Victor Hugo

Victor-Marie Hugo, who lived from 26 February 1802 to 22 May 1885, was a French Romantic author, poet, essayist, playwright, journalist, human rights activist and politician whose most famous works, the novels The Hunchback of Notre-Dame and Les Miserables, made him one of the central figures of French literature, alongside acclaimed poetry collections such as Les Contemplations and La Legende des siecles; his play Cromwell and drama Hernani placed him at the forefront of the Romantic literary movement, and his works have since inspired music including the opera Rigoletto and the musicals Les Miserables and Notre-Dame de Paris. He also produced more than four thousand drawings in his lifetime and campaigned for social causes including the abolition of capital punishment and slavery. Though a committed royalist in his youth, Hugo's views shifted over the following decades into passionate support for republicanism, and he served in French politics as both deputy and senator, with his opposition to absolutism and his literary stature establishing him as a national hero; he died on 22 May 1885 at age eighty three and was given a state funeral at the Pantheon in Paris attended by more than two million people, the largest in French history.