text:
Pot

Pot may refer to:

Containers

 * Flowerpot, a container in which plants are cultivated
 * Pottery, ceramic ware made by potters
 * Pot, a type of cookware
 * Pot, a 285ml beer glass

Places

 * Ken Jones Aerodrome, IATA airport code POT
 * Palestinian Occupied Territories, the West Bank
 * Pontefract Tanshelf railway station, England; National Rail station code POT
 * Po Tat station, Hong Kong; MTR station code POT
 * Patterson Office Tower, a high-rise office building located at the University of Kentucky

People

 * Cor Pot (born 1951), Dutch football manager and player
 * Philippe Pot (1428–1493), Burgundian nobleman, military leader, and diplomat
 * Pol Pot (1925–1998), leader of the communist Khmer Rouge in Kampuchea or Cambodia

Art, entertainment, and media

 * Pot (novel), a 1981 novel by Nejc Zaplotnik
 * Pot (poker), the amount to be won in gambling
 * P.O.T., former Filipino rock band
 * "The Pot", a 2006 song by Tool

Computing and electronics

 * .pot, file extension for template files of gettext, the GNU localization software
 * .pot, file extension for Microsoft PowerPoint template files
 * Pot, a ceramic insulator supporting an electric conductor rail to provide electric traction power to trains
 * Potentiometer, a variable resistor, informally known as a "pot" or "trim pot"
 * POT, acronym for 'plain old telephone', a traditional phone as in plain old telephone service

Plants

 * Pot, a slang term for the drug cannabis (marijuana)
 * Pot., the abbreviation for the orchid genus × Potinara

Other uses

 * PotashCorp, stock symbol: POT
 * Pot belly, informally known as a "pot"
 * Fishing pot, a trap used for fishing.
 * Peaks over Threshold (POT), a method in extreme value theory in maths

title: Pot


text:
Historical fiction

Historical fiction is a literary genre in which a fictional plot takes place in the setting of particular real historical events. Although the term is commonly used as a synonym for historical fiction literature, it can also be applied to other types of narrative, including theatre, opera, cinema, and television, as well as video games and graphic novels. It often makes many use of symbolism in allegory using figurative and metaphorical elements to picture a story.

An essential element of historical fiction is that it is set in the past and pays attention to the manners, social conditions and other details of the depicted period. Authors also frequently choose to explore notable historical figures in these settings, allowing readers to better understand how these individuals might have responded to their environments. The historical romance usually seeks to romanticize eras of the past. Some subgenres such as alternate history and historical fantasy insert intentionally ahistorical or speculative elements into a novel.

Works of historical fiction are sometimes criticized for lack of authenticity because of readerly criticism or genre expectations for accurate period details. This tension between historical authenticity and fiction frequently becomes a point of comment for readers and popular critics, while scholarly criticism frequently goes beyond this commentary, investigating the genre for its other thematic and critical interests.

Historical fiction as a contemporary Western literary genre has its foundations in the early-19th-century works of Sir Walter Scott and his contemporaries in other national literatures such as the Frenchman Honoré de Balzac, the American James Fenimore Cooper, and later the Russian Leo Tolstoy. However, the melding of historical and fictional elements in individual works of literature has a long tradition in many cultures; both western traditions (as early as Ancient Greek and Latin literature) as well as Eastern, in the form of oral and folk traditions (see mythology and folklore), which produced epics, novels, plays and other fictional works describing history for contemporary audiences.

Introduction
Definitions differ as to what constitutes a historical novel. On the one hand the Historical Novel Society defines the genre as works "written at least fifty years after the events described", while critic Sarah Johnson delineates such novels as "set before the middle of the last [20th] century ... in which the author is writing from research rather than personal experience." Then again Lynda Adamson, in her preface to the bibliographic reference work World Historical Fiction, states that while a "generally accepted definition" for the historical novel is a novel "about a time period at least 25 years before it was written", she also suggests that some people read novels written in the past, like those of Jane Austen (1775–1817), as if they were historical novels.

Historical fiction sometimes encouraged movements of romantic nationalism. Walter Scott's Waverley novels created interest in Scottish history and still illuminate it. A series of novels by Józef Ignacy Kraszewski on the history of Poland popularized the country's history after it had lost its independence in the Partitions of Poland. Henryk Sienkiewicz wrote several immensely popular novels set in conflicts between the Poles and predatory Teutonic Knights, rebelling Cossacks and invading Swedes. He won the 1905 Nobel Prize in literature. He also wrote the popular novel Quo Vadis, which was about Nero's Rome and the early Christians and has been adapted several times for film, in 1913, 1924, 1951, 2001 to only name the most prominent. Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter fulfilled a similar function for Norwegian history; Undset later won a Nobel Prize for Literature (1928).

Many early historical novels played an important role in the rise of European popular interest in the history of the Middle Ages. Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre-Dame often receives credit for fueling the movement to preserve the Gothic architecture of France, leading to the establishment of the Monuments historiques, the French governmental authority for historic preservation. Rita Monaldi and Francesco Sorti's historical mystery saga Imprimateur Secretum Veritas Mysterium has increased interest in European history and features famous castrato opera singer Atto Melani as a detective and spy. Although the story itself is fiction, many of the persona and events are not. The book is based on research by Monaldi and Sorti, who researched information from 17th-century manuscripts and published works concerning the siege of Vienna, the plague and papacy of Pope Innocent XI.

The genre of the historical novel has also permitted some authors, such as the Polish novelist Bolesław Prus in his sole historical novel, Pharaoh, to distance themselves from their own time and place to gain perspective on society and on the human condition, or to escape the depredations of the censor.

In some historical novels, major historic events take place mostly off-stage, while the fictional characters inhabit the world where those events occur. Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped recounts mostly private adventures set against the backdrop of the Jacobite troubles in Scotland. Charles Dickens's Barnaby Rudge is set amid the Gordon Riots, and A Tale of Two Cities in the French Revolution.

In some works, the accuracy of the historical elements has been questioned, as in Alexandre Dumas' 1845 novel Queen Margot. Postmodern novelists such as John Barth and Thomas Pynchon operate with even more freedom, mixing historical characters and settings with invented history and fantasy, as in the novels The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) and Mason & Dixon (1997) respectively. A few writers create historical fiction without fictional characters. One example is the series Masters of Rome by Colleen McCullough.

History up to 17th century
Historical prose fiction has a long tradition in world literature. Three of the Four Classics of Chinese novels were set in the distant past: Shi Nai'an's 14th-century Water Margin concerns 12th-century outlaws; Luo Guanzhong's 14th-century Romance of the Three Kingdoms concerns 3rd-century wars which ended the Han dynasty; Wu Cheng'en's 16th-century Journey to the West concerns the 7th-century Buddhist pilgrim Xuanzang. In addition to those, there was a wealth of historical novels that became popular in the literary circles during the Ming and Qing periods in Chinese history; they include Feng Menglong's Dongzhou Lieguo Zhi (Chronicles of the Eastern Zhou Kingdoms), Chu Renhuo's Sui Tang yanyi (Romance of the Sui and Tang dynasties), Xiong Damu's Liang Song Nanbei Zhizhuan (Records of the Two Songs, South and North) and Quan han zhi zhuan, Yang Erzeng's Dong Xi Jin yan yi (Romance of the Eastern and Western Jin dynasties), and Qian Cai's The General Yue Fei, etc.

Classical Greek novelists were also "very fond of writing novels about people and places of the past". The Iliad has been described as historic fiction, since it treats historic events, although its genre is generally considered epic poetry. Pierre Vidal-Naquet has suggested that Plato laid the foundations for the historical novel through the myth of Atlantis contained in his dialogues Timaeus and Critias. The Tale of Genji (written before 1021) is a fictionalized account of Japanese court life about a century prior and its author asserted that her work could present a "fuller and therefore 'truer version of history.

One of the early examples of the historical novel in Europe is La Princesse de Clèves, a French novel published anonymously in March 1678. It is regarded by many as the beginning of the modern tradition of the psychological novel and as a great work. Its author generally is held to be Madame de La Fayette. The action takes place between October 1558 and November 1559 at the royal court of Henry II of France. The novel recreates that era with remarkable precision. Nearly every character – except the heroine – is a historical figure. Events and intrigues unfold with great faithfulness to documentary records. In the United Kingdom, the historical novel "appears to have developed" from La Princesse de Clèves, "and then via the Gothic novel". Another early example is The Unfortunate Traveller by Thomas Nashe, published in 1594 and set during the reign of King Henry VIII.

19th century
Historical fiction rose to prominence in Europe during the early 19th century as part of the Romantic reaction to the Enlightenment, especially through the influence of the Scottish writer Sir Walter Scott, whose works were immensely popular throughout Europe. Among his early European followers we can find Willibald Alexis, Theodor Fontane, Bernhard Severin Ingemann, Miklós Jósika, Mór Jókai, Jakob van Lennep, Demetrius Bikelos, Enrique Gil y Carrasco, Carl Jonas Love Almqvist, Victor Rydberg, Andreas Munch, Alessandro Manzoni, Alfred de Vigny, Honoré de Balzac or Prosper Mérimée. Jane Porter's 1803 novel Thaddeus of Warsaw is one of the earliest examples of the historical novel in English and went through at least 84 editions, including translation into French and German. The first true historical novel in English was in fact Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent (1800).

In the 20th century György Lukács argued that Scott was the first fiction writer who saw history not just as a convenient frame in which to stage a contemporary narrative, but rather as a distinct social and cultural setting. Scott's Scottish novels such as Waverley (1814) and Rob Roy (1817) focused upon a middling character who sits at the intersection of various social groups in order to explore the development of society through conflict. Ivanhoe (1820) gained credit for renewing interest in the Middle Ages.

Many well-known writers from the United Kingdom published historical novels in the mid 19th century, the most notable include Thackeray's Vanity Fair, Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, George Eliot's Romola, and Charles Kingsley's Westward Ho! and Hereward the Wake. The Trumpet-Major (1880) is Thomas Hardy's only historical novel, and is set in Weymouth during the Napoleonic wars, when the town was then anxious about the possibility of invasion by Napoleon.

In the United States, the first historical novelist was Samuel Woodworth, who wrote The Champions of American Freedom in 1816. James Fenimore Cooper was better known for his historical novels and was influenced by Scott. His most famous novel is The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757 (1826), the second book of the Leatherstocking Tales pentalogy. The Last of the Mohicans is set in 1757, during the French and Indian War (the Seven Years' War), when France and Great Britain battled for control of North America. Cooper's chief rival, John Neal, wrote Rachel Dyer (1828), the first bound novel about the 17th-century Salem witch trials. Rachel Dyer also influenced future American fiction set in this period, like The Scarlet Letter (1850) by Nathaniel Hawthorne which is one of the most famous 19th-century American historical novels. Set in 17th-century Puritan Boston, Massachusetts during the years 1642 to 1649, it tells the story of Hester Prynne, who conceives a daughter through an affair and struggles to create a new life of repentance and dignity. In French literature, the most prominent inheritor of Scott's style of the historical novel was Balzac. In 1829 Balzac published Les Chouans, a historical work in the manner of Sir Walter Scott. This was subsequently incorporated into La Comédie Humaine. The bulk of La Comédie Humaine, however, takes place during the Bourbon Restoration and the July Monarchy, though there are several novels which take place during the French Revolution and others which take place of in the Middle Ages or the Renaissance, including About Catherine de Medici and The Elixir of Long Life. Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831) furnishes another 19th-century example of the romantic-historical novel. Victor Hugo began writing The Hunchback of Notre-Dame in 1829, largely to make his contemporaries more aware of the value of the Gothic architecture, which was neglected and often destroyed to be replaced by new buildings, or defaced by replacement of parts of buildings in a newer style. The action takes place in 1482 and the title refers to the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, on which the story is centered. Alexandre Dumas also wrote several popular historical fiction novels, including The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers. George Saintsbury stated: "Monte Cristo is said to have been at its first appearance, and for some time subsequently, the most popular book in Europe." This popularity has extended into modern times as well. The book was "translated into virtually all modern languages and has never been out of print in most of them. There have been at least twenty-nine motion pictures based on it ... as well as several television series, and many movies [have] worked the name 'Monte Cristo' into their titles."

Tolstoy's War and Peace offers an example of 19th-century historical fiction used to critique contemporary history. Tolstoy read the standard histories available in Russian and French about the Napoleonic Wars, and used the novel to challenge those historical approaches. At the start of the novel's third volume, he describes his work as blurring the line between fiction and history, in order to get closer to the truth. The novel is set 60 years before it was composed, and alongside researching the war through primary and secondary sources, he spoke with people who had lived through war during the French invasion of Russia in 1812; thus, the book is also, in part, ethnography fictionalized.

The Charterhouse of Parma by Marie-Henri Beyle (Stendhal) is an epic retelling of the story of an Italian nobleman who lives through the Napoleonic period in Italian history. It includes a description of the Battle of Waterloo by the principal character. Stendhal fought with Napoleon and participated in the French invasion of Russia.

The Betrothed (1827) by Alessandro Manzoni has been called the most famous and widely read novel of the Italian language. The Betrothed was inspired by Walter Scott's Ivanhoe but, compared to its model, shows some innovations (two members of the lower class as principal characters, the past described without romantic idealization, an explicitly Christian message), somehow forerunning the realistic novel of the following decades. Set in northern Italy in 1628, during the oppressive years under Spanish rule, it is sometimes seen as a veiled attack on Austria, which controlled the region at the time the novel was written.

The critical and popular success of The Betrothed gave rise to a crowd of imitations and, in the age of unification, almost every Italian writer tried his hand at the genre; novels now almost forgotten, like Marco Visconti by Tommaso Grossi (Manzoni's best friend) or Ettore Fieramosca by Massimo D'Azeglio (Manzoni's son-in-law), were the best-sellers of their time. Many of these authors (like Niccolò Tommaseo, Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi and D'Azeglio himself) were patriots and politicians too, and in their novels, the veiled politic message of Manzoni became explicit (the hero of Ettore Fieramosca fights to defend the honor of the Italian soldiers, mocked by some arrogant Frenchmen). In them, the narrative talent not equaled the patriotic passion, and their novels, full of rhetoric and melodramatic excesses, are today barely readable as historical documents. A significant exception is The Confessions of an Italian by Ippolito Nievo, an epic about the Venetian republic's fall and the Napoleonic age, told with satiric irony and youthful brio (Nievo wrote it when he was 26 years old).

In Arabic literature, the Lebanese writer Jurji Zaydan (1861–1914) was the most prolific novelist of this genre. He wrote 23 historical novels between 1889 and 1914. His novels played an important in shaping the collective consciousness of modern Arabs during the Nahda period and educated them about their history. The Fleeing Mamluk (1891), The Captive of the Mahdi Pretender (1892), and Virgin of Quraish (1899) are some of his nineteenth-century historical novels.

Germany
A major 20th-century example of this genre is the German author Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks (1901). This chronicles the decline of a wealthy north German merchant family over the course of four generations, incidentally portraying the manner of life and mores of the Hanseatic bourgeoisie in the years from 1835 to 1877. Mann drew deeply from the history of his own family, the Mann family of Lübeck, and their milieu. This was Mann's first novel, and with the publication of the 2nd edition in 1903, Buddenbrooks became a major literary success. The work led to a Nobel Prize in Literature for Mann in 1929; although the Nobel award generally recognizes an author's body of work, the Swedish Academy's citation for Mann identified "his great novel Buddenbrooks" as the principal reason for his prize. Mann also wrote, between 1926 and 1943, a four-part novel Joseph and His Brothers. In it Mann retells the familiar biblical stories of Genesis, from Jacob to Joseph (chapters 27–50), setting it in the historical context of the reign of Akhenaten (1353–1336 BC) in ancient Egypt.

In the same era, Lion Feuchtwanger was one of the most popular and accomplished writers of historical novels, with publications between the 1920s and 1950s. His reputation began with the bestselling work, Jud Süß (1925), set in the eighteenth century, as well as historical novels written primarily in exile in France and California, including most prominently the Josephus trilogy set in Ancient Rome (1932 / 1935 / 1942), Goya (1951), and his novel Raquel: The Jewess of Toledo - set in Medieval Spain.

Britain
Robert Graves of Britain wrote several popular historical novels, including I, Claudius, King Jesus, The Golden Fleece and Count Belisarius. John Cowper Powys wrote two historical novels set in Wales, Owen Glendower (1941) and Porius (1951). The first deals with the rebellion of the Welsh Prince Owain Glyndŵr (AD 1400–16), while Porius takes place during the Dark Ages, in AD 499, just before the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain. Powys suggests parallels with these historical periods and Britain in the late 1930s and during World War II.

Other significant British novelists include Georgette Heyer, Naomi Mitchison and Mary Renault. Heyer essentially established the historical romance genre and its subgenre Regency romance, which was inspired by Jane Austen. To ensure accuracy, Heyer collected reference works and kept detailed notes on all aspects of Regency life. While some critics thought the novels were too detailed, others considered the level of detail to be Heyer's greatest asset; Heyer even recreated William the Conqueror's crossing into England for her novel The Conqueror. Naomi Mitchison's finest novel, The Corn King and the Spring Queen (1931), is regarded by some as the best historical novel of the 20th century. Mary Renault is best known for her historical novels set in Ancient Greece. In addition to fictional portrayals of Theseus, Socrates, Plato, Simonides of Ceos and Alexander the Great, she wrote a non-fiction biography of Alexander. The Siege of Krishnapur (1973) by J. G. Farrell has been described as an "outstanding novel". Inspired by events such as the sieges of Cawnpore and Lucknow, the book details the siege of a fictional Indian town, Krishnapur, during the Indian Rebellion of 1857 from the perspective of the town's British residents. The main characters find themselves subject to the increasing strictures and deprivation of the siege, and the absurdity of maintaining the British class system in a town no one can leave becomes a source of comic invention, though the text is serious in intent and tone.

In Welsh literature, the major contributor to the genre in Welsh is William Owen Roberts (b. 1960). His historical novels include Y Pla (1987), set at the time of the Black Death; Paradwys (2001), 18th century, concerning the slave trade; and Petrograd (2008) and Paris (2013), concerning the Russian revolution and its aftermath. Y Pla has been much translated, appearing in English as Pestilence, and Petrograd and Paris have also appeared in English. A contemporary of Roberts' working in English is Christopher Meredith (b. 1954), whose Griffri (1991) is set in the 12th century and has the poet of a minor Welsh prince as narrator.

Nobel Prize laureate William Golding wrote a number of historical novels. The Inheritors (1955) is set in prehistoric times, and shows "new people" (generally identified with Homo sapiens sapiens) triumphing over a gentler race (generally identified with Neanderthals) by deceit and violence. The Spire (1964) follows the building (and near collapse) of a huge spire onto a medieval cathedral (generally assumed to be Salisbury Cathedral); the spire symbolizing both spiritual aspiration and worldly vanity. The Scorpion God (1971) consists of three novellas, the first set in a prehistoric African hunter-gatherer band (Clonk, Clonk), the second in an ancient Egyptian court (The Scorpion God) and the third in the court of a Roman emperor (Envoy Extraordinary). The trilogy To the Ends of the Earth, which includes the Rites of Passage (1980), Close Quarters (1987), and Fire Down Below (1989), describes sea voyages in the early 19th century. Anthony Burgess also wrote several historical novels; his last novel, A Dead Man in Deptford, is about the murder of Christopher Marlowe in the 16th century.

Though the genre has evolved since its inception, the historical novel remains popular with authors and readers to this day and bestsellers include Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey–Maturin series, Ken Follett's Pillars of the Earth and Dorothy Dunnett's Lymond Chronicles. A development in British and Irish writing in the past 25 years has been a renewed interest in the First World War. Works include William Boyd's An Ice-Cream War; Sebastian Faulks' Birdsong and The Girl at the Lion d'Or (concerned with the War's consequences); Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy and Sebastian Barry's A Long Long Way.

United States
American Nobel laureate William Faulkner's novel Absalom, Absalom! (1936) is set before, during and after the American Civil War. Kenneth Roberts wrote several books set around the events of the American Revolution, of which Northwest Passage (1937), Oliver Wiswell (1940) and Lydia Bailey (1947) all became best-sellers in the 1930s and 1940s. The following American authors have also written historical novels in the 20th century: Gore Vidal, John Barth, Norman Mailer, E. L. Doctorow and William Kennedy. Thomas Pynchon's historical novel Mason & Dixon (1997) tells the story of the two English surveyors, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, who were charged with marking the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland in the 18th century. More recently there have been works such as Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle.

Italy
In Italy, the tradition of historical fiction has flourished in the modern age, the nineteenth century in particular having caught writers’ interests. Southern Italian novelists like Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (The Leopard), Francesco Iovine (Lady Ava), Carlo Alianello (The Heritage of the Prioress) and more recently Andrea Camilleri (The Preston Brewer) retold the events of the Italian Unification, at times overturning its traditionally heroic and progressive image. The conservative Riccardo Bacchelli in The Devil at the Long Point and the communist Vasco Pratolini in Metello described, from ideologically opposite points of view, the birth of Italian Socialism. Bacchelli also wrote The Mill on the Po, a patchwork saga of a family of millers from the time of Napoleon to the First World War, one of the most epic novels of the last century.

In 1980, Umberto Eco achieved international success with The Name of the Rose, a novel set in an Italian abbey in 1327 readable as a historical mystery, as an allegory of Italy during the Years of Lead, and as an erudite joke. Eco's work, like Manzoni's preceding it, relaunched Italian interest in historical fiction. Many novelists who till then had preferred the contemporary novel tried their hand at stories set in previous centuries. Among them were Fulvio Tomizza (The Evil Coming from North, about the Reformation), Dacia Maraini (The Silent Duchess, about the female condition in the eighteenth century), Sebastiano Vassalli (The Chimera, about a witch hunt), Ernesto Ferrero (N) and Valerio Manfredi (The Last Legion).

Bulgaria
Fani Popova–Mutafova (1902–1977) was a Bulgarian author who is considered by many to have been the best-selling Bulgarian historical fiction author ever. Her books sold in record numbers in the 1930s and the early 1940s. However, she was eventually sentenced to seven years of imprisonment by the Bulgarian communist regime because of some of her writings celebrating Hitler, and though released after only eleven months for health reasons, was forbidden to publish anything between 1943 and 1972. Stoyan Zagorchinov (1889–1969) also a Bulgarian writer, author of "Last Day, God's Day" trilogy and "Ivaylo", continuing the tradition in the Bulgarian historical novel, led by Ivan Vazov. Yana Yazova (1912–1974) also has several novels that can be considered historical as "Alexander of Macedon", her only novel on non-Bulgarian thematic, as well as her trilogy "Balkani". Vera Mutafchieva (1929–2009) is the author of historical novels which were translated into 11 languages. Anton Donchev (1930–) is an old living author, whose first independent novel, Samuel's Testimony, was published in 1961. His second book, Time of Parting, which dealt with the Islamization of the population in the Rhodopes during the XVII century was written in 1964. The novel was adapted in the serial movie "Time of Violence", divided into two parts with the subtitles ("The Threat" and "The Violence") by 1987 by the director Lyudmil Staykov. In June 2015, "Time of Violence" was chosen as the most beloved film of Bulgarian viewers in "Laced Shoes of Bulgarian Cinema", a large-scale consultation with the audience of Bulgarian National Television.

Scandinavia
One of the best known Scandinavian historical novels is Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter (1920–1922) set in medieval Norway. For this trilogy Undset was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1928. Johannes V. Jensen's trilogy Kongens fald (1900–1901, "The Fall of the King"), set in 16th century Denmark, has been called "the finest historical novel in Danish literature". The epic historical novel series Den lange rejse (1908–1921, "The Long Journey") is generally regarded as Jensen's masterpiece and he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1944 partly on the strength of it. The Finnish writer Mika Waltari is known for the historical novel The Egyptian (1945). Faroes–Danish writer William Heinesen wrote several historical novels, most notably Det gode håb (1964, "Fair Hope") set in the Faroe Islands in 17th century.

Historical fiction has long been a popular genre in Sweden, especially since the 1960s a huge number of historical novels has been written. Nobel laureates Eyvind Johnson and Pär Lagerkvist wrote acclaimed historical novels such as Return to Ithaca (1946) and Barabbas (1950). Vilhelm Moberg's Ride This Night (1941) is set in 16th century Småland and his widely read novel series The Emigrants tells the story of Småland emigrants to the United States in the 19th century. Per Anders Fogelström wrote a hugely popular series of five historical novels set in his native Stockholm beginning with City of My Dreams (1960). Other writers of historical fiction in Swedish literature include Sara Lidman, Birgitta Trotzig, Per Olov Enquist and Artur Lundkvist.

Latin America
The historical novel was quite popular in 20th century Latin American literature, including works such as The Kingdom of This World (1949) by Alejo Carpentier, I, the Supreme (1974) by Augusto Roa Bastos, Terra Nostra (1975) by Carlos Fuentes, News from the Empire (1987) by Fernando del Paso, The Lightning of August (1964) by Jorge Ibargüengoitia, The War of the End of the World (1981) by Mario Vargas Llosa and The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975) by Gabriel García Marquez. Other writers of historical fiction include Abel Posse, Antonio Benitez Rojo, João Ubaldo Ribeiro, Jorge Amado, Homero Aridjis.

21st century
In the first decades of the 21st century, an increased interest for historical fiction has been noted. One of the most successful writers of historical novels is Hilary Mantel. Other writers of historical fiction include Philippa Gregory, Bernard Cornwell, Sarah Waters, Ken Follett, George Saunders, Shirley Hazzard and Julie Orringer. The historical novel The Books of Jacob set in 18th century Poland has been praised as the magnum opus by the 2018 Nobel Prize laureate Olga Tokarczuk.

Documentary fiction
A 20th-century variant of the historical novel is documentary fiction, which incorporates "not only historical characters and events, but also reports of everyday events" found in contemporary newspapers. Examples of this variant form of historical novel include U.S.A. (1938), and Ragtime (1975) by E.L. Doctorow.

Fictional biographies
Memoirs of Hadrian by the Belgian-born French writer Marguerite Yourcenar is about the life and death of Roman Emperor Hadrian. First published in France in French in 1951 as Mémoires d'Hadrien, the book was an immediate success, meeting with enormous critical acclaim. Margaret George has written fictional biographies about historical persons in The Memoirs of Cleopatra (1997) and Mary, called Magdalene (2002). An earlier example is Peter I (1929–34) by Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy, and I, Claudius (1934) and King Jesus (1946) by Robert Graves. Other recent biographical novel series, include Conqueror and Emperor by Conn Iggulden and Cicero Trilogy by Robert Harris.

Gothic fiction
The gothic novel was popular in the late eighteenth century. Set in the historical past it has an interest in the mysterious, terrifying and haunting. Horace Walpole's 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto is considered to be an influential work.

Historical mysteries
Historical mysteries or "historical whodunits" are set by their authors in the distant past, with a plot that which involves the solving of a mystery or crime (usually murder). Though works combining these genres have existed since at least the early 1900s, many credit Ellis Peters's Cadfael Chronicles (1977–1994) with popularizing them. These are set between 1137 and 1145 A.D. The increasing popularity of this type of fiction in subsequent decades has created a distinct subgenre recognized by both publishers and libraries.

Historical romance and family sagas
Romantic themes have also been portrayed, such as Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak and Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell. One of the first popular historical romances appeared in 1921, when Georgette Heyer published The Black Moth, which is set in 1751. It was not until 1935 that she wrote the first of her signature Regency novels, set around the English Regency period (1811–1820), when the Prince Regent ruled England in place of his ill father, George III. Heyer's Regency novels were inspired by Jane Austen's novels of the late 18th and early 19th century. Because Heyer's writing was set in the midst of events that had occurred over 100 years previously, she included authentic period detail in order for her readers to understand. Where Heyer referred to historical events, it was as background detail to set the period, and did not usually play a key role in the narrative. Heyer's characters often contained more modern-day sensibilities, and more conventional characters in the novels would point out the heroine's eccentricities, such as wanting to marry for love.

Nautical and pirate fiction
Some historical novels explore life at sea, including C. S. Forester's Hornblower series, Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey–Maturin series, Alexander Kent's The Bolitho novels, Dudley Pope's Lord Ramage's series, all of which all deal with the Napoleonic Wars. There are also adventure novels with pirate characters like Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island (1883), Emilio Salgari's Sandokan (1895–1913) and Captain Blood (1922) by Rafael Sabatini. Recent examples of historical novels about pirates are The Adventures of Hector Lynch by Tim Severin, The White Devil (Белият Дявол) by Hristo Kalchev and The Pirate Devlin novels by Mark Keating.

Alternative history and historical fantasy
A number of work take place in variants of known history, in which events had occurred differently. This can involve time travel. There are also works of historical fantasy, which add fantastical elements to known (or alternative) history or which take place in second worlds with a close resemblance to our own world at various points in history.

Historiographic metafiction
Historiographic metafiction combines historical fiction with metafiction. The term is closely associated with postmodern literature including writers such as Salman Rushdie and Thomas Pynchon.

Several novels by Nobel Prize laureate José Saramago are set in historical times including Baltasar and Blimunda, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ and The History of the Siege of Lisbon. In a parallel plot set in the 12th and 20th century where history and fiction are constantly overlapping, the latter novel questions the reliability of historical sources and deals with the difference of writing history and fiction.

Children's historical fiction
A prominent subgenre within historical fiction is the children's historical novel. Often following a pedagogical bent, children's historical fiction may follow the conventions of many of the other subgenres of historical fiction. A number of such works include elements of historical fantasy or time travel to facilitate the transition between the contemporary world and the past in the tradition of children's portal fiction. Sometimes publishers will commission series of historical novels that explore different periods and times. Among the most popular contemporary series include the American Girl novels and the Magic Tree House series. A prominent award within children's historical fiction is the Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction.

Comics and graphic novels
Historical narratives have also found their way in comics and graphic novels. There are Prehistorical elements in jungle comics like Akim and Rahan. Ancient Greece inspired graphic novels are 300 created by Frank Miller, centered around Battle of Thermopylae, and Age of Bronze series by Eric Shanower, that retells Trojan War. Historical subjects can also be found in manhua comics like Three Kingdoms and Sun Zi's Tactics by Lee Chi Ching, Weapons of the Gods by Wong Yuk Long as well as The Ravages of Time by Chan Mou. There are also straight Samurai manga series like Path of the Assassin, Vagabond, Rurouni Kenshin and Azumi. Several comics and graphic novels have been produced into anime series or a movie adaptations like Azumi and 300.

Period drama films and television series
Historical drama film stories are based upon historical events and famous people. Some historical dramas are docudramas, which attempt an accurate portrayal of a historical event or biography, to the degree that the available historical research will allow. Other historical dramas are fictionalized tales that are based on an actual person and their deeds, such as Braveheart, which is loosely based on the 13th-century knight William Wallace's fight for Scotland's independence. For films pertaining to the history of East Asia, Central Asia, and South Asia, there are historical drama films set in Asia, also known as Jidaigeki in Japan. Wuxia films like The Hidden Power of the Dragon Sabre (1984) and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), based on novels by Jin Yong and Wang Dulu, have also been produced. Zhang Yimou has directed several acclaimed wuxia films like Hero (2002), House of Flying Daggers (2004) and Curse of the Golden Flower (2006). Although largely fictional some wuxia films are considered historical drama. Samurai films like Zatoichi and Lone Wolf and Cub series also fall under historical drama umbrella. Peplum films also known as sword-and-sandal, is a genre of largely Italian-made historical or biblical epics (costume dramas) that dominated the Italian film industry from 1958 to 1965. Most pepla featured a superhumanly strong man as the protagonist, such as Hercules, Samson, Goliath, Ursus or Italy's own popular folk hero Maciste. These supermen often rescued captive princesses from tyrannical despots and fought mythological creatures. Not all the films were fantasy-based, however. Many featured actual historical personalities such as Julius Caesar, Cleopatra, and Hannibal, although great liberties were taken with the storylines. Gladiators, pirates, knights, Vikings, and slaves rebelling against tyrannical kings were also popular subjects. There are also films based on Medieval narratives like Ridley Scott's historical epics Robin Hood (2010) and Kingdom of Heaven (2005) and the subgenred films based on the Arthurian legend such as Pendragon: Sword of His Father (2008) and King Arthur (2004).

Many historical narratives have been expanded into television series. Notable ancient history inspired TV series include: Rome, Spartacus, Egypt, The Last Kingdom and I Claudius. Tudor England is also a very prominent subject in television series like The Tudors, The Virgin Queen and Elizabeth I. Programs about the Napoleonic Wars have also been produced, like Sharpe and Hornblower. Historical soap operas have also been popular, including the Turkish TV series The Magnificent Century and Once Upon A Time In The Ottoman Empire: Rebellion. Chinese studios have also produced television series like The Legend and the Hero, its sequel series, King's War and The Qin Empire. There have also been produced pure Wuxia television series, many based on works by Jin Yong like Condor Trilogy and Swordsman, also Lu Xiaofeng and Chu Liuxiang by Gu Long. They have been very popular in China, but largely unnoticed in Western media.

History plays
History is one of the three main genres in Western theatre alongside tragedy and comedy, although it originated, in its modern form, thousands of years later than the other primary genres. For this reason, it is often treated as a subset of tragedy. A play in this genre is known as a history play and is based on a historical narrative, often set in the medieval or early modern past. History emerged as a distinct genre from tragedy in Renaissance England. The best known examples of the genre are the history plays written by William Shakespeare, whose plays still serve to define the genre. Shakespeare wrote numerous history plays, some included in the First Folio as histories, and other listed as tragedies, or Roman plays. Among the most famous histories are Richard III, and Henry IV, Part 1, Henry IV, Part 2, and Henry V. Other plays that feature historical characters, are the tragedy Macbeth, set in the mid-11th century during the reigns of Duncan I of Scotland and Edward the Confessor, and the Roman plays Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, and Antony and Cleopatra. Another tragedy King Lear, is based on British legend, as is the romanc Cymbeline, King of Britain, which is set in Ancient Britain.

Other playwrights contemporary to Shakespeare, such as Christopher Marlowe, also dramatized historical topics. Marlowe wrote Edward the Second which deals with the deposition of King Edward II by his barons and the Queen, who resent the undue influence the king's favourites have in court and state affairs, and The Massacre at Paris, which dramatizes the events of the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre in France in 1572. Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great (1587 or 1588) is a play in two parts, loosely based on the life of the Central Asian emperor, Timur "the lame".

History plays also appear elsewhere in other western literature. The German authors Goethe and Schiller wrote a number of historical plays, including Goethe's Egmont (1788), which is set in the 16th century, and is heavily influenced by Shakespearean tragedy, and Schiller's Mary Stuart, which depicts the last days of Mary, Queen of Scots (1800). This play formed the basis for Donizetti's opera Maria Stuarda (1834). Beethoven wrote incidental music for Egmont.

Later Irish author George Bernard Shaw wrote several histories, including Caesar and Cleopatra (1898) and Saint Joan, which based on the life and trial of Joan of Arc. Published in 1924, not long after the canonization of Joan of Arc by the Roman Catholic Church, the play dramatises what is known of her life based on the substantial records of her trial. One of the most famous 20th-century history plays is The Life of Galileo by Bertolt Brecht which dramatises the latter period of the life of Galileo Galilei, the great Italian natural philosopher, who was persecuted by the Roman Catholic Church for the promulgation of his scientific discoveries; for details, see Galileo affair. The play embraces such themes as the conflict between dogmatism and scientific evidence, as well as interrogating the values of constancy in the face of oppression.

More recently British dramatist Howard Brenton has written several histories. He gained notoriety for his play The Romans in Britain, first staged at the National Theatre in October 1980, which drew parallels between the Roman invasion of Britain in 54BC and the contemporary British military presence in Northern Ireland. Its concerns with politics were, however, overshadowed by controversy surrounding a rape scene. Brenton also wrote Anne Boleyn a play on the life of Anne Boleyn, which premiered at Shakespeare's Globe in 2010. Anne Boleyn is portrayed as a significant force in the political and religious in-fighting at court and a furtherer of the cause of Protestantism in her enthusiasm for the Tyndale Bible.

Opera
One of the first operas to use historical events and people is Claudio Monteverdi's L'incoronazione di Poppea, which was first performed in Venice during the 1643 carnival season. it describes how Poppaea, mistress of the Roman emperor Nero, is able to achieve her ambition and be crowned empress. The opera was revived in Naples in 1651, but was then neglected until the rediscovery of the score in 1888, after which it became the subject of scholarly attention in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Since the 1960s, the opera has been performed and recorded many times. George Frederick Handel also wrote several operas based on historical characters, including Giulio Cesare (1724), Tamerlano (1724) and Rodelinda (1725).

Historical subjects for operas also developed during the 19th century. Usually with 4 or 5 acts, they are large-scale casts and orchestras, and spectacular staging. Several operas by Gaspare Spontini, Luigi Cherubini, and Gioachino Rossini can be regarded as precursors to French grand opera. These include Spontini's La vestale (1807) and Fernand Cortez (1809, revised 1817), Cherubini's Les Abencérages (1813), and Rossini's Le siège de Corinthe (1827) and Moïse et Pharaon (1828). All of these have some of the characteristics of size and spectacle that are normally associated with French grand opera. Another important forerunner was Il crociato in Egitto by Meyerbeer, who eventually became the acknowledged king of the grand opera genre. Amongst the most important opera composers on historical topics are Giuseppe Verdi, and Richard Wagner.

Russian composers also wrote operas based on historical figures, including Boris Godunov by Modest Mussorgsky (1839–1881), which was composed between 1868 and 1873, and is considered his masterpiece. Its subjects are the Russian ruler Boris Godunov, who reigned as Tsar (1598 to 1605). Equally famous is Alexander Borodin's Prince Igor, the libretto for which the composer developed from the Ancient Russian epic The Lay of Igor's Host, which recounts the campaign of Rus prince Igor Svyatoslavich against the invading Cuman ("Polovtsian") tribes in 1185.

Historical reenactment
Historical reenactment is an educational or entertainment activity in which people follow a plan to recreate aspects of a historical event or period. This may be as narrow as a specific moment from a battle, such as the reenactment of Pickett's Charge presented during the Great Reunion of 1913, or as broad as an entire period, such as Regency reenactment or The 1920s Berlin Project.

Theory and criticism
The Marxist literary critic, essayist, and social theorist György Lukács wrote extensively on the aesthetic and political significance of the historical novel. In 1937's Der historische Roman, published originally in Russian, Lukács developed critical readings of several historical novels by various authors, including Gottfried Keller, Charles Dickens, and Gustave Flaubert. He interprets the advent of the "genuinely" historical novel at the beginning of the 19th century in terms of two developments, or processes. The first is the development of a specific genre in a specific medium—the historical novel's unique stylistic and narrative elements. The second is the development of a representative, organic artwork that can capture the fractures, contradictions, and problems of the particular productive mode of its time (i.e., developing, early, entrenched capitalism).

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Talk:Revolution

Semi-protected edit request on 1 April 2023
The image in the quick preview of any link that redirects to this page has an image of a fly feeding on faeces. This is clearly an act of vandalism and the quick preview image should be one that is appropriate to the topic, i.e. the Delacroix painting that appears on the article itself. 2001:818:C413:E700:F1C6:DE21:2B7D:1F3C (talk) 19:22, 1 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Pictogram voting wait blue.svg In progress: An editor is implementing the requested edit. Known issue, is being worked on. It's unclear what exactly is happening, but the important people who understand this stuff know about it :) Actualcpscm (talk) 20:00, 1 April 2023 (UTC)

Geography
Motions of the earth 117.223.244.177 (talk) 13:34, 1 August 2023 (UTC)

Merge proposal
I propose merging Social Revolution into Revolution. As the two articles are structured, there is no difference in how revolution is understood and defined. If there are nuanced differences, then those differences can be fleshed out in Revolution. As it stands, the existing of two separate articles leads to duplicated content and worse article quality. Thenightaway (talk) 17:29, 28 January 2024 (UTC)
 * Oppose — "Social revolution" is a specific classification within revolution studies in fields such as history and philosophy. Revolutions do not always bring changes in societal structures or systems. If anything, the definition in the lead of this article (Revolution) should be more general initially and then describe specific classifications like social revolution. Social revolution is not "different" from revolution; social revolution is a type of revolution. Yue 🌙 21:02, 29 January 2024 (UTC)
 * Oppose. The article isn't great, but social revolutions are a distinct and notable enough concept to require an independent article. The term "social revolution" gets no less than 234,000 hits on Google Scholar. --Grnrchst (talk) 17:39, 31 January 2024 (UTC)
 * Oppose — If we look to the International Encyclopedia of Political Science, for the entry on "Revolutions" we find "social revolutions" referred to multiple times as specific and unique form of revolutions that is an important area of research. We also find "social revolutions" come up specifically in the entries for "Terrorist groups", "Communist parties", "Comparative methods", "Democracy", "Feminist movements", and "Marxism". So it is evidently viewed as an important and distinct form of revolution by multiple leading academics, this along with Grnrchst's point show how it is something worthy of it's own article on Wikipedia, even if the current article is lacking. --Cdjp1 (talk) 21:20, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

title: Talk:Revolution


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Victor Hugo

Victor-Marie Hugo, vicomte Hugo (26 February 1802 – 22 May 1885), sometimes nicknamed the Ocean Man, was a French Romantic writer and politician. During a literary career that spanned more than sixty years, he wrote in a variety of genres and forms.

His most famous works are the novels The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831) and Les Misérables (1862). In France, Hugo is renowned for his poetry collections, such as Les Contemplations (The Contemplations) and La Légende des siècles (The Legend of the Ages). Hugo was at the forefront of the Romantic literary movement with his play Cromwell and drama Hernani. Many of his works have inspired music, both during his lifetime and after his death, including the opera Rigoletto and the musicals Les Misérables and Notre-Dame de Paris. He produced more than 4,000 drawings in his lifetime, and campaigned for social causes such as the abolition of capital punishment and slavery.

Although he was a committed royalist when young, Hugo's views changed as the decades passed, and he became a passionate supporter of republicanism, serving in politics as both deputy and senator. His work touched upon most of the political and social issues and the artistic trends of his time. His opposition to absolutism, and his literary stature, established him as a national hero. Hugo died on 22 May 1885, aged 83. He was given a state funeral in the Panthéon of Paris, which was attended by over 2 million people, the largest in French history.

Early life
Victor-Marie Hugo was born on 26 February 1802 in Besançon in Eastern France. He was the youngest son of Joseph Léopold Sigisbert Hugo (1774–1828), a general in the Napoleonic army, and Sophie Trébuchet (1772–1821). The couple had two other sons: Abel Joseph (1798–1855) and Eugène (1800–1837). The Hugo family came from Nancy in Lorraine, where Hugo's grandfather was a wood merchant. Léopold enlisted in the army of Revolutionary France at fourteen. He was an atheist and an ardent supporter of the Republic. Hugo's mother Sophie was loyal to the deposed dynasty but would declare her children to be Protestants. They met in Châteaubriant in 1796 and married the following year.

Since Hugo's father was an officer in Napoleon's army, the family moved frequently from posting to posting. Léopold Hugo wrote to his son that he had been conceived on one of the highest peaks in the Vosges Mountains, on a journey from Lunéville to Besançon. "This elevated origin," he went on, "seems to have had effects on you so that your muse is now continually sublime." Hugo believed himself to have been conceived on 24 June 1801, which is the origin of Jean Valjean's prisoner number 24601.

In 1810, Hugo's father was made Count Hugo de Cogolludo y Sigüenza by then King of Spain Joseph Bonaparte, though it seems that the Spanish title was not legally recognized in France. Hugo later titled himself as a viscount, and it was as "Vicomte Victor Hugo" that he was appointed a peer of France on 13 April 1845.

Weary of the constant moving required by military life, Sophie separated temporarily from Léopold and settled in Paris in 1803 with her sons. There, she began seeing General Victor Fanneau de La Horie, Hugo's godfather, who had been a comrade of General Hugo's during the campaign in Vendee. In October 1807, the family rejoined Leopold, now Colonel Hugo, Governor of the province of Avellino. There, Hugo was taught mathematics by Giuseppe de Samuele Cagnazzi, elder brother of Italian scientist Luca de Samuele Cagnazzi. Sophie found out that Leopold had been living in secret with an Englishwoman called Catherine Thomas.

Soon, Hugo's father was called to Spain to fight the Peninsular War. Madame Hugo and her children were sent back to Paris in 1808, where they moved to an old convent, 12 Impasse des Feuillantines, an isolated mansion in a deserted quarter of the left bank of the Seine. Hiding in a chapel at the back of the garden was de La Horie, who had conspired to restore the Bourbons and been condemned to death a few years earlier. He became a mentor to Hugo and his brothers.

In 1811, the family joined their father in Spain. Hugo and his brothers were sent to school in Madrid at the Real Colegio de San Antonio de Abad while Sophie returned to Paris on her own, now officially separated from her husband. In 1812, as the Peninsular War was turning against France, de La Horie was arrested and executed. In February 1815, Hugo and Eugène were taken away from their mother and placed by their father in the Pension Cordier, a private boarding school in Paris, where Hugo and Eugène remained for three years while also attending lectures at Lycée Louis le Grand.

On 10 July 1816, Hugo wrote in his diary: "I shall be Chateaubriand or nothing." In 1817, he wrote a poem for a competition organised by the Academie Française, for which he received an honorable mention. The Academicians refused to believe that he was only fifteen. Hugo moved in with his mother to 18 rue des Petits-Augustins the following year and began attending law school. Hugo fell in love and secretly became engaged, against his mother's wishes, to his childhood friend Adèle Foucher. In June 1821, Sophie Trebuchet died, and Léopold married his long-time mistress Catherine Thomas a month later. Hugo married Adèle the following year. In 1819, Hugo and his brothers began publishing a periodical called Le Conservateur littéraire.

Career
Hugo published his first novel (Hans of Iceland, 1823) the year following his marriage, and his second three years later (Bug-Jargal, 1826). Between 1829 and 1840, he published five more volumes of poetry: Les Orientales, 1829; Les Feuilles d'automne, 1831; Les Chants du crépuscule, 1835; Les Voix intérieures, 1837; and Les Rayons et les Ombres, 1840. This cemented his reputation as one of the greatest elegiac and lyric poets of his time.

Like many young writers of his generation, Hugo was profoundly influenced by François-René de Chateaubriand, the famous figure in the literary movement of Romanticism and France's pre-eminent literary figure during the early 19th century. In his youth, Hugo resolved to be "Chateaubriand or nothing", and his life would come to parallel that of his predecessor in many ways. Like Chateaubriand, Hugo furthered the cause of Romanticism, became involved in politics (though mostly as a champion of Republicanism), and was forced into exile due to his political stances. Along with Chateaubriand he attended the Coronation of Charles X in Reims in 1825.

The precocious passion and eloquence of Hugo's early work brought success and fame at an early age. His first collection of poetry (Odes et poésies diverses) was published in 1822 when he was only 20 years old and earned him a royal pension from Louis XVIII. Though the poems were admired for their spontaneous fervor and fluency, the collection that followed four years later in 1826 (Odes et Ballades) revealed Hugo to be a great poet, a natural master of lyric and creative song. Victor Hugo's first mature work of fiction was published in February 1829 by Charles Gosselin without the author's name and reflected the acute social conscience that would infuse his later work. Le Dernier jour d'un condamné (The Last Day of a Condemned Man) would have a profound influence on later writers such as Albert Camus, Charles Dickens, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Claude Gueux, a documentary short story about a real-life murderer who had been executed in France, was published in 1834. Hugo himself later considered it to be a precursor to his great work on social injustice, Les Misérables.

Hugo became the figurehead of the Romantic literary movement with the plays Cromwell (1827) and Hernani (1830). Hernani announced the arrival of French romanticism: performed at the Comédie-Française, it was greeted with several nights of rioting as romantics and traditionalists clashed over the play's deliberate disregard for neo-classical rules. Hugo's popularity as a playwright grew with subsequent plays, such as Marion Delorme (1831), Le roi s'amuse (1832), and Ruy Blas (1838). Hugo's novel Notre-Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre-Dame) was published in 1831 and quickly translated into other languages across Europe. One of the effects of the novel was to shame the City of Paris into restoring the much neglected Cathedral of Notre Dame, which was attracting thousands of tourists who had read the popular novel.

Hugo began planning a major novel about social misery and injustice as early as the 1830s, but a full 17 years were needed for Les Misérables to be realised and finally published in 1862. Hugo had previously used the departure of prisoners for the Bagne of Toulon in Le Dernier Jour d'un condamné. He went to Toulon to visit the Bagne in 1839 and took extensive notes, though he did not start writing the book until 1845. On one of the pages of his notes about the prison, he wrote in large block letters a possible name for his hero: "JEAN TRÉJEAN". When the book was finally written, Tréjean became Jean Valjean.

Hugo was acutely aware of the quality of the novel, as evidenced in a letter he wrote to his publisher, Albert Lacroix, on 23 March 1862: "My conviction is that this book is going to be one of the peaks, if not the crowning point of my work." Publication of Les Misérables went to the highest bidder. The Belgian publishing house Lacroix and Verboeckhoven undertook a marketing campaign unusual for the time, issuing press releases about the work a full six months before the launch. It also initially published only the first part of the novel ("Fantine"), which was launched simultaneously in major cities. Installments of the book sold out within hours and had an enormous impact on French society. The critical establishment was generally hostile to the novel; Taine found it insincere, Barbey d'Aurevilly complained of its vulgarity, Gustave Flaubert found within it "neither truth nor greatness", the Goncourt brothers lambasted its artificiality, and Baudelaire—despite giving favourable reviews in newspapers—castigated it in private as "repulsive and inept". However, Les Misérables proved popular enough with the masses that the issues it highlighted were soon on the agenda of the National Assembly of France. Today, the novel remains his best-known work. It is popular worldwide and has been adapted for cinema, television, and stage shows.

An apocryphal tale has circulated, describing the shortest correspondence in history as having been between Hugo and his publisher Hurst and Blackett in 1862. Hugo was on vacation when Les Misérables was published. He queried the reaction to the work by sending a single-character telegram to his publisher, asking ?. The publisher replied with a single ! to indicate its success. Hugo turned away from social/political issues in his next novel, Les Travailleurs de la Mer (Toilers of the Sea), published in 1866. The book was well received, perhaps due to the previous success of Les Misérables. Dedicated to the channel island of Guernsey, where Hugo spent 15 years of exile, the novel tells of a man who attempts to win the approval of his beloved's father by rescuing his ship, intentionally marooned by its captain who hopes to escape with a treasure of money it is transporting, through an exhausting battle of human engineering against the force of the sea and an almost mythical beast of the sea, a giant squid. Superficially an adventure, one of Hugo's biographers calls it a "metaphor for the 19th century–technical progress, creative genius and hard work overcoming the immanent evil of the material world."

The word used in Guernsey to refer to squid (pieuvre, also sometimes applied to octopus) was to enter the French language as a result of its use in the book. Hugo returned to political and social issues in his next novel, L'Homme Qui Rit (The Man Who Laughs), which was published in 1869 and painted a critical picture of the aristocracy. The novel was not as successful as his previous efforts, and Hugo himself began to comment on the growing distance between himself and literary contemporaries such as Flaubert and Émile Zola, whose realist and naturalist novels were now exceeding the popularity of his own work.

His last novel, Quatre-vingt-treize (Ninety-Three), published in 1874, dealt with a subject that Hugo had previously avoided: the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution. Though Hugo's popularity was on the decline at the time of its publication, many now consider Ninety-Three to be a work on par with Hugo's better-known novels.

Political life and exile
After three unsuccessful attempts, Hugo was finally elected to the Académie française in 1841, solidifying his position in the world of French arts and letters. A group of French academicians, particularly Étienne de Jouy, were fighting against the "romantic evolution" and had managed to delay Victor Hugo's election. Thereafter, he became increasingly involved in French politics.

On the nomination of King Louis-Philippe, Hugo entered the Upper Chamber of Parliament as a pair de France in 1845, where he spoke against the death penalty and social injustice, and in favour of freedom of the press and self-government for Poland.

In 1848, Hugo was elected to the National Assembly of the Second Republic as a conservative. In 1849, he broke with the conservatives when he gave a noted speech calling for the end of misery and poverty. Other speeches called for universal suffrage and free education for all children. Hugo's advocacy to abolish the death penalty was renowned internationally.

When Louis Napoleon (Napoleon III) seized complete power in 1851, establishing an anti-parliamentary constitution, Hugo openly declared him a traitor to France. He moved to Brussels, then Jersey, from which he was expelled for supporting a Jersey newspaper that had criticised Queen Victoria. He finally settled with his family at Hauteville House in Saint Peter Port, Guernsey, where he would live in exile from October 1855 until 1870.

While in exile, Hugo published his famous political pamphlets against Napoleon III, Napoléon le Petit and Histoire d'un crime. The pamphlets were banned in France but nonetheless had a strong impact there. He also composed or published some of his best work during his period in Guernsey, including Les Misérables, and three widely praised collections of poetry (Les Châtiments, 1853; Les Contemplations, 1856; and La Légende des siècles, 1859).

However, Víctor Hugo said in Les Misérables:

"The wretched moral character of Thénardier, the frustrated bourgeois, was hopeless; it was in America what it had been in Europe. Contact with a wicked man is sometimes enough to rot a good deed and cause something bad to come out of it. With Marius's money, Thénardier became a slave trader."

Like most of his contemporaries, Hugo justified colonialism in terms of a civilizing mission and putting an end to the slave trade on the Barbary coast. In a speech delivered on 18 May 1879, during a banquet to celebrate the abolition of slavery, in the presence of the French abolitionist writer and parliamentarian Victor Schœlcher, Hugo declared that the Mediterranean Sea formed a natural divide between "ultimate civilisation and ... utter barbarism." Hugo declared that "God offers Africa to Europe. Take it" and "in the nineteenth century the white man made a man out of the black, in the twentieth century Europe will make a world out of Africa".

This might partly explain why in spite of his deep interest and involvement in political matters he remained silent on the Algerian issue. He knew about the atrocities committed by the French Army during the French conquest of Algeria as evidenced by his diary but he never denounced them publicly; however, in Les Misérables, Hugo wrote: "Algeria too harshly conquered, and, as in the case of India by the English, with more barbarism than civilization."

After coming in contact with Victor Schœlcher, a writer who fought for the abolition of slavery and French colonialism in the Caribbean, he started strongly campaigning against slavery. In a letter to American abolitionist Maria Weston Chapman, on 6 July 1851, Hugo wrote: "Slavery in the United States! It is the duty of this republic to set such a bad example no longer.... The United States must renounce slavery, or they must renounce liberty." In 1859, he wrote a letter asking the United States government, for the sake of their own reputation in the future, to spare abolitionist John Brown's life, Hugo justified Brown's actions by these words: "Assuredly, if insurrection is ever a sacred duty, it must be when it is directed against Slavery." Hugo agreed to diffuse and sell one of his best known drawings, "Le Pendu", an homage to John Brown, so one could "keep alive in souls the memory of this liberator of our black brothers, of this heroic martyr John Brown, who died for Christ just as Christ."Only one slave on Earth is enough to dishonour the freedom of all men. So the abolition of slavery is, at this hour, the supreme goal of the thinkers."

As a novelist, diarist, and member of Parliament, Victor Hugo fought a lifelong battle for the abolition of the death penalty. The Last Day of a Condemned Man published in 1829 analyses the pangs of a man awaiting execution; several entries in Things Seen (Choses vues), the diary he kept between 1830 and 1885, convey his firm condemnation of what he regarded as a barbaric sentence; on 15 September 1848, seven months after the Revolution of 1848, he delivered a speech before the Assembly and concluded, "You have overthrown the throne. ... Now overthrow the scaffold." His influence was credited in the removal of the death penalty from the constitutions of Geneva, Portugal, and Colombia. He had also pleaded for Benito Juárez to spare the recently captured emperor Maximilian I of Mexico, but to no avail.

Although Napoleon III granted an amnesty to all political exiles in 1859, Hugo declined, as it meant he would have to curtail his criticisms of the government. It was only after Napoleon III fell from power and the Third Republic was proclaimed that Hugo finally returned to his homeland in 1870, where he was promptly elected to the National Assembly and the Senate.

He was in Paris during the siege by the Prussian Army in 1870, famously eating animals given to him by the Paris Zoo. As the siege continued, and food became ever more scarce, he wrote in his diary that he was reduced to "eating the unknown".

During the Paris Commune—the revolutionary government that took power on 18 March 1871 and was toppled on 28 May—Victor Hugo was harshly critical of the atrocities committed on both sides. On 9 April, he wrote in his diary, "In short, this Commune is as idiotic as the National Assembly is ferocious. From both sides, folly." Yet he made a point of offering his support to members of the Commune subjected to brutal repression. He had been in Brussels since 22 March 1871 when in the 27 May issue of the Belgian newspaper l’Indépendance Victor Hugo denounced the government's refusal to grant political asylum to the Communards threatened with imprisonment, banishment or execution. This caused so much uproar that in the evening a mob of fifty to sixty men attempted to force their way into the writer's house shouting, "Death to Victor Hugo! Hang him! Death to the scoundrel!"

Hugo, who said "A war between Europeans is a civil war," was an enthusiastic advocate for the creation of the United States of Europe. He expounded his views on the subject in a speech he delivered during the International Peace Congress which took place in Paris in 1849.

Because of his concern for the rights of artists and copyright, he was a founding member of the Association Littéraire et Artistique Internationale, which led to the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works. However, in Pauvert's published archives, he states strongly that "any work of art has two authors: the people who confusingly feel something, a creator who translates these feelings, and the people again who consecrate his vision of that feeling. When one of the authors dies, the rights should totally be granted back to the other, the people." He was one of the earlier supporters of the concept of domaine public payant, under which a nominal fee would be charged for copying or performing works in the public domain, and this would go into a common fund dedicated to helping artists, especially young people.

Religious views
Hugo's religious views changed radically over the course of his life. In his youth and under the influence of his mother, he identified as a Catholic and professed respect for Church hierarchy and authority. From there he became a non-practising Catholic and increasingly expressed anti-Catholic and anti-clerical views. He frequented spiritism during his exile (where he participated also in many séances conducted by Madame Delphine de Girardin) and in later years settled into a rationalist deism similar to that espoused by Voltaire. A census-taker asked Hugo in 1872 if he was a Catholic, and he replied, "No. A Freethinker."

After 1872, Hugo never lost his antipathy towards the Catholic Church. He felt the Church was indifferent to the plight of the working class under the oppression of the monarchy. Perhaps he also was upset by the frequency with which his work appeared on the Church's list of banned books. Hugo counted 740 attacks on Les Misérables in the Catholic press. When Hugo's sons Charles and François-Victor died, he insisted that they be buried without a crucifix or priest. In his will, he made the same stipulation about his own death and funeral.

Yet he believed in life after death and prayed every single morning and night, convinced as he wrote in The Man Who Laughs that "Thanksgiving has wings and flies to its right destination. Your prayer knows its way better than you do."

Hugo's rationalism can be found in poems such as Torquemada (1869, about religious fanaticism), The Pope (1878, anti-clerical), Religions and Religion (1880, denying the usefulness of churches) and, published posthumously, The End of Satan and God (1886 and 1891 respectively, in which he represents Christianity as a griffin and rationalism as an angel). 'The Hunchback of Notre-Dame' also garnered attention due to its portrayal of the abuse of power by the church, even getting listed as one of the 'forbidden books' by it. In fact, earlier adaptations had to change the villain, Claude Frollo from being a priest to avoid backlash.

Vincent van Gogh ascribed the saying "Religions pass away, but God remains," actually by Jules Michelet, to Hugo.

Relationship with music
Although Hugo's many talents did not include exceptional musical ability, he nevertheless had a great impact on the music world through the inspiration that his works provided for composers of the 19th and 20th centuries. Hugo himself particularly enjoyed the music of Gluck, Mozart, Weber and Meyerbeer. In Les Misérables, he calls the huntsman's chorus in Weber's Euryanthe, "perhaps the most beautiful piece of music ever composed". He also greatly admired Beethoven and, rather unusually for his time, appreciated works by composers from earlier centuries such as Palestrina and Monteverdi.

Two famous musicians of the 19th century were friends of Hugo: Hector Berlioz and Franz Liszt. The latter played Beethoven in Hugo's home, and Hugo joked in a letter to a friend that, thanks to Liszt's piano lessons, he learned how to play a favourite song on the piano – with only one finger. Hugo also worked with composer Louise Bertin, writing the libretto for her 1836 opera La Esmeralda, which was based on the character in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Although for various reasons the opera closed soon after its fifth performance and is little known today, it has enjoyed a modern revival, both in a piano/song concert version by Liszt at the Festival international Victor Hugo et Égaux 2007 and in a full orchestral version presented in July 2008 at Le Festival de Radio France et Montpellier Languedoc-Roussillon. He was also on friendly terms with Frederic Chopin. He introduced him to George Sand who would be his lover for years. In 1849, Hugo attended Chopins funeral.

On the other hand, he had low esteem for Richard Wagner, whom he described as "a man of talent coupled with imbecility."

Well over one thousand musical compositions have been inspired by Hugo's works from the 19th century until the present day. In particular, Hugo's plays, in which he rejected the rules of classical theatre in favour of romantic drama, attracted the interest of many composers who adapted them into operas. More than one hundred operas are based on Hugo's works and among them are Donizetti's Lucrezia Borgia (1833), Verdi's Rigoletto (1851) and Ernani (1844), and Ponchielli 's La Gioconda (1876).

Hugo's novels, as well as his plays, have been a great source of inspiration for musicians, stirring them to create not only opera and ballet but musical theatre such as Notre-Dame de Paris and the ever-popular Les Misérables, London West End's longest running musical. Additionally, Hugo's poems have attracted an exceptional amount of interest from musicians, and numerous melodies have been based on his poetry by composers such as Berlioz, Bizet, Fauré, Franck, Lalo, Liszt, Massenet, Saint-Saëns, Rachmaninoff, and Wagner.

Today, Hugo's work continues to stimulate musicians to create new compositions. For example, Hugo's novel against capital punishment, The Last Day of a Condemned Man, was adapted into an opera by David Alagna, with a libretto by Frédérico Alagna and premièred by their brother, tenor Roberto Alagna, in 2007. In Guernsey, every two years, the Victor Hugo International Music Festival attracts a wide range of musicians and the premiere of songs specially commissioned from such composers as Guillaume Connesson, Richard Dubugnon, Olivier Kaspar, and Thierry Escaich and based on Hugo's poetry.

Remarkably, not only has Hugo's literary production been the source of inspiration for musical works, but also his political writings have received attention from musicians and have been adapted to music. For instance, in 2009, Italian composer Matteo Sommacal was commissioned by Festival "Bagliori d'autore" and wrote a piece for speaker and chamber ensemble entitled Actes et paroles, with a text elaborated by Chiara Piola Caselli after Victor Hugo's last political speech addressed to the Assemblée législative, "Sur la Revision de la Constitution" (18 July 1851), and premiered in Rome on 19 November 2009, in the auditorium of the Institut français, Centre Saint-Louis, French Embassy to the Holy See, by Piccola Accademia degli Specchi featuring the composer Matthias Kadar.

Declining years and death
When Hugo returned to Paris in 1870, the country hailed him as a national hero. He was confident that he would be offered the dictatorship, as shown by the notes he kept at the time: "Dictatorship is a crime. This is a crime I am going to commit," but he felt he had to assume that responsibility. Despite his popularity, Hugo lost his bid for re-election to the National Assembly in 1872.

Throughout his life Hugo kept believing in unstoppable humanistic progress. In his last public address on 3 August 1879 he prophesied, in an over-optimistic way, "In the twentieth century war will be dead, the scaffold will be dead, hatred will be dead, frontier boundaries will be dead, dogmas will be dead; man will live."

Within a brief period, he suffered a mild stroke, his daughter Adèle was interned in an insane asylum, and his two sons died. (Adèle's biography inspired the movie The Story of Adele H.) His wife Adèle had died in 1868.

His faithful mistress, Juliette Drouet, died in 1883, only two years before his own death. Despite his personal loss, Hugo remained committed to the cause of political change. On 30 January 1876, he was elected to the newly created Senate. This last phase of his political career was considered a failure. Hugo was a maverick and achieved little in the Senate. He suffered a mild stroke on 27 June 1878. To honour the fact that he was entering his 80th year, he received one of the greatest tributes to a living writer ever held. The celebrations began on 25 June 1881, when Hugo was presented with a Sèvres vase, the traditional gift for sovereigns. On 27 June, one of the largest parades in French history was held.

Marchers stretched from the Avenue d'Eylau, where the author was living, down the Champs-Élysées, and all the way to the centre of Paris. The paraders marched for six hours past Hugo as he sat at the window at his house. Every inch and detail of the event was for Hugo; the official guides even wore cornflowers as an allusion to Fantine's song in Les Misérables. On 28 June, the city of Paris changed the name of the Avenue d'Eylau to Avenue Victor-Hugo. Letters addressed to the author were from then on labelled "To Mister Victor Hugo, In his avenue, Paris". Two days before dying, he left a note with these last words: "To love is to act."

On 20 May 1885, le Petit Journal published the official medical bulletin on Hugo's health condition. "The illustrious patient" was fully conscious and aware that there was no hope for him. They also reported from a reliable source that at one point in the night he had whispered the following alexandrin, "En moi c’est le combat du jour et de la nuit."—"In me, this is the battle between day and night." Le Matin published a slightly different version: "Here is the battle between day and night." Hugo died on May 22, 1885, at 50 Avenue Victor Hugo (now number 124). His death, from pneumonia, generated intense national mourning. He was not only revered as a towering figure in literature, he was a statesman who shaped the Third Republic and democracy in France. All his life he remained a defender of liberty, equality and fraternity as well as an adamant champion of French culture. In 1877, aged 75, he wrote, "I am not one of these sweet-tempered old men. I am still exasperated and violent. I shout and I feel indignant and I cry. Woe to anyone who harms France! I do declare I will die a fanatic patriot." Although he had requested a pauper's funeral, by decree of President Jules Grévy he was awarded a state funeral, an event described by Nietzsche as a "veritable orgy of bad taste". More than two million people joined Hugo's funeral procession in Paris from the Arc de Triomphe to the Panthéon, where he was buried. He shares a crypt within the Panthéon with Alexandre Dumas and Émile Zola. Most large French towns and cities have a street or square named after him.

Hugo left five sentences as his last will, to be officially published:

" Je donne cinquante mille francs aux pauvres. Je veux être enterré dans leur corbillard. Je refuse l'oraison de toutes les Églises. Je demande une prière à toutes les âmes. Je crois en Dieu." " I leave 50,000 francs to the poor. I wish to be buried in their hearse. I refuse [funeral] orations from all Churches. I ask [for] a prayer to all souls. I believe in God."

Drawings
Hugo produced more than 4,000 drawings, with about 3,000 drawings still in existence. Originally pursued as a casual hobby, drawing became more important to Hugo shortly before his exile when he made the decision to stop writing to devote himself to politics. Drawing became his exclusive creative outlet between 1848 and 1851.

Hugo worked only on paper, and on a small scale; usually in dark brown or black pen-and-ink wash, sometimes with touches of white, and rarely with colour.

Marriage
Hugo married Adèle Foucher in October 1822. Despite their respective affairs, they lived together for nearly 46 years until she died in August 1868. Hugo, who was still banished from France, was unable to attend her funeral in Villequier, where their daughter Léopoldine was buried. From 1830 to 1837, Adèle had an affair with Charles-Augustin Sainte Beuve, a reviewer and writer.

Children
Adèle and Victor Hugo had their first child, Léopold, in 1823, but the boy died in infancy. On 28 August 1824, the couple's second child, Léopoldine, was born, followed by Charles on 4 November 1826, François-Victor on 28 October 1828, and Adèle on 28 July 1830.

Hugo's eldest and favourite daughter, Léopoldine, died in 1843 at the age of 19, shortly after her marriage to Charles Vacquerie. On 4 September, she drowned in the Seine at Villequier when the boat she was in overturned. Her young husband died trying to save her. The death left her father devastated; Hugo was travelling at the time, in the south of France, when he first learned about Léopoldine's death from a newspaper that he read in a café. He describes his shock and grief in his famous poem "À Villequier":

He wrote many poems afterward about his daughter's life and death. His most famous poem is "Demain, dès l'aube" (Tomorrow, at Dawn), in which he describes visiting her grave.

Exile
Hugo decided to live in exile after Napoleon III's coup d'état at the end of 1851. After leaving France, Hugo lived in Brussels briefly in 1851, and then moved to the Channel Islands, first to Jersey (1852–1855) and then to the smaller island of Guernsey in 1855, where he stayed until Napoleon III's fall from power in 1870. Although Napoleon III proclaimed a general amnesty in 1859, under which Hugo could have safely returned to France, the author stayed in exile, only returning when Napoleon III was removed from power by the creation of the French Third Republic in 1870, as a result of the French defeat at the Battle of Sedan in the Franco-Prussian War. After the Siege of Paris from 1870 to 1871, Hugo lived again in Guernsey from 1872 to 1873, and then finally returned to France for the remainder of his life. In 1871, after the death of his son Charles, Hugo took custody of his grandchildren Jeanne and Georges-Victor.

Juliette Drouet
From February 1833 until her death in 1883, Juliette Drouet devoted her whole life to Victor Hugo, who never married her even after his wife died in 1868. He took her on his numerous trips and she followed him in exile on Guernsey. There Hugo rented a house for her near Hauteville House, his family home. She wrote some 20,000 letters in which she expressed her passion or vented her jealousy on her womanizing lover. On 25 September 1870 during the Siege of Paris (19 September 1870 – 28 January 1871) Hugo feared the worst. He left his children a note reading as follows:

"J.D. She saved my life in December 1851. For me she underwent exile. Never has her soul forsaken mine. Let those who have loved me love her. Let those who have loved me respect her. She is my widow." V.H.

Léonie d’Aunet
For more than seven years, Léonie d’Aunet, who was a married woman, was involved in a love relationship with Hugo. Both were caught in adultery on 5 July 1845. Hugo, who had been a Member of the Chamber of Peers since April, avoided condemnation whereas his mistress had to spend two months in prison and six in a convent. Many years after their separation, Hugo made a point of supporting her financially.

Others
Hugo gave free rein to his sensuality until a few weeks before his death. He sought a wide variety of women of all ages, be they courtesans, actresses, prostitutes, admirers, servants or revolutionaries like Louise Michel for sexual activity. Both a graphomaniac and erotomaniac, he systematically reported his casual affairs using his own code, as Samuel Pepys did, to make sure they would remain secret. For instance, he resorted to Latin abbreviations (osc. for kisses) or to Spanish (Misma. Mismas cosas: The same. Same things). Homophones are frequent: Seins (Breasts) becomes Saint; Poële (Stove) actually refers to Poils (Pubic hair). Analogy also enabled him to conceal the real meaning: A woman's Suisses (Swiss) are her breasts—because Switzerland is renowned for its milk. After a rendezvous with a young woman named Laetitia he would write Joie (Happiness) in his diary. If he added t.n. (toute nue) he meant she stripped naked in front of him. The initials S.B. discovered in November 1875 may refer to Sarah Bernhardt.

Nicknames
Victor Hugo acquired several nicknames. The first one originated from his own description of Shakespeare in the introduction to his eponymous work. In this introduction to William Shakespeare (essay), he tried to delve into what constituted the genius of certain artists and described Shakespeare as an "Ocean Man": "There were indeed ocean men. [...] all of this could exist within a mind, and then that mind is called genius, and you have Aeschylus, you have Isaiah, you have Juvenal, you have Dante, you have Michelangelo, you have Shakespeare, and it is the same thing to gaze upon these souls or to gaze upon the Ocean."During his lifetime and in the 1870s, the expression to describe him entered popular culture. It was later adopted by authors and literary critics, including Joseph Serre, who identified it with an expression he himself coined. This nickname became widespread during the 20th century and was used by the National Library of France when organizing an exhibition about him. Since then, it has been frequently used in research and literary critics. Alongside "Ocean Man," the nickname "Horizon Man" was sometimes used during Hugo's lifetime as well. Finally, researchers and literary critics, such as Henri Meschonnic, proposed the nickname "Century Man" to refer to Victor Hugo.

Memorials
His legacy has been honored in many ways, including his portrait being placed on French currency.

The people of Guernsey erected a statue by sculptor Jean Boucher in Candie Gardens (Saint Peter Port) to commemorate his stay in the islands. The City of Paris has preserved his residences Hauteville House, Guernsey, and 6, Place des Vosges, Paris, as museums. The house where he stayed in Vianden, Luxembourg, in 1871 has also become a commemorative museum.

The Avenue Victor-Hugo in the 16th arrondissement of Paris bears Hugo's name and links the Place de l'Étoile to the vicinity of the Bois de Boulogne by way of the Place Victor-Hugo. This square is served by a Paris Métro stop also named in his honour. In the town of Béziers there is a main street, a school, hospital and several cafés named after Hugo, and a number of streets and avenues throughout France are named after him. The school Lycée Victor Hugo was founded in his town of birth, Besançon in France. Avenue Victor-Hugo, located in Shawinigan, Quebec, was named to honour him. A street in San Francisco, Hugo Street, is named for him. In the city of Avellino, Italy, Victor Hugo lived briefly stayed in what is now known as Il Palazzo Culturale when reuniting with his father, Leopold Sigisbert Hugo, in 1808. Hugo would later write about his brief stay here, quoting "C'était un palais de marbre..." ("It was a palace of marble").

There is a statue of Hugo across from the Museo Carlo Bilotti in Rome, Italy.

Victor Hugo is the namesake of the city of Hugoton, Kansas.

In Havana, Cuba, there is a park named after him. A bust of Hugo stands near the entrance of the Old Summer Palace in Beijing.

A mosaic commemorating Hugo is located on the ceiling of the Thomas Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress.

The London and North Western Railway named a 'Prince of Wales' Class 4-6-0 No 1134 after Hugo. British Railways perpetuated this memorial, naming Class 92 Electric Unit 92001 after him.

Hugo is venerated as a saint in the Vietnamese religion of Cao Đài, a new religion established in Vietnam in 1926.

A crater on the planet Mercury is named after him.

Prose fiction

 * Hans of Iceland (Han d'Islande – novella - 1820, novel - 1823, revised until 1833)
 * Bug-Jargal (short story – 1820, novel – 1826)
 * The Last Day of a Condemned Man (Le Dernier jour d'un condamné – 1829) - prototype for Les Misérables
 * The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (Notre-Dame de Paris – 1831, definitive unabridged edition: 1832)
 * La Esmeralda (the only libretto of an opera written by Victor Hugo himself) (1836) – the ending was altered for the play
 * Claude Gueux (1834) - prototype for Les Misérables
 * The Rhine (Le Rhin'' – 1842) - also contains essays and a political manifesto
 * The Poor People (1854) - short story included in La Légende des siècles, later rewritten or retold by Leo Tolstoy in Russian (1908)
 * Les Misérables (1862) - mega-novel, initially begun as Les Misères. 7 chapters from Book 7 of Part 3 were excised by Albert Lacroix at the time of publication. None of the English translations include the excised chapters but some French editions include them as Appendix or in Notes.
 * Les Misères (1845-48) - 2 draft versions of Les Misérables - not yet translated into English but available online in French
 * Toilers of the Sea (Les Travailleurs de la Mer – 1866)
 * The Man Who Laughs ( L'Homme qui rit – 1869)
 * Ninety-Three (Quatrevingt-treize – 1874)

Other works published during Hugo's lifetime

 * Cromwell, preface only (1819)
 * Odes et poésies diverses (1822)
 * Odes (1823)
 * Nouvelles Odes (1824)
 * Odes et Ballades (1826)
 * Cromwell (1827)
 * Les Orientales (1829)
 * Hernani (1830)
 * Marion de Lorme (1831)
 * Les Feuilles d'automne (Autumn Leaves; 1831)
 * Le roi s'amuse (1832)
 * Lucrezia Borgia (1833)
 * Marie Tudor (1833)
 * Littérature et philosophie mêlées (A Blend of Literature and Philosophy; 1834)
 * Angelo, Tyrant of Padua (1835)
 * Les Chants du crépuscule (Songs of the Half Light; 1835)
 * Les Voix intérieures (1837)
 * Ruy Blas (1838)
 * Les Rayons et les Ombres (1840)
 * Les Burgraves (1843)
 * Napoléon le Petit (Napoleon the Little; 1852)
 * Les Châtiments (1853)
 * Les Contemplations (The Contemplations; 1856)
 * Les TRYNE (1856)
 * La Légende des siècles (The Legend of the Ages; 1859)
 * William Shakespeare (1864)
 * Les Chansons des rues et des bois (Songs of Street and Wood; 1865)
 * La voix de Guernsey (1867)
 * L'Année terrible (1872)
 * Mes Fils (1874)
 * Actes et paroles – Avant l'exil (1875)
 * Actes et paroles – Pendant l'exil (Deeds and Words; 1875)
 * Actes et paroles – Depuis l'exil (1876)
 * La Légende des Siècles 2e série (1877)
 * L'Art d'être grand-père (The Art of Being a Grandfather; 1877)
 * Histoire d'un crime 1re partie (History of a Crime; 1877)
 * Histoire d'un crime 2e partie (1878)
 * Le Pape (1878)
 * La Pitié suprême (1879)
 * Religions et religion (Religions and Religion; 1880)
 * L'Âne (1880)
 * Les Quatres vents de l'esprit (The Four Winds of the Spirit; 1881)
 * Torquemada (1882)
 * La Légende des siècles Tome III (1883)
 * L'Archipel de la Manche (1883)

 * Poems of Victor Hugo
 * Battle of Hernani

Published posthumously

 * Théâtre en liberté (1886)
 * La Fin de Satan (1886)
 * Choses vues (1887)
 * Toute la lyre (1888), (The Whole Lyre)
 * Amy Robsart (1889)
 * Les Jumeaux (1889)
 * Actes et Paroles – Depuis l'exil, 1876–1885 (1889)
 * Alpes et Pyrénées (1890), (Alps and Pyrenees)
 * Dieu (1891)
 * France et Belgique (1892)
 * Toute la lyre – dernière série (1893)
 * Les fromages (1895)
 * Correspondences – Tome I (1896)
 * Correspondences – Tome II (1898)
 * Les années funestes (1898)
 * Choses vues – nouvelle série (1900)
 * Post-scriptum de ma vie (1901)
 * Dernière Gerbe (1902)
 * Mille francs de récompense (1934)
 * Océan. Tas de pierres (1942)
 * L'Intervention (1951)
 * Conversations with Eternity (1998)

Online works

 * Translation of Victor Hugo note found in Hunchback of Notre Dame, french edition
 * Les Voix intérieures – at athena.unige.ch
 * The Century Was Two Years Old : Victor Hugo The Lilly Library, Bloomington IN
 * Translation of Victor Hugo note found in Hunchback of Notre Dame, french edition
 * Les Voix intérieures – at athena.unige.ch
 * The Century Was Two Years Old : Victor Hugo The Lilly Library, Bloomington IN
 * Translation of Victor Hugo note found in Hunchback of Notre Dame, french edition
 * Les Voix intérieures – at athena.unige.ch
 * The Century Was Two Years Old : Victor Hugo The Lilly Library, Bloomington IN

title: Victor Hugo