The Man Who Laughs

Victor-Marie Hugo (1802-1885) was a French poet, playwright, novelist, essayist, visual artist, statesman, human rights campaigner, and perhaps the most influential exponent of the Romantic movement in France. In France, Hugo's literary reputation rests primarily on his poetic and dramatic output and only secondarily on his novels. Among many volumes of poetry, Les Contemplations and La Légende des Siècles stand particularly high in critical esteem, and Hugo is sometimes identified as the greatest French poet. In the Englishspeaking world his best-known works are often the novels Les Misérables and Notre-Dame de Paris (translated into English as The Hunchback of Notre-Dame) (1899). Though extremely conservative in his youth, Hugo moved to the political left as the decades passed; he became a passionate supporter of republicanism, and his work touches upon most of the political and social issues and artistic trends of his time. He is buried in the Panthéon. Amongst his other works are: Napoleon the Little (1852), The Man Who Laughs (1869), The History of a Crime (1877), Poems (1888) and The Memoirs of Victor Hugo.