Today In History; Victor Hugo, Poet

1802: Victor Hugo was one of France's most powerful and popular Romantic authors. He wrote a large number of poems and was as important and innovative a poet for the French as Wordsworth was for the English, even though outside of France Hugo's novels are better known than his poems. As a republican he was exiled during the reign of Napoleon III and lived in the Channel Islands, but his death threw France into collective mourning.