Victor Hugo was the standard-bearer and leader of French romantic literature. He lived almost the entire 19th century and made significant achievements in poetry, fiction, drama, and political writing. The changing reality of 19th-century France left a distinctive mark on his work and had a profound impact on the development of French literature in later generations.
In his youth, Hugo was influenced by his mother and was relatively conservative in both political thought and literary concepts. In 1822, Hugo's first collection of poems, Odes and Ballads, appeared. This collection of poems is purely a vulgar work of the monarchy and the Catholic singing of merit.
In 1827, Hugo published the play Cromwell, the preface of which became the manifesto of the French Romantic literary movement. In the Preface to "Cromwell", the author declares that classicism is outdated, advocates abandoning the various rules and precepts of classicism, and learning to absorb the language of the people for free creation, at the same time, the author also puts forward the aesthetic principle of combining ugliness and nobility in art according to the reality that "ugliness is next to beauty, deformity is close to beauty, ugliness is hidden behind the sublime, beauty and evil coexist, light and darkness coexist".
In 1830, his romantic play "Onani" was successfully staged, marking the complete victory of French romanticism over classicism, and Hugo became a banner of French romanticism. "Notre Dame de Paris" is Hugo's first major novel and a masterpiece of his romantic fiction. Since then, Hugo has written a series of novels, mainly "Les Misérables", "Sea Laborer", "The Smiley Man", "Ninety-Three Years" and so on.
