Victor Hugo

The apartment on the Place des Vosges

Hugo was the son of Léopold Hugo, a general in Napoleon's armies, and Sophie Trébuchet. He published Odes et poésies diverses, a first collection of poems, in 1822, and in 1827 wrote a preface to his play Cromwell that became the manifesto of French Romanticism — the movement that wanted drama built on real feeling and real history rather than on the rules of classical tragedy. The argument was settled in a theatre. His play Hernani opened at the Comédie-Française, the state theatre, on 25 February 1830, and his friends packed the house to shout down the traditionalists; the poet Théophile Gautier led them in a red waistcoat, with the novelist Honoré de Balzac, the poet Gérard de Nerval and the composer Hector Berlioz among the crowd. From the fourth act the Romantics had the room, and the evening became known as the bataille d'Hernani, the battle of Hernani.

In 1832 Hugo moved into the second floor of the Hôtel de Rohan-Guéménée — hôtel here meaning a grand townhouse, not an inn — at 6 Place des Vosges, then called the Place Royale, and stayed sixteen years. He was elected to the Académie française, the body that guards the French language, in 1841, and made a peer of France — a member of the upper house of parliament — in 1845. In 1833 he met the actress Juliette Drouet, who became his companion for the rest of her life. His eldest daughter Léopoldine drowned in 1843, at nineteen, a few months after her marriage. Visitors to the apartment today walk through it in three parts — his life before the exile, during it, and after. Along the way are a hand-painted Chinese-style room he designed for Drouet's house in Guernsey, a dining room of Gothic furniture he assembled from salvaged pieces, and the desk where he wrote the first series of La Légende des siècles, a cycle of poems telling the history of humanity; the visit ends in the bedroom, rebuilt from the apartment where he died.

The novel that saved the cathedral

Notre-Dame de Paris appeared in 1831, and in English it is usually called The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. It is set in the Paris of 1482 and turns on Quasimodo, the deaf bell-ringer of the cathedral, and Esmeralda, the young dancer he tries to protect. The cathedral it described was in poor condition: its windows had been smashed during the disturbances of 1830, and demolition had been discussed. Hugo wrote about the building as a work of centuries and a record of the people who made it, and the novel's success produced a public outcry about what had been allowed to happen to it. Hugo's line about the printed book displacing the cathedral as the way a civilisation records itself, "ceci tuera cela", "this will kill that", is the argument the book is built around.

A major restoration campaign was launched in 1842, and the architects Eugène Viollet-le-Duc and Jean-Baptiste Lassus were put in charge of it. Notre-Dame was added to France's list of protected historic monuments in 1862. The restoration also answered the book directly: the Stryge, the horned stone creature that leans on its hands above Paris and is now one of the most photographed things in the city, was carved in 1849 and took its idea from Quasimodo. A work of fiction had ended up as heritage policy.

The barricade of 1832, written from an island

Les Misérables was published in 1862, and Hugo wrote it in exile at Hauteville House on Guernsey, one of the Channel Islands off the coast of Normandy. Its hero is Jean Valjean, a former convict pursued for decades by a policeman named Javert; around them are Fantine, a mother destroyed by poverty, her daughter Cosette, and Gavroche, a Paris street child. The novel's central set piece is the republican rising of June 1832, when Paris insurgents threw up barricades in the streets and were defeated. Hugo had been in the city that week. Thirty years later, from an island he was not allowed to leave, he wrote the failed insurrection into the book that made his name a household word in languages he did not speak.

Nineteen years off the coast of France

Hugo was elected a deputy after the revolution of 1848 and expected the new republic to hold. On 2 December 1851 its president, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, seized full power in a coup and made himself the emperor Napoleon III. Hugo resisted in the streets for several days, then fled to Brussels. He moved to Jersey in August 1852 and, after being expelled from it in 1855, to Guernsey, where he stayed until the empire fell.

The exile produced his strongest work. Napoléon le Petit and Les Châtiments, published in 1853, are sustained attacks on the emperor; Les Contemplations followed in 1856, La Légende des siècles in 1859, and Les Misérables in 1862. Napoleon III's regime collapsed after the French defeat by Prussia at Sedan, and Hugo was back in Paris on 4 September 1870, the day the Third Republic was declared. He was elected a senator in 1876 and spent his last years as something close to a national institution, which is what made his death a state occasion.

Two million people, and the Panthéon

Hugo died in Paris on 22 May 1885, aged eighty-three. The bed he died in is now in the museum at the Place des Vosges. His funeral was held on 1 June, and the crowd that came out for it was estimated at around two million people — more than the population of Paris at the time. Photographs taken that day show the procession and the packed square at the entrance to the Panthéon.

The Panthéon had spent a century switching between being a church and being a mausoleum for national figures, and the argument was never settled. Hugo's funeral settled it: from 1885 the building kept its role as the resting place of the people France chooses to honour, and it has never gone back. The novelist Alexandre Dumas, who had died in 1870, was moved there in 2002. Hugo's own apartment became a museum through his friend and literary executor Paul Meurice, who gathered the collection, bought Juliette Drouet's papers and pictures for it, and gave the whole thing to the City of Paris in 1902. It opened at 6 Place des Vosges on 30 June 1903 and is still free to enter.