A few days after the coup d’état of December 2, 1851 by Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, Victor Hugo (1802-1885) will take the path of exile which will last 19 years.
After a stay of a few months in Brussels and three years spent in Jersey, an Anglo-Norman island located between France and England, the author of Notre Dame de Paris (1831) acquired “Hauteville House” on the island of Guernsey, where he settled with his entire family. Juliette Drouet, his mistress since 1833, who followed him into exile, rents a house in the same street.
This forced immigration, initially, opened up new avenues of creation for the committed poet. “ By removing everything from you, everything was given to you; everything is permitted to whom everything is forbidden; you are no longer forced to be academic and parliamentary; you have the formidable ease of the true, savagely superb »he believed.
And if for Hugo these first years in the middle of the Channel will be the time of battles, they will also quickly be synonymous with graphic experiments and spiritualist research – which will give rise to his famous “talking table” sessions. In Jersey, his son Charles had already opened a photography workshop, of which the writer was the main subject.
Because nothing visible or invisible seems to escape his eye. Starting with the house itself. “This house made by him with the patience of a Gothic cathedral picture artist and the Far Eastern fantasy of his brush, mysterious house where every piece of furniture, almost every trinket, bears the imprint of his mark,” wrote his grandson Georges Hugo in a book he dedicated to him.
More than anyone perhaps, “ocean man”, he embodies a sort of artistic “totality” which eloquently testifies Victor Hugo, the convict of letters, biographical account of Agnès Sandras, historian and curator at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BNF). Agnès Sandras’ story is based on the great moments of this immense artist with an exceptional destiny and draws on the very rich collection of archives and iconography available to the institution: photographs, manuscripts, paintings, caricatures.
Author of more than 4000 drawings, which remained almost entirely intimate during his lifetime, Hugo the romantic had a weakness for seascapes, apocalyptic visions, stormy seas and the silhouettes of ruins. As proof, all these magnificent ink washes often enhanced with gouache, watercolor or coffee (!).
Both witness and actor, incarnation of his time and apostle of progress, the author of Sea workers knew how to skillfully put herself on stage, Agnès Sandras shows well, feeding her own imagery.
Could we today share the enthusiasm and confidence in the future that Victor Hugo demonstrated in his time? In “Lux”, for example, the last poem of the Punishments (1853): “Future times! sublime vision! » Or again: “Progress, dark bee, brings happiness out of our evils. »
A fascinating journey in the footsteps of a man and a writer who, in a certain way, sums up his century.