Victor Hugo (1802-1885) was born in Besançon, France on February 26, 1802. Originally on track to become a lawyer, he instead became France's revered Romantic poet, novelist, and dramatist. He is the author of The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Les Misérables, among countless others. For fifteen years, Hugo lived on the island of Guernsey in political exile following the 1851 coup d'état by Napoleon III. There he wrote The Toilers of the Sea, published in 1866. When Hugo died in 1885, he was given a national funeral and burial in Paris' Pantheon.
