Théâtre Montansier - The story of a lifetime

Cultural, Entertainment/recreation

Wednesday 24 September 2025

Location : Théâtre Montansier

Enlarge

Presentation

Discover the fascinating story behind one of Victor Hugo's major works: inspired one evening by an encounter with a man arrested for stealing bread, this royalist faced with real misery transformed his vision and created a masterpiece.

Unlike his contemporaries, who invented fictional characters, Hugo wrote from what he saw, and the major work he spent twenty years composing brought together characters he met in the street and in the places where simple people lived, often abandoned and repressed. This courageous choice earned him the hostility of his social milieu, which considered him a traitor. Les Misérables is therefore both the story of the redemption of a convict named Jean Valjean and that of the transformation of an ambitious, conservative young author into the sacred monster who gave a voice to the people.

Victor Hugo (1802-1885)

During the reign of Charles X, Baron Victor Hugo, aged 28, was a royalist and already famous thanks to Notre-Dame de Paris and Hernani.

In 1849, at the age of 46 and a member of the Académie Française, Victor Hugo became a member of the Chamber of Peers of France. He had become an influential, respected and wealthy man. Well established in the institution, he openly took up the cause of the underprivileged. He prepared social measures to protect women and children; the right to vote and education for all; the abolition of the death penalty; the creation of a Théâtre national populaire, the forerunner of Jean Vilar's TNP; and he was the first to propose, to the jeers and jeers of his colleagues, the creation of a United States of Europe.

1862 saw the publication of Les Misérables, which was a popular success from the outset.

General information