Victor Hugo
Victor Hugo
Victor Hugo (1802–1885) was a French poet, novelist and dramatist, a leading figure of French Romanticism and the author of Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. Born in Besançon, he won early fame as a poet and with the play Hernani (1830), and his 1831 novel stirred public support for restoring Notre-Dame Cathedral. The turning point came in 1851, when he opposed Louis-Napoléon's seizure of power and went into exile, spending nearly nineteen years abroad, most of them in the Channel Islands, chiefly on Guernsey. There he completed Les Misérables (1862), in which the former convict Jean Valjean is transformed by a bishop's mercy and spends his life repaying it with goodness. Hugo also campaigned against poverty and capital punishment and for free education. On his return to France in 1870 he was received as a national figure, and he was buried in the Panthéon.
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Giants of the Romantic Era
Romanticism prized feeling, imagination and national spirit. Beethoven's music bridged the Classical and Romantic eras. Victor Hugo led French Romantic literature, from the drama Hernani (1830) to Les Misérables (1862). Chopin, who settled in Paris in 1831, gave the piano a new poetic voice. Wagner, who revered Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, reshaped opera as music drama, and Tchaikovsky brought Russian Romanticism to the world with Swan Lake and The Nutcracker.
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