This lovely chalk art in Vitruvian Park is a tribute to a poem from the French poet, novelist and dramatist of the Romantic Movement — Victor Hugo (1802-1885). What a perfect sentiment to take to heart in these troubling times! These verses come at the very end of a six-part poem, “Dans l’eglise de…” (“In the church of …”), in his Les chants du crepuscule (Songs of Dusk), written in 1836. Per the Encyclopedia of World Biography, the French Romantic Movement was a style in the 1800s that emphasized a free form of writing and expressed strong emotions, experiences of common people and imaginative expressions and passion. Hugo's reputation as a poet developed early in his life, and he received a royal salary in 1822. He felt that poetry should follow nature, mixing the beautiful and the good with the ugly and the displeasing. For 15 years, he was the official poet of France.
In his lifetime, he wrote 186 poems and 20 books. Outside France, his most famous works are the novels The Hunchback of Notre Dame, 1831, and Les Miserables, 1862. Per the Encyclopedia of World Biography, in Les Miserables his guiding interest was a social and humanitarian concern for the disadvantaged. The book was not just an adventure story, but a love story and a mystery as well. It solidified his concern for people who were treated unfairly in society. It was made into films in 1958 and 2012 and a Broadway musical which ran from 1987 to 2003. The Hunchback of Notre Dame musical, produced by Disney, opened in Berlin in 1999. The related French musical with a slightly different name, Notre-Dame de Paris, premiered in Paris in 1998. Hunchback was made into films in 1939 and 1996. His novels are dominated by a sense both of fatality and social conscience, according to Fantastic Fiction.
According to the Encyclopedia of World Biography, Victor Marie Vicomte Hugo was born in Besançon, France, on February 26, 1802, to Joseph Leopold Sigisbert Hugo and Sophie Trebuchet. He and his two older brothers, Abel and Eugène, lived with their mother in Paris, France, while their father, a general and the governor of the Italian province of Avellino, lived in Italy. In 1822 Hugo married his childhood sweetheart, Adèle Foucher, one and a half years after the death of his mother, who had opposed their marriage. The couple later had four children.
In 1831, Hugo’s wife, tired of bearing children and frustrated by the poet's immense selfishness, turned for comfort to the poet's friend, the novelist and critic Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve. Due to his loneliness from his wife's rejection, he fell in love with the young actress and prostitute Juliette Drouet. He took it upon himself to save her. He paid her debts and forced her to live in poverty, with her whole life focused entirely upon him. From this time on, she lived solely for the poet and spent her time writing him letters, of which many thousands are in existence.
On the night of December 2, 1850, Charles-Louis Napoléon Bonaparte or Napoleon III seized power and declared himself emperor. Hugo called for the people to fight back, and many were killed in this process. His involvement in the events put his life in danger. Drouet saved the poet, found him shelter and organized his escape to Brussels, Belgium. From there he went to the British Channel Islands of Jersey and Guernsey.
During Hugo's long absence from France, he explored the dark side of his personality. There were many séances in his home. He believed that he was communicating with famous spirits. The "visit" that touched him most was that of his favorite daughter, Léopoldine, who had tragically drowned in the Seine with her young husband in 1843. Hugo continued his experiments with the supernatural until stopped by the fragile mental state of his son Charles. Hugo's wife left him to live in Brussels, where she died in 1868. Only Juliette remained loyal during the seventeen years the poet spent in England.
According to The Biography.com website, though Hugo returned to France after 1870 as a symbol of republican triumph, his later years were largely sad. He lost two sons between 1871 and 1873. His later works are somewhat darker than his earlier writing, focusing on themes of God, Satan and death. In 1878, he was stricken with cerebral congestion. Hugo and his mistress, Juliette, continued to live in Paris for the rest of their lives. The street on which he lived was renamed Avenue Victor Hugo on the occasion of his 80th birthday in 1882.
Per the International Socialist Review, Victor Hugo died on May 22, 1885. His funeral attracted more than two million people — one of the largest mass mobilizations ever seen in Paris and more than the city’s total population at the time. It was truly a festival of the oppressed, as workers, the poor and the exploited arrived en masse to celebrate the life and work of a man who had given voice to the voiceless.
Graham Robb, the author of one of the best biographies of Hugo, describes the scene as a “fairground” where “drunken bodies littered the Champs-Élysées.” Brothels closed as prostitutes dressed in mourning to pay their respects. Among those who came to pay their respects were delegations of “war veterans, civil servants, artists and writers, animal-lovers and school children.”
His significance as a writer — an extremely prolific writer — is incontestable. As the poet and critic Mallarmé argued, Hugo “divided all French literature into two epochs — before and after Hugo.”
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