Les miserables (Abridged) - Victor Hugo [5]
THE WORLD OF VICTOR HUGO AND LES MISÉRABLES
1797 Hugo’s parents, Joseph-Léopold Hugo and Sophie Trébuchet, marry. They will have three sons: Abel (1798), Eugène (1800), and Victor-Marie (1802), who is born in Besançon on February 26. An officer in the army of Napoleon Bonaparte (Napoléon I), Léopold must travel constantly during Victor’s youth.
1803—Marital problems occur as Sophie cannot tolerate the transience
1812 of army life; finally, she settles in Paris with her three children. Both parents start extramarital affairs. The family travels to Corsica and Elba, where Léopold is stationed. He later commands the troops that will suppress freedom fighters in occupied Italy and Spain, sometimes nailing their severed heads above church doors.
1804 Napoleon proclaims himself Emperor of the French. Literary critic Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve is born.
1807 Léopold Hugo receives a post in Naples, where his family soon joins him.
1808 Léopold Hugo follows a cortege of Napoléon’s brother, Joseph, to Spain. Weary of travel, Sophie returns with her young sons to Paris, where she begins an affair with General Victor Lahorie, a conspirator against Napoleon.
1809 Napoleon promotes Major Hugo to general, and honors him with the title of count.
1810 The police arrest Lahorie in Mme Hugo’s house on December 30.
1811 Sophie journeys to Spain to save her marriage, but problems in the relationship persist. Leopold, knowing of his wife’s infidelity, asks for a divorce. Sophie and her sons return to Paris.
1812 General Lahorie is executed for plotting against Napoleon.
1814 Napoleon abdicates and is banished to the island of Elba.
1815 Napoléon is defeated at Waterloo, after “The Hundred Days” of his renewed reign following his secret return from exile. Louis XVIII returns to power, reinstating France’s monarchy.
1816 A marvelously gifted and precocious writer, Victor Hugo proclaims his ambition to rival François-René de Chateaubriand, the most famous Romantic author of his generation. Estranged from his father and influenced by his mother, a royalist by expediency, he skillfully curries favor with the conservative literary establishment and the King, whom he praises in odes.
1817 Hugo wins honorable mention in the national poetry contest sponsored by the l‘Académie française (the French Academy).
1818 Sophie and Léopold are legally separated (divorce was illegal in France between 1814 and 1886). Victor composes a first, brief version of his novel Bug-Jargal, an account of a slave revolt in the Caribbean after the French Revolution; this version will appear in 1820.
1819 Despite his mother’s wishes for a more ambitious union, Victor falls in love with—and secretly asks the hand of—his neighbor, Adèle Foucher. But as a minor, he cannot marry her without his mother’s consent, which is denied. The three Hugo brothers found a literary journal called Le Conservateur litteraire.
1820—Hugo writes over one hundred essays and more than twenty
1821 poems for Le Conservateur.
1821 Victor becomes friends with the famous priest Félicité de Lamennais, who preaches a socially committed Christianity. Victor’s mother dies on June 27. In July his father marries his mistress, Catherine Thomas. Victor becomes reconciled with his father, who does not oppose Victor’s marriage to Adèle.
1822 Granted a small pension by Louis XVIII for his first volume of Odes praising the monarchy, Victor marries Adèle Foucher on October 12. Eugène Hugo, who also loves her, has a psychotic breakdown at the wedding; he will never recover.
1823 Hugo publishes a pioneering historical novel, Han d‘Islande (sometimes translated as The Demon Dwarf), a bloodthirsty melodrama. He helps found the periodical La Muse française and attends weekly gatherings hosted by the then leader of the French Romantic movement, Charles Nodier (1780—1844).
1824 Hugo publishes the Nouvelles Odes. His first child, a daughter Léopoldine is born. Charles X assumes the throne, and Victor serves as the historian of the coronation.
1826 Odes et Ballades is published,