Hugo, Victor (Marie)

French novelist, poet, and dramatist. The verse play Hernani (1830) firmly established Hugo as the leader of French Romanticism. This was the first of a series of dramas produced in the 1830s and early 1840s, including Le Roi s'amuse (1832) and Ruy Blas (1838). His melodramatic novels include Notre-Dame de Paris (1831), and Les Misérables (1862).

Hugo's position in French literature is important: he gave French Romanticism a peculiarly decorative character and kept the Romantic spirit alive in France for some 30 years after its apparent demise. His writing is notable for its vitality, wide scope, graceful lyrical power, rhetorical magnificence, the ability to express pathos, awe, and indignation; and the variety of style and skill displayed in his handling of metre and language. Despite a lack of humour and proportion, and an all-pervading egoism, Hugo remains a literary giant.