Victor Hugo

 

Victor Hugo was a key strategist, inspiration, and the most visible standard-bearer of Romanticism during its take-over of the French cultural infrastructure during the 1830s. By the time of his death half a century later his influence had fundamentally infiltrated every facet of both intellectual and popular culture, an incalculable affect on Western society comparable in the twentieth century only to that of the Beatles. While Hugo developed and epitomised the mainstream Romanticism that the avant-garde in some ways set itself against, Hugo was key in developing a popular perception of creative activity as an ethical and intellectual praxis, which in turn made the activities of underground Romanticism comprehensible; both were born at the 'Battle of Hernani', in which Hugo was the chief strategist and the organisers of the avant-garde the tacticians and fighters; and the personal and ideological bonds between Hugo and the avant-garde community never disappeared.

 

The production of Hugo's Hernani, a play that embodied the officially-proscribed Romanticist movement and incorporated anti-Monarchist codes, was the result of years of coordinated political maneuvering by members of the Romanticist community. Hugo collaborated with young leaders of the underground Romanticist subculture in Paris, including Gérard de Nerval, Petrus Borel, Achille Devéria, Célestin Nanteuil, and Hector Berlioz, to turn the performances into high-profile media sensations by meticulously planning with them a riot that would ensure that Romanticism grabbed the imaginations of people throughout France and beyond. Pitched struggles, often breaking into physical blows, charcterised almost every performance of the play's first run, and provided the catalyst and proving-ground from which a radicalised, extremist Romanticism emerged, calling itself several different names including Frenetic and Avant-Garde Romanticism.