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Victor Hugo
2 books in the library
Victor Hugo (1802–1885) was a French poet, novelist and dramatist, the leader of French Romanticism, and by the end a national institution. He wrote Notre-Dame de Paris partly as a campaign to stop the demolition of Gothic buildings, and it worked: the cathedral was restored because of the book. A republican who had begun as a royalist, he opposed Napoleon III's coup in 1851 and spent nineteen years in exile on Guernsey rather than accept an amnesty, writing Les Misérables there. Two million people lined the streets of Paris at his funeral.