Some great events marked Hugo's early childhood. A few years before his birth, the Bourbon Dynasty was overthrown during the French Revolution. The First Republic rose and fell and the First French Empire rose under the rule of Napoléon Bonaparte. Napoléon became Emperor two years after Hugo's birth. The Bourbon Monarchy was restored when Hugo was 17. His parents had different political and religious views. Hugo's father was an officer. He ranked very high in Napoléon's army. He was an atheist republican and considered Napoléon a hero. His mother was an extreme Catholic Royalist. As Hugo's father was an officer, the family moved frequently. Victor Hugo learned a lot from these travels. He stayed in Naples and Rome for six months, before going back to Paris. He was only five at the time, but he remembered the trip well.
His mother, Sophie, went to Italy with her husband who was a governor of a province near Naples. They also went to Spain where Joseph governed three Spanish provinces. Sophie separated temporarily from her husband in 1803, as it was a difficult life. She settled in Paris. This meant she dominated Hugo's education. Therefore, Hugo's early work, mainly in poetry, show him praising monarchism and faith. The 1848 Revolution made Hugo rebel against his Catholic Royalist education. After that revolution, he preferred republicanism and freethought.
When he was young, Victor Hugo fell in love. He became secretly engaged to his childhood friend Adèle Foucher (1803-1868), against his mother's wishes.
He married Adèle in 1822, after his mother's death in 1821. Their first child, Léopold (born in 1823), died in infancy. Hugo had four other children called Léopoldine (28 August 1824), Charles (4 November 1826), François-Victor (28 October 1828) and Adèle (24 August 1830). Hugo published his first novel in 1823 ("Han d'Islande"). His second came three years later ("Bug-Jargal", 1826). He published five more volumes of poetry ("Les Orientales", 1829; "Les Feuilles d'automne", 1831; "Les Chants du crépuscule", 1835; "Les Voix intérieures", 1837; and "Les Rayons et les ombres", 1840) between 1829 and 1840. This helped his reputation as one of the greatest elegiac and lyric poets of his time.
The death of his oldest and favourite daughter, Léopoldine, made Hugo very sad. She died at the age of 19, in 1843. This was only shortly after her marriage. She drowned in the Seine at Villequier. Her heavy skirts pulled her down, when a boat overturned. Her husband died as he tried to save her. At the time; Victor Hugo was travelling with his mistress in the south of France. He learned about Léopoldine's death from a newspaper when he was sitting in a café. He describes his shock and grief in his poem "À Villequier":
<poem>
"Hélas ! vers le passé tournant un oeil d'envie,"
"Sans que rien ici-bas puisse m'en consoler,"
"Je regarde toujours ce moment de ma vie"
"Où je l'ai vue ouvrir son aile et s'envoler !"
"Je verrai cet instant jusqu'à ce que je meure,"
"L'instant, pleurs superflus !"
"Où je criai : L'enfant que j'avais tout à l'heure,"
"Quoi donc ! je ne l'ai plus !"
Alas! turning an envious eye towards the past,
unconsolable by anything on earth,
I keep looking at that moment of my life
when I saw her open her wings and fly away!
I will see that instant until I die,
that instant—too much for tears!
when I cried out: "The child that I had just now--
what! I don't have her any more!"
</poem>
After this, he wrote many poems about his daughter's life and death. One of his most famous poem is probably "Demain, dès l'aube". In this poem, he describes visiting her grave.
François-René de Chateaubriand, the famous Romantic writer, influenced Hugo during the early 1800s. When Hugo was young, he said he would be "Chateaubriand ou rien" (“Chateaubriand or nothing”). Many things Chateaubriand did, Hugo copied. First, he defended the cause of Romanticism. Then, he became involved in politics and supported Republicanism. Finally, he was forced into exile because of his political views. Hugo's passion and eloquence in his early work made him successful and famous at an early age. His first collection of poetry ("Odes et poésies diverses") was published in 1822. At the time, Hugo was only twenty years old. It earned him a "royal pension" (money from the king) from Louis XVIII. His poems were admired but it was his next collection, four years later in 1826 ("Odes et Ballades") which revealed Hugo to be a great poet.
Victor Hugo's first mature work of fiction appeared in 1829. It reflected his interest for society which appeared more often in his later work. "Le Dernier jour d'un condamné" ("The Last Day of a Condemned Man") had a big influence on later writers such as Albert Camus, Charles Dickens, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. "Claude Gueux" appeared in 1834. It is a documentary short story about a real-life murderer who had been executed in France. Hugo himself considered it to be a precursor to his great work on social injustice, "Les Misérables". But Hugo’s first successful novel "Notre-Dame de Paris" ("The Hunchback of Notre Dame"), which was published in 1831. It was quickly translated into other languages across Europe. One of the effects of the novel was to make the inhabitants of Paris restore the neglected Cathedral of Notre Dame, which was attracting thousands of tourists who had read the popular novel. The book also inspired a renewed appreciation for pre-renaissance buildings, which began to be actively preserved.
Hugo began planning a major novel about social misery and injustice as early as the 1830s, but it would take a full 17 years for "Les Misérables", to be realized and finally published in 1862. The author was acutely aware of the quality of the novel and publication of the work went to the highest bidder. The Belgian publishing house Lacroix and Verboeckhoven undertook a marketing campaign unusual for the time, issuing press releases about the work a full six months before the launch. It also initially published only the first part of the novel (“Fantine”), which was launched simultaneously in major cities. Installments of the book sold out within hours, and had enormous impact on French society. The critical establishment was generally hostile to the novel; Taine found it insincere, Barbey d'Aurevilly complained of its vulgarity, Flaubert found within it "neither truth nor greatness," the Goncourts lambasted its artificiality, and Baudelaire - despite giving favorable reviews in newspapers - castigated it in private as "tasteless and inept." "Les Misérables" proved popular enough with the masses that the issues it highlighted were soon on the agenda of the French National Assembly. Today the novel remains his most enduringly popular work. It is popular worldwide, has been adapted for cinema, television and stage shows.
The shortest correspondence in history is between Hugo and his publisher Hurst & Blackett in 1862. It is said Hugo was on vacation when Les Misérables (which is over 1200 pages) was published. He telegraphed the single-character message '?' to his publisher, who replied with a single '!'.
Hugo turned away from social or political issues in his next novel, "Les Travailleurs de la Mer" ("Toilers of the Sea"), published in 1866. Still, the book was well received, perhaps due to the earlier success of "Les Misérables". Dedicated to the channel island of Guernsey, where he spent fifteen years of exile, Hugo’s story about Man’s battle with the sea and the creatures in its depths, started an unusual trend in Paris: squids. From squid dishes and exhibitions, to squid hats and parties, Parisians became fascinated by these unusual sea creatures.