49 Fun Facts About Victor Hugo

Who is the hero of Les Misérables?

Jean Valjean. Sent to the galleys for stealing a loaf of bread, he ends up serving 19 years because each failed escape adds to his sentence.

The success of an 1831 Hugo novel is credited with inspiring the restoration of which decaying Paris church?

Notre-Dame. Hugo wrote the novel partly as a plea to save France's crumbling Gothic buildings, and stopped the story for a whole chapter describing the cathedral.

Hugo was born in which watchmaking city near Switzerland?

Besançon. In a famous poem Hugo called it an 'old Spanish town' and pictured himself as a newborn so frail that everyone but his mother gave him up.

What was Hugo's father's profession?

General in Napoleon's army. Léopold Hugo's postings took the family to Elba, Naples and Madrid, so Victor spent his childhood being uprooted from Paris and brought back again.

Prisoner number 24601 in Les Misérables is thought to encode the date of which event in Hugo's life?

His conception. Born slightly premature in February 1802, Hugo always believed he had been conceived on 24 June 1801, which in digits reads 24-6-01.

What ambition did the 14-year-old Hugo write in a notebook in 1816?

I shall be Chateaubriand or nothing. Chateaubriand was then France's leading writer and the idol of its young, and Hugo followed him closely, as head of the Romantics and then into politics.

In legend, why did the Académie française deny Hugo its 1817 poetry prize?

They refused to believe he was only 15, or so the long-told story runs. The Academy's own report said that, if he truly was that age, the young poet deserved encouragement.

Whom did Hugo marry in 1822?

Adèle Foucher. The childhood friends were able to marry once his first book of odes brought him a pension of 1,000 francs a year.

Hugo's first book of poems won him a pension in 1822 because its odes took which political line?

Royalist. Raised on his mother's politics, the 20-year-old pleased King Louis XVIII with his odes, decades before he became the exiled voice of French republicanism.

Which 1830 Hugo play gave its name to a noisy theatre battle between Romantics and Classicists?

Hernani. Hugo refused the theatre's paid applauders and recruited his own army of young Romantics from the art studios to cheer down the classicists' hisses.

Which Verdi opera is based on Hugo's play Le roi s'amuse?

Rigoletto. Hugo's play was banned after one night in 1832 for its portrait of a debauched French king, so to get past the censors Verdi turned the king into an Italian duke.

Which Russian novelist judged The Last Day of a Condemned Man the most truthful thing Hugo ever wrote?

Dostoevsky. He knew the subject first-hand: as a young man he was sentenced to death, led out to be shot and reprieved only at the last moment.

The permanent grin of the hero of Hugo's The Man Who Laughs inspired the look of which comic-book villain?

The Joker. Batman's creators worked from a photograph of the actor Conrad Veidt playing Hugo's disfigured Gwynplaine in a 1928 silent film of the novel.

What is the name of the hunchbacked bell-ringer in Hugo's novel of medieval Paris?

Quasimodo. The priest who adopts the abandoned child names him, at least in part, after Quasimodo Sunday, the first Sunday after Easter, the day he was found.

Which battle does Hugo halt the plot of Les Misérables to describe across 19 chapters?

Waterloo. Hugo went to the battlefield in 1861 and finished the novel there, in a hotel room that looked out on the Lion's Mound.

In an unproven tale, what did Hugo send his publisher about Les Misérables?

A single question mark. The publisher is said to have answered with a single exclamation mark, an exchange often called the shortest correspondence on record.

Which poet praised Les Misérables but privately called it "repulsive and inept"?

Baudelaire. He told his mother in a letter that the book was 'immonde et inepte', and that his kind review showed he possessed the art of lying.

In Hugo's Toilers of the Sea, the hero Gilliatt fights for his life in a sea cave against which creature?

An octopus. Hugo called it by a Norman dialect word, pieuvre, and the novel's success made that the everyday French name for the animal.

Which Paris street urchin in Les Misérables is shot while gathering cartridges for the barricade?

Gavroche. He sings as he robs the dead soldiers of their cartridges under fire, and his name has become an everyday French word for a cheeky street kid.

Hugo's last novel, Ninety-Three, is set during which period?

The Reign of Terror. The title is the year 1793, and the novel ends with its young republican commander going to the guillotine for letting a rebel leader escape.

In Les Misérables, the hero carries the wounded Marius away from the barricade through which part of Paris?

The sewers. Hugo pauses the escape for a whole book on their history, arguing that Paris was flushing a fortune in fertiliser out to sea every year.

Which 'Citizen King' made Hugo a peer of France in 1845?

Louis-Philippe. The honour lasted three years: the 1848 revolution swept away both the king and the Chamber of Peers, and Hugo was elected to the new republic's Assembly instead.

After Louis Napoleon's coup of December 1851, Hugo fled France for which foreign city?

Brussels. He slipped out of Paris on a night train disguised as a workman, carrying a passport in the name of Lanvin.

On which Channel Island did Hugo spend the last fifteen years of his exile?

Guernsey. He stayed on by choice even after an 1859 amnesty would have let him go home, and dedicated his novel Toilers of the Sea to the island and its sailors.

Which home did Hugo buy in exile, later given by his heirs to Paris?

Hauteville House. Hugo bought it with the profits of a book of poems, partly because an exile who owned property was much harder to expel, and spent years decorating it himself.

Why was Hugo expelled from Jersey in 1855?

For backing a paper that insulted Queen Victoria. When the editors of the exiles' paper L'Homme were expelled for printing a letter that mocked her visit to Paris, Hugo signed a protest ending 'And now let them expel us!'

What was the title of Hugo's famous pamphlet mocking Napoleon III?

Napoléon le Petit. Hugo had already asked the Assembly whether France, having had Napoleon the Great, must now put up with Napoleon the Little, and the gibe became his title.

Why did Hugo refuse Napoleon III's 1859 amnesty?

It would have meant muting his criticism. 'When Liberty returns, I shall return,' he replied, and he kept his word, going home only when the Empire fell in 1870.

Which American abolitionist's life did Hugo plead with the US government to spare in 1859?

John Brown. In an open letter Hugo wrote that he knelt before the Stars and Stripes to plead for Brown's life, and warned that the execution would be an error that could shake American democracy.

Hugo told the 1848 Assembly "You have overthrown the throne" and then made which demand?

Now overthrow the scaffold. Hugo wanted the new republic to abolish the death penalty outright, but his motion was lost: that year it was ended only for political crimes.

What unusual food did Hugo eat during the 1870 Prussian siege?

Animals from the city zoo. The Jardin des Plantes sent him gifts of bear, deer and antelope, and when even horse ran out he noted that he was now 'eating the unknown'.

At an 1849 peace congress, Hugo predicted the continent would form what?

The United States of Europe. Deputies jeered when he used the phrase in parliament, but he held to it, and in 1870 he planted an acorn in his garden and named the oak for the union to come.

Hugo helped found a body that led to which international copyright treaty?

The Berne Convention. Hugo was founder and honorary president of the writers' association that campaigned for it from 1878, but he died the year before the treaty was signed in 1886.

What did Hugo answer when a census-taker asked in 1872 if he was a Catholic?

No. A Freethinker. He meant it: his will turned away the prayers of every religion and asked instead for a prayer from every soul, adding 'I believe in God'.

Which composer taught Hugo to play a song on the piano with one finger?

Franz Liszt. The great pianist was a friend who played Beethoven in Hugo's home, and Hugo joked in a letter that the lessons had got him as far as one finger.

Hugo described which composer as "a man of talent coupled with imbecility"?

Richard Wagner. Hugo wrote the verdict in a private notebook; Wagner, for his part, had greeted the 1870 siege of Paris, which Hugo sat through in the city, with a gloating farce.

Which actress won an Oscar as Fantine in the 2012 film of Hugo's Les Misérables?

Anne Hathaway. Her songs were recorded live on set, and she had her own hair cut off on camera for the scene in which Fantine sells hers.

Whose 1876 funeral heard Hugo's words 'I weep for a dead woman'?

George Sand. Hugo sent the speech to be read at her graveside; after 'and salute an immortal' it went on, 'I loved her, I admired her'.

Besides his writing, Hugo left some 4,000 works in which other art?

Drawing. Most are small ink washes made for family and friends, and he never exhibited them in his lifetime, leaving the collection to France's national library instead.

How did Hugo's eldest daughter, Léopoldine, die in 1843?

She drowned in the Seine. Her boat capsized soon after her wedding and her husband drowned with her; Hugo, away travelling, learned of it from a newspaper handed to him in a village café.

Who was Juliette Drouet?

Hugo's mistress of 50 years. An actress when they met in 1833, she gave up the stage for him, followed him into exile and wrote him more than 20,000 letters.

What happened when Hugo and Léonie d'Aunet were caught in adultery in 1845?

She was jailed, he was not. Hugo reminded the police that a peer of France could not be arrested and walked free, while she spent two months in prison and about six more in a convent.

Which director's 1975 film follows Hugo's youngest daughter chasing a British officer?

François Truffaut. She trailed the lieutenant who had rejected her to Canada and on to Barbados, and of Hugo's five children she alone outlived him.

What did Paris rename in Hugo's honour for his 80th year in 1881?

The avenue he lived on. That February a vast birthday parade had filed past his windows on the Avenue d'Eylau, and by July the street carried his name, so he was living at his own address.

Before his 1885 funeral, Hugo's coffin lay beneath which Paris monument?

The Arc de Triomphe. His will had asked for the hearse of the poor, so next day a pauper's hearse carried him across Paris at the head of a vast state procession.

With which two writers does Hugo share a crypt in the Panthéon?

Alexandre Dumas and Émile Zola. Zola joined Hugo in 1908 and Dumas only in 2002, when his coffin crossed Paris escorted by Republican Guards dressed as the Musketeers.

Hugo is a saint of Caodaism, a religion founded in which country?

Vietnam. The faith grew out of séances held by officials of the French colonial service, and it counts Hugo among its saints beside Joan of Arc and Sun Yat-sen.

What were the last words Hugo wrote, in a note left days before he died?

To love is to act. Dying of pneumonia soon afterwards, he is reported to have murmured one more line of verse: 'This is the battle between day and night.'

Which Beijing landmark's looting by French and British troops in 1860 did Hugo denounce in a famous letter?

The Old Summer Palace. 'One of the two bandits will be called France and the other England,' Hugo wrote, hoping France would one day send its plunder back to China.