Olympio ou la vie de Victor Hugo was published by Hachette in 1954, the title drawn from Hugo’s own self-designation in the poem “Tristesse d’Olympio” — a name suggesting the Olympian grandeur and self-regard that were both Hugo’s greatest strength and his most obvious weakness. The biography appeared in English as Olympio: The Life of Victor Hugo (Harper & Brothers, 1956), translated by Gerard Hopkins, and at nearly 500 pages it is the fullest of Maurois’s literary lives.
Victor Hugo’s life spanned almost the entire nineteenth century — born in 1802 during Napoleon’s Consulate, he died in 1885 under the Third Republic — and his career touched every aspect of French cultural and political life. Maurois organizes this enormous material chronologically but with thematic set-pieces on Hugo’s major works: the theatrical revolution of Hernani (1830), which provoked a literal battle between classicists and romantics in the audience; Notre-Dame de Paris (1831), the novel that saved the cathedral from demolition; Les Misérables (1862), written during exile and published to worldwide acclaim; and the vast late poetry collections that most French critics consider Hugo’s greatest achievement.
Maurois is particularly good on Hugo’s exile — the nineteen years (1851–1870) spent on Jersey and Guernsey after opposing Louis-Napoleon’s coup d’état. This period, which might have destroyed a lesser man, produced Hugo’s finest work: Les Contemplations, La Légende des siècles, Les Misérables, and Les Travailleurs de la mer. Maurois shows how exile freed Hugo from the distractions of Parisian literary life and forced him inward, producing a late style of visionary intensity that has no parallel in French poetry.
The biography treats Hugo’s chaotic personal life with characteristic tact but without evasion. The fifty-year relationship with Juliette Drouet (his mistress from 1833 until her death in 1883), conducted alongside his marriage to Adèle Foucher and various briefer liaisons, is presented as a genuine love story — complicated, sometimes painful, but sustained by mutual devotion. The tragedy of his daughter Léopoldine, who drowned with her husband in 1843, receives the emotional weight it deserves: Maurois shows how this loss transformed Hugo’s poetry from brilliant rhetoric into something deeper and more mysterious.
The critical argument running through the biography is that Hugo was a far greater writer than his reputation among intellectuals (who tended to dismiss him as a windbag) would suggest. Maurois cites André Gide’s famous response when asked who was the greatest French poet — “Victor Hugo, hélas” — and argues that the “hélas” is unnecessary: Hugo’s poetry, at its best, achieves a sublimity that no other French poet has matched.
Collecting Olympio
First French edition (Hachette, Paris, 1954): Olympio ou la vie de Victor Hugo. Illustrated.
First English edition (Harper & Brothers, New York, 1956): Olympio: The Life of Victor Hugo. Translated by Gerard Hopkins.
Market values:
- French first: $20–$50
- English first in dust jacket: $20–$45
- Later paperback editions: $5–$10