Victor Hugo

Hugo dominated French letters for sixty years (poet, playwright, novelist, and politician) before Napoleon III's coup sent him into exile in 1851. He spent nineteen years mostly on the Channel Island of Guernsey, refusing an amnesty he considered beneath his principles, and it was there that he finished Les Misérables (1862), a novel begun decades earlier about an ex-convict's redemption across the wreckage of post-revolutionary France.

He had already written The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831) partly to shame Paris into preserving the crumbling cathedral it depicts. When the empire fell in 1870 he returned home to a hero's welcome, and when he died in 1885 two million people lined the streets for a funeral that ended at the Panthéon.