Where to Start with Victor Hugo: A Reading Guide

Victor Hugo (1802–1885) is the central figure of French Romantic literature — a poet, playwright, novelist, and political figure whose work spans most of the nineteenth century and whose novels Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame are among the most widely read in world history. His fiction is characterized by enormous scope (historical panoramas, vast casts of characters, sustained engagement with the social conditions of the poor), Gothic atmosphere (the medieval cathedral, the Paris sewers, the criminal underworld), and an explicit political engagement with the causes of democracy, the abolition of poverty, and the dignity of every human being. He spent nineteen years in exile under Napoleon III for his opposition to the Second Empire.

Where to Start: Les Misérables (1862)

The essential Hugo — and one of the most read novels in the history of world literature. Jean Valjean, a peasant who stole a loaf of bread for his sister’s starving children and then attempted to escape, has served nineteen years in the galleys by the time of his release in 1815. Society refuses to accept him; only a bishop treats him with dignity, and that bishop’s inexplicable generosity transforms him. Across the following decades — taking on new identities, becoming a successful businessman and mayor, adopting the orphan Cosette — he is pursued by Inspector Javert, who cannot accept that a man defined by his past can become someone different.

The novel takes in the Battle of Waterloo, the Convent of Petit-Picpus, the Paris sewers, and the barricades of the June Rebellion. Its digressions are Hugo’s argument that the social world — every aspect of it, from military strategy to sewage engineering — is the context within which individual moral choices are made. Magnificent in scope; genuinely moving in its characters; one of the great arguments in fiction for human dignity.

The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831)

Hugo’s most Gothic novel — and the book that established Notre-Dame cathedral as an icon of French civilization. Set in Paris in 1482, it follows Quasimodo, the deaf and deformed bell-ringer raised by the archdeacon Claude Frollo, whose life is transformed by his love for Esmeralda, a Romani street dancer. Frollo is also obsessed with Esmeralda, and when she refuses him his obsession becomes destruction — her destruction and, ultimately, his own.

The novel is Hugo’s fullest expression of his Romantic vision: the cathedral as a book in stone, the architecture of medieval Paris as a living civilization, and beauty and deformity as intertwined qualities that society assigns and withdraws arbitrarily. Its atmosphere is magnificent; its Gothic energy is completely sustained.

The Man Who Laughs (1869)

Hugo’s darkest and most savage novel — the story of Gwynplaine, an English child whose face was surgically mutilated by comprachicos (criminals who disfigured children for sale to fairs and circuses) to produce a permanent grinning rictus, and who grows up in eighteenth-century England as a fairground performer. His disfigurement — which makes crowds laugh no matter what he says or feels — is Hugo’s most direct metaphor for the way the aristocracy uses the poor: as entertainment, as raw material, as objects whose suffering can be made to seem comic.

Less widely read than Les Misérables and The Hunchback, but among Hugo’s most powerful political statements and his most original in form.

Reading Victor Hugo

Hugo’s fiction operates at the intersection of the political and the personal: his great characters — Jean Valjean, Quasimodo, Gwynplaine — are both fully human individuals and embodiments of his argument that society’s treatment of its poorest and most marginalized members reveals its true values. His prose is expansive and given to extended digressions; his scope is enormous; his emotional range — from broad comedy to genuine tragic grandeur — is unusual in the European tradition. Begin with Les Misérables for the most complete and most celebrated statement of his vision; read The Hunchback of Notre-Dame for the most Gothic atmosphere and the most concentrated narrative. Both repay the attention they require.