French Second Empire

The French Second Empire is the political period that began on December 2, 1852, after Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte’s coup had ended the republic. For Victor Hugo, its arrival made a gradual political disillusionment irreversible: the man he had supported became, in Hugo’s view, a ruler whose personal government and restrictions on liberty demanded opposition. The period thus frames both Hugo’s exile and his transformation into a prominent defender of republican values.

From Support to Rupture

Hugo’s break with Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte followed a reversal in his politics. By family tradition, Hugo had entered public life on the royalist side. He attended Charles X’s coronation in 1825 and, in 1848, was elected to the Constituent Assembly as a moderate right-wing deputy. He also supported Louis-Napoléon, who was elected president of the French Second Republic. That support did not survive the president’s conduct in office: Louis-Napoléon progressively reduced civil and individual liberties and governed with increasing personal authority.

The coup of December 2, 1851, ended the republic and brought the conflict into the open. After a vehement speech against the prince-president in the French Legislative Assembly, Hugo went into exile in Brussels; an expulsion decree was issued against him. The Second Empire was formally established on December 2, 1852. These dates distinguish the coup that precipitated Hugo’s break from the subsequent establishment of the regime. For Hugo, the coup was not simply a change of government but the point at which his earlier allegiance gave way to lasting political opposition.

Exile and Opposition

Hugo’s exile continued from Brussels to Jersey and then Guernsey. The islands became successive settings for a political separation from France that was also a sustained act of writing. In 1853, he published the satirical poetry collection Les Châtiments, which expressed his hostility toward Napoléon III and presented him as a symbol of tyranny. Hugo used the force of his poetic language to denounce the ruler’s violence and injustice. The collection therefore records more than personal antagonism: it shows how exile and literary work became connected forms of resistance to the Empire.

Hugo’s opposition also belongs to a broader record of his political concern with poverty, though that concern must not be mistaken for a direct account of the Empire’s policies. In 1849, before the coup and the establishment of the regime, he supported a proposal for a committee to prepare laws on public assistance and social provision. Addressing the French Legislative Assembly, he argued that misery could be destroyed and that government had a continuing duty to act while improvement remained possible. The chronology matters: this intervention preceded his rupture with Louis-Napoléon, while his subsequent exile and poetry made resistance to the new regime a defining public commitment.

The Empire and the Novel’s Earlier Time

The period is also an important historical boundary for reading Les Misérables. Several of the novel’s central episodes take place well before the French Second Empire, so their poverty, punishment, and political violence should not be placed within the regime’s years. Jean Valjean steals a loaf of bread in 1795, after a severe winter leaves his family without food. The court sentences him to five years of hard labor; four failed escape attempts extend his sentence to nineteen years. That narrative presents deprivation and criminal punishment as part of an earlier social order, not as an event during the Empire.

Likewise, the uprising in Paris on June 5, 1832, belongs to a period before the Second Empire. Marius is summoned to the barricade, where Courfeyrac, Bossuet, Combeferre, Enjolras, and Gavroche are among those facing government forces. The insurgents are described as fifty men awaiting an army of sixty thousand. Javert is discovered to be a police inspector and seized by the barricade’s defenders; later, Gavroche risks himself to gather ammunition and is shot. These events give the novel a political and social history extending across decades. The Second Empire falls after them, and its relevance to the novel’s frame is not that it contains these scenes, but that it forms part of the later history through which Hugo’s work and public commitments were shaped.

Fall of the Regime and Hugo’s Return

The fall of the Second Empire in 1870 ended Hugo’s exile and enabled him to return to France. His political career continued in the new circumstances: he was elected deputy in 1871 and senator in 1875, and was regarded as a defender of republican values and institutions. The contrast with his earlier support for Louis-Napoléon is pronounced. The political rupture that had driven Hugo abroad preceded a later public identity grounded in republican defense.

Hugo died in 1885. France organized a national funeral, and a procession carried his coffin from the Arc de Triomphe to the Panthéon, where he was buried. His return after the Empire’s fall thus closes the period’s direct effect on his life without erasing its consequences: exile had separated him from France, while his political writing kept his opposition publicly present.