SOURCE: Brombert, Victor. “Victor Hugo: The Spaceless Prison.” In The Romantic Prison: The French Tradition, pp. 88-119. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978.

In the following essay, Brombert analyzes the prison imagery in the writings of Victor Hugo, whose novels Le Dernier Jour d'un Condamné and Les Misérables were influential for later writers using the prison as a setting or metaphor.

Where would thought lead if not to jail? 

—William Shakespeare

The New Voice

“On voit le soleil!” (One sees the sun!) This cry of the Condemned Man in Hugo's Le Dernier Jour d'un Condamné is quoted from memory by Dostoevsky in the letter he writes his brother on December 22, 1849, a few hours after the macabre scenario of his sham execution. Imperial grace came at the last moment: the death sentence was commuted to hard labor. But the resuscitated man was never again the same.

The French quotation in...