Victor Hugo

Victor Hugo was the leading French Romantic, poet, playwright and novelist, a peer of France, and an exile for nineteen years on Guernsey after Louis Napoleon’s coup, where he wrote Les Misérables. Cromwell, a play of 1827 too long to be staged, matters for its preface, the manifesto of Romantic drama against the classical rules, which demanded the grotesque beside the sublime and the freedom Shakespeare had. Hernani three years later caused a riot in the theatre. Two million people followed his funeral to the Panthéon. He is the one French writer everyone has heard of and few outside France read.