When Victor Hugo died in 1885 at the age of eighty-three, one million mourners gathered in the streets of Paris to see his corpse borne to the Pantheon. Buried with honors usually reserved for heads of state, the author outlived neither his celebrity nor his popularity. Although often controversial and politically charged, his works were embraced by both critics and commoners. As Jean-Paul Sartre later noted, "Hugo, no doubt, had the rare good fortune to be read everywhere: he's one of our only, perhaps our only writer who has been truly popular." Sartre was not alone in expressing an ambivalent attitude toward Hugo's enduring popularity. Asked to name France's greatest poet, novelist André Gide lamented, "Victor Hugo, hélas!"

Hugo, Timothy Raser argues in Dictionary of Literary Biography, was a product of his time: "No century of French literature has been better represented by a single author...