No stranger to revolution, having participated in the French Revolution of 1848, he felt that the Commune was ‘idiotic’, as he declared in his diary: Victor Hugo had conflicted feelings towards this revolution.

The commune was crushed after just two months by the French army, but several thinkers such as Karl Marx turned their thoughts towards the question of revolution. Barricades were built around the city of Paris and the ‘Communards’ formed their socialist government, founded on the principles set forth by Jean Pierre Proudhon. Street barricade during the Paris Communeįiercely patriotic and smarting under the humiliating reparations that Prussia had imposed on the nation-and which had been accepted by the newly elected leader of the French executive, Adolphe Thiers-working-class members of the French National Guard, along with their allies in the socialist movement, rose up against Thiers’s administration. His opposition to Napoleon III, however, meant that he was forced into exile (a fate which befell his fellow author and contemporary Eugene Sue the two men’s careers, in terms of their literary output, activism, and eventual exile were in fact very similar). He also turned politician and, as a member of the conservative-republican Parti de l’Ordre (referred to in English radical newspapers as the Party of Law and Order), was elected to the French legislative assembly in the late 1840s. Hugo began his career as a poet and novelist, publishing Notre Dame de Paris in 1833, and collections of poems such as Songs of Twilight (1835). By the time that Hugo had published Ninety-Three-his final novel-he had been witness to some of the defining events of nineteenth-century French history such as the French Revolution of 1848 and the coup d’état of Napoleon III in 1852. …So wrote Victor Hugo in Ninety-Three (1874). Thus the guillotine had a right to say to the tower: “I am thy daughter.”

Ninety-Three by Victor Hugo