Les miserables (Abridged) - Victor Hugo [8]
1874 Hugo publishes Quatrevingt-treize (Ninety-three), a historical novel about the counter-revolutionary rebellion in la Vendee, and events leading to the Reign of Terror in 1793. He provides nuanced portraits of both sides.
1876 Hugo is elected to the Senate.
1877 As senator, Hugo plays a leading role in preventing Marshal Marie Edmé MacMahon from becoming dictator of France. Because the monarchists have split their support among various claimants to the throne, the republicans achieve a working majority. The second volume of Hugo’s poetic history of the world, La Légende des siècles, appears.
1878 A stroke leaves Hugo incapable of composing additional literary works.
1880 After years of efforts, Hugo arranges amnesty for the Com munards, popular-front rebels in the Paris of 1871 opposed to surrender to the Prussians. Some 20,000 of them, including women and children, had been slaughtered by French government troops—more than the total of those guillotined during the Reign of Terror in 1793. Guy de Maupassant’s collected Contes (Stories) are published.
1881 On February 26, Hugo’s birthday, a national holiday is proclaimed, and 600,000 marchers pass his windows. The street where he lives is renamed L‘avenue Victor-Hugo.
1882 Hugo is reelected to the Senate. His play Torquemada (1869) is performed.
1883 Juliette Drouet, Hugo’s mistress since 1833, dies after a prolonged struggle with cancer. The final volume of Hugo’s poetic history of the world, La Légende des siècles, appears.
1885 Victor Hugo dies May 22. Two million mourners pass his coffin underneath the Arc de Triomphe. Hugo is entombed in the Panthéon, the first of a series of culture heroes and great leaders to be placed there. June 1 is declared a day of national mourning. Posthumous publications will enhance his reputation for decades—notably, the verse collections La Fin de Satan (The End of Satan, 1886), Toute la lyre (1888,1893), and Dieu (1891). His experimental plays, eventually published in a Pléïade edition as “Le Theatre en lib erté,” brilliantly anticipate the Theater of the Absurd in the 1950s.
1902 On the centenary of his birth, the French government opens the Maison de Victor Hugo museum in the apartment where he once lived on la place des Vosges.
1912- In collaboration with André Antoine, the director of the 1918 naturalistic Théatre-Libre, the filmmaker Albert Capellani, with the Pathé firm, produces a series of movies based on Hugo’s works: Les Misérables (1912), Marie Tudor (1912), Quatrevingt-treize (1914), and Les Travailleurs de la mer (1918).
1926 The Buddhist sect, Cao Dai, originates in Vietnam. It now has about 2,000 temples and several million followers worldwide. The worshipers venerate Hugo and his two sons, whom they believe, return to earth, reincarnated.
1975 François Truffaut’s film Adèle H., retelling the tragedy of Hugo’s second daughter, wins Le Grand Prix du Cinema Français.
1980 Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schoenberg create a rock-opera version of Les Misérables. Translated into English, the musical has been produced internationally more times than any other—Cats being the previous record holder.
1996 Walt Disney issues an animated, freely altered film version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, distinctive in its politically correct treatment of gypsies, women, and persons with disabilities.
INTRODUCTION
Background
Victor Hugo (1802—1885) was a child prodigy with a precocious vocation as a creative writer. He would excel in the novel, the essay, drama, and poetry. He became an instant celebrity when he received honorable mention in a poetry contest sponsored by the Académie Française in 1817. Concerning the construction of varied versification and stanzaic form, he would soon demonstrate a virtuosity that only Goethe and Shelley could rival in Europe. In 1819 and 1820 he received two annual prizes for odes submitted to the prestigious national contest, the Jeux Floraux in Toulouse. In the latter year he and his two older brothers founded a literary magazine, for which he