Imagine living in an age and a place literate enough that the foremost celebrity in your society was a writer, who published enormously popular works, publicly stood up to the government and prevailed, and was even very nearly elected to lead the country. Of course we don’t live in that kind of age, nor that kind of society. And yet we still know the writer: Victor Hugo. If the name sort of vaguely rings a bell but you’re not sure, this will help. The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Les Miserables. Those are the most famous of Hugo’s works. But his writing career spanned more than six decades, and his creative output is just as vast as that implies. I think he might be one of the most important writers ever. Today being his birthday, I thought I’d take a closer look.

The first hint at Hugo’s talent came in 1817 when he won a poetry prize in a contest organized by the Academy Française. The judges at first refused to believe his age, which was just 15. Two years later he, along with his two brothers, started publishing a literary magazine all on their own: Le Conservator Littéraire. That was the sort of thing you could do in France in the early 1800s. Nowadays three creative brothers might be more likely to publish a mobile app of some sort.

He started writing in earnest around that time, when he was in his late teens. He published his first volume of collected poems when he was 20, and it was good enough that the king, Louis XVIII, granted him a royal pension. The next year he published his first novel, Han d’Islands. He followed that up with a steady series of novels and five more collections of poetry.

It wasn’t just Victor’s writing that brought him such acclaim; it was his extreme commitment to social justice. That first showed up in a big way in his 1829 novel Le Dernier jour d'un condamné (The Last Day of a Condemned Man). A few years later he blazed the trail for modern-era reportorial writers like Gay Tales and Tom Wolfe by writing Claude Gueux, a short story about the true tale of a murderer who had been executed.

He switched genres again around 1827 (by then he was the ripe old age of 25) and started writing plays. Cromwell was followed a couple years later by Hernani, and both were produced and performed at the Comédie-Française. He ignored the standard rules of classical drama, and the plays (particularly Hernani) were so innovative they sparked riots between the traditionalists and the more up-to-date romantics. Hugo’s plays probably marked the onset of the whole genre of French romanticism, for that matter. But just imagine popular interest in a literary work like a play being so intense that people rioted.

Victor Hugo wrote a series of plays over the next few years, and became as well known as a playwright as he was for his other writing. That came just in time for him to switch back to novels and write his first international best-seller: The Hunchback of Notre-Dame in 1831. The book was so popular that it sparked a wave of tourism in Paris as people from all over Europe traveled to see the cathedral featured in the story. The cathedral had been pretty much neglected at the time, but the book — and the tourists — spurred the city into restoring it. And that sentiment spilled over into preservation efforts of other pre-Renaissance buildings, not just in France. Those preservation efforts are probably the reason why many of those buildings still exist today. Before Hugo’s work, old buildings were just old buildings and nobody really cared.

It was around the time Hunchback was published that Hugo started thinking about writing a major novel about social justice. He was increasingly concerned about public misery as well as issues like slavery, and visited the notorious prison the Bagne of Toulon in 1839 to make notes. He kept accumulating notes for another six years before beginning to write Les Misérables. Once he started, the book took him 17 years to finish. The publishers broke new ground as well; they began a marketing campaign before the book was published. It was quite possibly the first time that was ever tried.

The marketing campaign, not to mention Hugo’s reputation, made Les Misérables an instant success. It was published simultaneously in all the major cities of Europe, and sold out the same day. Hugo wrote more books after Les Misérables, but none so ambitious, and none that had such a sweeping effect on society.

I mentioned at the start that Hugo stood up to the government and prevailed. He was politically active throughout his whole career and spoke out against the death penalty, in favor of freedom of the press and free education, and weighed in on popular issues of his time. For instance, he favored Polish independence. He was elected to the National Assembly of the Second Republic, and when Napoleon III seized power in 1851, dissolving the Second Republic, Hugo kept speaking out. They couldn’t do much to him directly because of his reputation, but he and his family were exiled from France. He settled on the island of Guernsey, in the English Channel, where he and his family lived for 15 years.

During his exile, though, he kept up with his writing, and turned to political pamphlets, many of them against Napoleon III and his government. The pamphlets were officially banned in France, but of course were everywhere to be found there. While on Guernsey he also began campaigning seriously to abolish slavery everywhere it still existed — chiefly, by that time, in the United States.

You’d like to think that somebody with Hugo’s talents as a writer and poet might not be just as good in other fields, but Hugo also ended up having a big impact on music. He was not a musician himself, but he worked closely with composers who set his poetry to music, and writing the librettos for operas. He was also a close friend of the composer Franz Liszt, who gave him piano lessons. This influence in music continues; his book The Last Day of a Condemned Man was made into an opera in 2007.

I suppose that leaves the visual arts. And wouldn’t you know it, Hugo was a gifted artist as well. He specialized in drawings — none of his work featured much color — but he left thousands of them. He didn’t like to share his art because he didn’t want it to get more famous than his writing. According to some artists of the time who did see it, like Van Gogh and Delacroix, he was right to worry. They thought he could have outdone the painters of his time if he’d tried.

There’s a good deal more to be said about Victor Hugo, including more about his political work, and for that matter I haven’t really addressed his personal life. But come on, this is not a biography newsletter. I think that’s plenty. I’ll leave you with a recommendation. Hugo’s last novel is Quatre-vingt-treize (Ninety-Three). It’s about the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution. It’s not well known nowadays, but it’s said to be at least as good as anything else he wrote. If you like eBooks, there’s a Kindle edition. And the price is right: it’s currently just 99 cents.

The title is from the note Hugo wrote two days before his death; the last words he ever wrote. The subtitle is from a report of something he whispered the following night.

The subtitle is what the newspaper Le Matin published. He may have said something slightly different, though: “In me, this is the battle between day and night.” In his native French, it would be “En moi c’est le combat du jour et de la nuit.” That makes it an alexandrine, a French poetic form reminiscent of a haiku. An alexandrine is a line of 12 syllables divided by a pause or rest into two half-lines of 6 syllables each. You’ll often see the rest symbol reproduced like this: ||. It was a hugely popular form in French poetry (and other European literary traditions) from around the 1600s to the 1800s. So if Hugo had still been able to lift a pen, his last note might have been:

“En moi c’est le combat || du jour et de la nuit.”