Victor Hugo
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49 free Victor Hugo trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Victor Hugo wrote Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, started a riot with a play, sat in three parliaments, spent 19 years in exile on Guernsey rather than forgive Napoleon III, drew 4,000 pictures, ate zoo animals during the siege of Paris and was carried to the Panthéon by a crowd of two million. He also kept a mistress for 50 years, coded his other affairs like Pepys and became a saint in a Vietnamese religion. These 49 questions cover the man and the work: his general father and the origin of prisoner 24601, the Chateaubriand vow, the Hernani premiere, the novels from Hans of Iceland to Ninety-Three, the Belgian publisher and the one-character telegram, Hauteville House, the Napoléon le Petit pamphlets, the campaigns against slavery and the scaffold, Liszt's one-finger piano lessons, Léopoldine, Juliette Drouet, the 1881 avenue renaming and the state funeral. Easy questions stick to the famous titles; the expert tier asks about pieuvre, Louise Bertin and the 740 Catholic attacks. Every answer is cited to a page we checked, with a short explanation so you learn something even when you miss. Play it solo or print it for a book-club night.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Who is the hero of Les Misérables?
Jean Valjean
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.
Q 02The success of an 1831 Hugo novel is credited with inspiring the restoration of which decaying Paris church?
Notre-Dame
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.
Q 03Hugo was born in which watchmaking city near Switzerland?
Besançon
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.
Q 04What was Hugo's father's profession?
General in Napoleon's army
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.
Q 05Prisoner number 24601 in Les Misérables is thought to encode the date of which event in Hugo's life?
His conception
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.
Q 06What ambition did the 14-year-old Hugo write in a notebook in 1816?
I shall be Chateaubriand or nothing
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.
Q 07In legend, why did the Académie française deny Hugo its 1817 poetry prize?
They refused to believe he was only 15
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.
Q 08Whom did Hugo marry in 1822?
Adèle Foucher
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.
Q 09Hugo's first book of poems won him a pension in 1822 because its odes took which political line?
Royalist
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.
Q 10Which 1830 Hugo play gave its name to a noisy theatre battle between Romantics and Classicists?
Hernani
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.
Q 11Which Verdi opera is based on Hugo's play Le roi s'amuse?
Rigoletto
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.
Q 12Which Russian novelist judged The Last Day of a Condemned Man the most truthful thing Hugo ever wrote?
Dostoevsky
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.
Q 13The permanent grin of the hero of Hugo's The Man Who Laughs inspired the look of which comic-book villain?
The Joker
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.
Q 21In Les Misérables, the hero carries the wounded Marius away from the barricade through which part of Paris?
The sewers
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.
Q 22Which 'Citizen King' made Hugo a peer of France in 1845?
Louis-Philippe
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.
Q 23After Louis Napoleon's coup of December 1851, Hugo fled France for which foreign city?
Brussels
Brussels. He slipped out of Paris on a night train disguised as a workman, carrying a passport in the name of Lanvin.
Q 14What is the name of the hunchbacked bell-ringer in Hugo's novel of medieval Paris?
Quasimodo
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.
Q 15Which battle does Hugo halt the plot of Les Misérables to describe across 19 chapters?
Waterloo
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.
Q 16In an unproven tale, what did Hugo send his publisher about Les Misérables?
A single question mark
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.
Q 17Which poet praised Les Misérables but privately called it "repulsive and inept"?
Baudelaire
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.
Q 18In Hugo's Toilers of the Sea, the hero Gilliatt fights for his life in a sea cave against which creature?
An octopus
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.
Q 19Which Paris street urchin in Les Misérables is shot while gathering cartridges for the barricade?
Gavroche
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.
Q 20Hugo's last novel, Ninety-Three, is set during which period?
The Reign of Terror
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.
Q 24On which Channel Island did Hugo spend the last fifteen years of his exile?
Guernsey
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.
Q 25Which home did Hugo buy in exile, later given by his heirs to Paris?
Hauteville House
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.
Q 26Why was Hugo expelled from Jersey in 1855?
For backing a paper that insulted Queen Victoria
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!'
Q 27What was the title of Hugo's famous pamphlet mocking Napoleon III?
Napoléon le Petit
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.
Q 28Why did Hugo refuse Napoleon III's 1859 amnesty?
It would have meant muting his criticism
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.
Q 29Which American abolitionist's life did Hugo plead with the US government to spare in 1859?
John Brown
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.
Q 30Hugo told the 1848 Assembly "You have overthrown the throne" and then made which demand?
Now overthrow the scaffold
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.