SOURCE: "State, Self and History in Victor Hugo's L'Année Terrible" in Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 32, No. 3, Fall, 1993, pp. 367-78.

In the essay below, Coombes discusses Hugo's treatment of history and politics in L'Année terrible.

Hugo's last major poem sequence, and perhaps the last major poetic statement of European romanticism [L'Année terrible], was written in 1870-72, throughout the historical events with which it is concerned: the Franco-Prussian war, the Commune and their aftermath. Its articulation upon those events is thus very different from that of Wordsworth's The Prelude, with its attempt at a monolithic tranquillity of retrospection upon the Revolution, or indeed—to cite a less evidently conservative/conservatory instance—Heine's Deutschland, Ein Wintermärchen, generated out of the depressing yet constant condition of political exile.

Rather, the conditions of writing of L'Année Terrible—from the last months of Republican exile in Jersey through residence...