Victor Hugo
Victor Hugo: Man of the Century
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© Massimiliano Manzan
About the book
Walburga Hülk explores the fate and myth of the grand homme Victor Hugo, not only as an intellectual, writer and multi-talented artist but also in terms of his visions and contradictions. She paints a portrait of a man and author caught between freedom and exile, a figure whose story also encapsulates the history of 19th-century France.
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The burning of the Paris cathedral has brought renewed attention to Hugo’s “The Hunchback of Notre-Dame”. Enlightened on the one hand and romantic on the other, Hugo embodies the contradictions of his era. After a royalist phase, he positioned himself at the forefront of progressive bourgeois protest, a stance that eventually led to his exile following Napoleon III’s coup d’état. There, a lover of pomp and kitsch, he wrote “Les Misérables” and campaigned against the death penalty, slavery and authoritarian regimes. Through his own testimonials and those of others, the novelist Walburga Hülk successfully brings to life both Hugo as a politician, writer and unhappy family man, as well as 19th-century France. She portrays him as a public intellectual of enduring relevance, who used the mass media of his time to advocate for a united Europe and to speak out against the oppression of Poland by the Russian army.
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Walburga Hülk, born in 1953, was Professor of Romance Literature at the University of Siegen until 2019. She previously taught in Freiburg and Gießen and was a visiting professor at the University of California at Berkeley, the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme in Paris and the Université Polytechnique Hauts-de-France in Valenciennes. In numerous books and articles, she has repeatedly dealt with the 19th century in France and with literature and art in the modern age.
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