Victor Hugo

Victor-Marie Hugo was born on 26 February 1802 in Besançon in Eastern France. The youngest son of Joseph Léopold Sigisbert Hugo (1774–1828) a general in the Napoleonic army, and Sophie Trébuchet (1772–1821); the couple had two more sons: Abel Joseph (1798–1855) and Eugène (1800–1837). The Hugo family came from Nancy in Lorraine where Victor Hugo’s grandfather was a wood merchant. Léopold enlisted in the army of Revolutionary France at fourteen, he was an atheist and an ardent supporter of the republic created following the abolition of the monarchy in 1792. Victor’s mother Sophie was a devout Catholic who remained loyal to the deposed dynasty. They met in Châteaubriant, a few miles from Nantes in 1796 and married the following year.

Since Hugo’s father was an officer in Napoleon’s army, the family moved frequently from posting to posting, Sophie had three children in four years. Léopold Hugo wrote to his son that he had been conceived on one of the highest peaks in the Vosges Mountains, on a journey from Lunéville to Besançon. “This elevated origin”, he went on, “seems to have had effects on you so that your muse is now continually sublime.” Hugo believed himself to have been conceived on 24 June 1801, which is the origin of Jean Valjean’s prisoner number 24601.

Weary of the constant moving required by military life, Sophie separated temporarily from Léopold and settled in Paris in 1803 with her sons; she started seeing General Victor Fanneau de La Horie, Hugo’s godfather who had been a comrade of General Hugo’s during the campaign in Vendee. In October 1807 the family rejoined Leopold, now Colonel Hugo, Governor of the province of Avellino. Sophie finds out that Leopold had been living in secret with an Englishwoman called Catherine Thomas.

Soon Hugo’s father is called to Spain to fight the Peninsular War. Madame Hugo and her children are sent back to Paris in 1808, they moved to an old convent, 12 Impasse des Feuillantines, an isolated mansion in a deserted quarter of the left bank of the Seine, hiding in a chapel at the back of the garden, was Victor Fanneau de La Horie who had conspired to restore the Bourbons and had been condemned to death a few years earlier. He became a mentor to Victor and his brothers.

In 1811 the family joined their father in Spain, Victor and his brothers are sent to school in Madrid at the Real Colegio de San Antonio de Abad while Sophie returned to Paris on her own, the parents now officially separated. In 1812 Victor Fanneau de La Horie is arrested and executed. In February 1815 Victor and Eugene are taken away from their mother and placed by their father in the Pension Cordier, a private boarding school in Paris, where Victor and Eugène will remain three years while also attending lectures at Lycée Louis le Grand.

On 10 July 1816, Hugo wrote in his diary: “I shall be Chateaubriand or nothing”. In 1817 he wrote a poem for a competition organised by l’Academie Française, for which he received an honorable mention, the Academicians refused to believe that he is only fifteen. Victor moved in with his mother 18 rue des Petits-Augustins the following year and starts going to law school. Victor fell in love and secretly became engaged, against his mother’s wishes, to his childhood friend Adèle Foucher. In June 1821 his mother died, Léopold married his long time mistress Catherine Thomas a month later. Victor married Adèle the following year, together with his brothers, they started publishing in 1819 a periodical called Le Conservateur littéraire.