Les Misérables | Author Biography

As a novelist, poet, political activist, and painter, Victor Hugo was a central figure in the Romantic movement of nineteenth-century France. Both his family and his times influenced Hugo’s social views and politics, which included a deep concern with human rights, social injustice, and poverty as the root of evil. Born in Besançon, France, in 1802, Hugo grew up in the years of Napoleon Bonaparte’s empire. In 1815, the empire collapsed at the Battle of Waterloo, which Hugo describes in detail in Les Misérables, and a constitutional monarchy was established. His father was a...

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