Second Empire

The Second Empire is the political period inaugurated by Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte’s coup d’état of December 2, 1851, which ended the republic; he restored the Empire a year later. In the account of Victor Hugo’s life, this transition marks the collapse of a political allegiance and the beginning of exile. It also provides the immediate historical setting for writing shaped by opposition to the new regime.

From Support to Opposition

In his youth, Hugo had entered politics in the royalist camp, and in 1848 he was elected to the Constituent Assembly as a moderate deputy of the right. He also supported Louis-Napoléon. That support gave way to disillusionment as the president progressively restricted civil and individual liberties and governed with increasing personal authority. The coup completed the break between the poet and the political leader he had once backed.

Coup and Exile

Hugo spoke against Louis-Napoléon in the Assembly and went into exile in Brussels. An expulsion decree was issued against him. His exile then extended from Belgium to the Channel Islands, placing him outside France during the Second Empire. The period is therefore presented not simply as a change of regime, but as the circumstance that separated Hugo from his country and redirected his political life toward resistance from abroad.

Writing Against the Regime

Hugo’s collection Les Châtiments, published in 1853, emerged during this exile. Its political revolt was joined to personal sorrow. In the poem Souvenir de la nuit du 4, Hugo recounts witnessing the death of a young child during the coup. The episode connects the regime’s seizure of power to an individual loss, making the violence of political change part of the collection’s moral and emotional charge.

The Second Empire thus forms a hinge between Hugo’s earlier political commitments and his later opposition: support for Louis-Napoléon becomes confrontation, confrontation becomes exile, and exile becomes a setting for writing that joins private grief to public dissent.