Victor Hugo: A Titan of French Romanticism

Essays on literary works - 2024

Victor Hugo: A Titan of French Romanticism

(A longform emotional spiral through the stormy genius of literature’s most extra guy)


So. Victor Hugo.

You probably know him as that Les Mis guy—or, more likely, that guy who wrote the thing that turned into the thing where Anne Hathaway cries with a shaved head. But buckle up, because this man was not just your run-of-the-mill brooding 19th-century wordsmith. No, Hugo was a full-blown chaos god of Romanticism, a human tempest with a pen, and honestly? He’s the dramatic blueprint for every Tumblr post about doomed love, revolutionary angst, or crying in the rain.

Keywords: Victor Hugo, French Romanticism, Les Misérables, Notre-Dame de Paris, Romantic literature, Victor Hugo analysis, 19th-century French literature

We’re diving headfirst into the literary fever dream of Victor Hugo—not as a museum piece, not as some “pillar of world literature” (gross), but as the hot mess visionary he actually was. This is not your professor’s Hugo. This is Hugo with his sleeves rolled up and feelings leaking out of every orifice.


HUGO WAS DOING EMO BEFORE EMO WAS A THING

French Romanticism wasn't all slow violins and fainting maidens. It was rage and love and God and death and also maybe politics but, like, with sexy candles and bleeding hearts. Victor Hugo? He ran that circus.

You want excess? Hugo’s got excess. His novels are literary lasagnas—layer after layer of plot, backstory, drama, regret, ghost-visions, sewer metaphors, and oh yeah, probably a barricade or two. He didn’t write; he poured. Novels like Les Misérables and Notre-Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, for Disney-poisoned minds) aren’t stories so much as emotional black holes. You don’t read them—you fall into them, screaming, while Hugo yells French poetry in your ear and lights everything on fire.

Romanticism, at its core, is about feeling too much—and no one, absolutely no one, out-feeled Victor Hugo. Not even Byron, and Byron literally made his entire brand “being tragically hot and depressed.”


VICTOR HUGO AND HIS EMOTIONAL KINK FOR SUFFERING

Let’s talk Les Misérables—which, if we’re being honest, should probably just be called Pain: The Musical. Here’s a novel where everyone suffers. Constantly. With operatic intensity. There’s a priest who gives away candlesticks and changes the world. A convict with the soul of Christ. A cop whose moral compass is so rigid it snaps. An orphan who loves too hard. And a revolutionary who probably smells like absinthe and bad decisions.

This book is a marathon of trauma. It’s 1,500 pages of what if grace existed in a broken world—but also, what if everyone died horribly anyway?

Hugo doesn’t subtly suggest themes. He stabs you with them. Repeatedly. Then writes a 30-page chapter about the Paris sewer system to let you reflect.

But here’s the kicker: it works. Like, actually works. Because it’s not just melodrama. It’s myth. It’s human fragility as divine opera. It’s God and revolution and unrequited love and relentless moral inquiry…all mashed together in a pile of wet cobblestones.


HE WAS ALSO KIND OF A CHAOTIC LEGEND

Let’s detour from the literature for a second and talk about the man himself.

Victor Hugo wasn’t just writing about revolutionaries—he was one. Banned, exiled, constantly pissing off the political elite with his spicy takes. He called Napoleon III “Napoleon the Small.” (Shade.) He once described a monarch’s policies as “idiocy mixed with blood.” (Bars.) He exiled himself rather than play nice with the regime—and spent nearly 20 years raging from the outside like a literary emo-punk on a self-imposed world tour.

Also: dude was into spirits. Like, seances. The man thought he was chatting with Shakespeare’s ghost. On purpose. Regularly. On an island. This is your reminder that writers have always been weird. Don’t let the high school curriculums fool you.


NOTRE-DAME DE PARIS: GOTHIC MELANCHOLIA WITH EXTRA CURVES

Okay, let’s do some Hugo-and-chill with Notre-Dame de Paris, because this book deserves way more than “it’s about a hunchback.”

Spoiler: it’s not about a hunchback. Not really.

It’s about architecture. No, seriously. The whole thing was Hugo screaming into the void because 19th-century Paris was knocking down medieval buildings, and he was like “NOPE” and wrote a novel where the cathedral is basically the main character.

It’s about the body of the city. The actual bones and spires. And yes, there’s Esmeralda dancing and Quasimodo brooding and Frollo having the most toxic of toxic crushes, but deep down it’s Hugo whispering, “Buildings have souls. Time is a monster. We are all crumbling.”

There are parts of that book that feel like Tumblr text posts in Gothic font:

  • “She was beautiful...because she was indifferent to her own beauty.”
  • “The great buildings, like the great mountains, are the work of centuries.”
  • “The church is dying. The book is replacing it.”

Same energy as: we’re all just pixels screaming into a void. But make it 1482.


BIG THEMES, BIGGER FEELINGS (AND NO, IT’S NOT “TOO MUCH”)

Hugo writes like he’s possessed. And maybe he was.

His major themes: justice vs. law, grace vs. vengeance, individual vs. system, love vs. death. But he doesn’t do this the tidy way. There’s no neat dichotomy. Javert dies by his own ethics. Fantine is crushed by an invisible machine. Cosette loves Marius with Disney sparkle energy while Jean Valjean quietly bleeds dignity.

And look, it’s messy. It’s so messy. You could argue Hugo was emotionally manipulative, and you’d be right. But also—so is real life? Real life is manipulative. It’s unfair and over-the-top and sometimes it’s a drunk man crying in a sewer because his daughter got married.

This is what makes Hugo unkillable in the culture. You don’t read him for subtlety. You read him because your own heart’s a little cracked and you want someone to scream with you.


THE VIBE: MAXIMALISM AS SALVATION

Minimalism is dead. Long live maximalism. And Hugo? Was its literary prophet.

We live in a time of oversaturation—ten tabs open, ten identities stacked, ten lives on ten apps. Hugo gets that energy. He was writing 800-page novels with five-layered flashbacks before it was cool. He’s your literary friend who monologues for three hours and cries about liberty and then hands you a metaphor so luminous it breaks you.

Keyword variation alert: Victor Hugo maximalism, French Romantic excess, emotionally intense novels, character-driven epic literature

He doesn’t tell you how to feel. He makes you feel. Sometimes against your will. Sometimes while you’re just trying to chill and suddenly find yourself thinking about divine grace and whether law can ever serve humanity.

He’s emotionally exhausting. He’s morally overwhelming. He’s perfect for this age of too much.


FINAL THOUGHT (BUT NOT A CONCLUSION, OK?)

Victor Hugo is the human embodiment of a thunderstorm yelling about justice while painting a mural on the side of a cathedral with tears. He is a lot. And in a world increasingly afraid of feeling too hard, too fast, too deep—he’s kind of a miracle.

Romanticism wasn’t just about flowers and sighing. It was about soul-vomit. About throwing everything onto the page—love, rage, God, guilt—and daring people to look away.

So next time someone says “Hugo’s too dramatic,” just nod and say: “Exactly.”


Write that on a candle. Or a barricade. Or a seance napkin.

Victor Hugo would.