The Night of Exile

On the night of December 2, 1851, Victor Hugo sat in the darkened apartment of his mistress Juliette Drouet, writing by candlelight. Outside, the streets of Paris echoed with gunfire as Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte's troops crushed the last republican resistance. The man who would crown himself Napoleon III had destroyed the Second Republic, and Hugo—deputy, peer of France, the nation's greatest living writer—was now a marked man.

At forty-nine, Hugo had everything to lose. His plays dominated the theaters, his novels sold in vast editions, his poetry was memorized by schoolchildren. He lived in splendor on the Place des Vosges, received by kings and sought by beautiful women. Yet as he wrote what would become "History of a Crime," documenting the coup hour by hour, he made the decision that would define the rest of his life: he would go into exile rather than live under tyranny.

"Because we have had Napoleon the Great, must we now have Napoleon the Little?" he wrote, coining the phrase that would haunt the new emperor. Friends urged caution—surely accommodation was possible, surely his genius would be protected. But Hugo understood what others didn't: a writer's first duty was to conscience. If France had chosen servitude, he would become the voice of French liberty from abroad.

As dawn broke, Juliette had already packed their few belongings. Within days, they would cross the Belgian frontier, beginning nineteen years of exile. Hugo would lose his fortune, his position, his country. But he would gain something greater: moral authority. From the Channel Islands, he would thunder against injustice, becoming not just France's greatest writer but the conscience of Europe. The romantic poet was transforming into the prophet of democracy, and literature would never be the same.