Victor Hugo in exile in Guernsey: mixed literature and politics

Hauteville House is the name of the exile home of Victor Hugo (1802-1885). It is located in St Peter Port, capital of Guernsey, in the Channel Islands. The author settled there with his family in 1855, bought the house in 1856 and lived in it until 1870.

Hugo’s exile had started a few days after the Coup of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte (2nd December 1851 – then President of the 2nd Republic Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte was to become the emperor Napoléon III exactly one year later). Prior to settling in Guernsey, Hugo spent time in Brussels (12th December 1851 – 1st August 1852) and on the sister island of Jersey (5 August 1852 – 31st October 1855).

Victor Hugo was nearly 50 at the time of the Coup. He was then a nationally and internationally recognized writer. He had written and published several collections of poems (Odes et Ballades, Les Orientales, Les Rayons et les Ombres, etc.), plays (Hernani, Marion de Lorme, Ruy Blas, etc.), novels (Le Dernier jour d’un condamné, Notre-Dame de Paris, etc.). In the 1830’s he was generally acknowledged as the leading figurehead of French Romanticism and in 1841 had been elected to the Académie française.

This intense literary body of work had earlier been coupled with and run parallel to political interests and concerns. Firstly royalist (see his youth poems to celebrate the Restauration, and his appointment as a peer of France under the Monarchy of July in 1845), then later on Hugo progressively turned towards republicanism, as his speeches as a deputy before the National Assembly in 1849 and 1850 show. He could never forgive the breach of the Constitution by Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, whom he named 'Napoléon-le-Petit' (title of a famous lampoon against the emperor published in Brussels in 1852), whose general amnesty he refused in May 1859. And it is only when in 1870 that Hugo returned to France, i.e. at the fall of Napoléon III.

The Guernsey exile was extremely important to Hugo both politically and literary. It was a way and an opportunity to re-confirm and exert his political opinions. It was also the time in his life when he had great focus and could concentrate on a deep reflection on humanity, history, poetical genius, God, etc. La Légende des siècles, Les Misérables, William Shakespeare, L’Homme qui rit, La Fin de Satan, Dieu, Religions et Religion, etc., published or written during the exile, are the literary results of his intense thoughts on human being and his place in universe.

Céline Micout, June 2008