The Hunchback of Notre Dame is finished
On this day in 1831 Victor Hugo finishes writing Notre Dame de Paris also known as The Hunchback of Notre Dame.Distracted by other projects Hugo had continually postponed his deadlines for delivering the book to his publishers but once he sat down to write it he completed the novel in only four months.Hugo the son of one of Napoleons officers decided while still a teenager to become a writer.Although he studied law he also founded a literary review to which he and other emerging writers published their work.
In 1822 Hugo married his childhood sweetheart Adele Foucher and published his first volume of poetry which won him a pension from Louis XVIII.In 1823 Hugo published his first novel Han dIslande.His 1827 play Cromwell embraced the tenets of Romanticism which he laid out in the plays preface.The following year despite a contract to begin work on a novel called Notre Dame de Paris he set to work on two plays.
The first Marion de Lorme (1829) was censored for its candid portrayal of a courtesan.The second Hernani became the subject for a bitter and protracted debate between French Classicists and Romantics.In 1831 he finally finished Notre Dame de Paris.
In addition to promoting a Romantic aesthetic that would tolerate the imperfect and the grotesque the book also had a simpler agenda to increase appreciation of old Gothic structures which had become the object of vandalism and neglect.In the 1830s Hugo wrote numerous plays many created as vehicles for actress Juliette Drouet with whom Hugo was romantically connected starting in 1833.In 1841 Hugo was elected to the prestigious Acadamie Francaise but two years later he lost his beloved daughter and her husband when they were drowned in an accident.He expressed his profound grief in a poetry collection called Les Contemplations (1856).Hugo was forced to flee France when Napoleon III came to power He did not return for 20 years.
While in exile he completed Les Miserables (1862) which became a hit in France and abroad.He returned to Paris during the Franco-Prussian War and was hailed a national hero.Hugos writing spanned more than six decades and he was given a national funeral and buried in the Pantheon after his death in 1885.
