Victor Hugo was a colossus who strode across French literature bridging the divide between the antique classicism of post-Revolution France and the Modernist stirrings of late Romanticism. His influence as a poet, playwright and novelist extended further than that of any other writer. But he was also a politician and a painter, a lover and a revolutionary who came to symbolize France in the second half of the nineteenth century in all its turmoil and complexity. Exiled by Napoleon in 1851, Hugo lived in the Channel Islands until the early 1870s and there discovered a new set of identities: amongst them the visionary poet who invented a religion and who recieved compliments for his work by Jesus Christ and Shakespeare. Probably the most famous of French writers, his books are still read and have been made into films and musicals; his characters in Les Miserables and Notre-Dame de Paris have entered popular mythology.
