CLAUDE GUEUX
CLAUDE GUEUX
BY VICTOR MARIE HUGO
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Victor Hugo, greatest and most versatile of the French poets of the nineteenth century, was born at Besançon in 1802. He published a succession of monumental romances, plays, poems, until he was elected in 1844 to the Academy. After that he threw himself into the political turmoil of the period, becoming chief of the opponents of Louis Bonaparte and of the reconstruction of the Empire, and was exiled for eighteen years to Jersey and Guernsey, where he wrote, in 1862, “Les Misérables.”All contemporary poetry has been said to take its inspiration from Victor Hugo. Besides a wonderfully fertile and monumental mind, dignified, dramatic, satiric, he had a special genius for expressing by the sound of a phrase what could not be directly expressed in words.“Claude Gueux,” which means ragamuffin and simpleton, written about 1828, is an indignant pleading in favor of the numerous classes of outcasts who would be useful citizens if not led to crime by misery.
Victor Hugo, greatest and most versatile of the French poets of the nineteenth century, was born at Besançon in 1802. He published a succession of monumental romances, plays, poems, until he was elected in 1844 to the Academy. After that he threw himself into the political turmoil of the period, becoming chief of the opponents of Louis Bonaparte and of the reconstruction of the Empire, and was exiled for eighteen years to Jersey and Guernsey, where he wrote, in 1862, “Les Misérables.”
All contemporary poetry has been said to take its inspiration from Victor Hugo. Besides a wonderfully fertile and monumental mind, dignified, dramatic, satiric, he had a special genius for expressing by the sound of a phrase what could not be directly expressed in words.
“Claude Gueux,” which means ragamuffin and simpleton, written about 1828, is an indignant pleading in favor of the numerous classes of outcasts who would be useful citizens if not led to crime by misery.
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