Fin de Satan. He returned to France
on the fall of Napoleon in 1870, to be for fifteen
years the idol of the people, who regarded him as
the incarnation of the spirit of liberty. Several
volumes of poetry were issued during those fifteen
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