The Burgraves

About the Author Victor Hugo (1802-1885) was a novelist, poet, and dramatist, and the most important of French Romantic writers. In his preface to his historical play Cromwell (1827) Hugo wrote that romanticism is the liberalism of literature. Hugo developed his own version of the historical novel, combining concrete, historical details with vivid, melodramatic, even feverish imagination. Among his best-known works are The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Les Misérables. Victor Hugo was one of the greatest personalities of French literature. Though not without the faults and eccentricities which frequently characterize great geniuses, he never entered any field of literature without excelling in it. The novel, the lyric, the drama, criticism, all fell from his facile pen without apparent effort. Hugo died in Paris on May 22, 1885. He was given at his death a national funeral. It was attended by two million people. Victor Hugo is buried in the Panthéon. Product Description The “burgraves” were medieval princes who inhabited the fortified castles of the Rhine and ranked second only to kings. They mostly led a lawless life, harrying the country and stopping at no crime. Through four generations of burgraves evil and corruption are shown driving out the rough ideas of honor which had hitherto existed side by side with ferocity. The complete failure of this play when produced on March 7, 1843 at the Coméédie-Franççaise was the end of Hugo’s career as a dramatist.