The Last Day of a Condemned Man

by Victor Hugo

Overview

First published in 1829 at the beginning of Victor Hugo’s literary career, “The Last Day of a Condemned Man” is one of the author’s first mature works of fiction. It recounts the thoughts of a condemned man as the day of his execution draws near. Inspired by the sight of an executioner preparing the guillotine for another scheduled public execution, Hugo quickly wrote this moving and eloquent work describing the condemned man’s final thoughts as he awaits his death. Hugo was a celebrated French novelist, poet, playwright, dramatist, essayist, and statesman whose work ushered in the Romantic literary movement in France, one of the most influential movements in French and all of European literary history. Like many of his time, Hugo promoted the virtues of liberty, individualism, spirit, and nature in rebellion of the conservative political and religious establishments of Imperial France, and eventually became known as one of the most gifted and influential writers of his time. “The Last Day of a Condemned Man”, along with Hugo’s other stories and novels, had a profound influence on writers like Albert Camus, Charles Dickens, and Fyodor Dostoevsky and endures as one of the author’s most sensitive and starkly honest works. This edition includes a biographical afterword and follows the translation of George Reynolds.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781420979992
Publisher:	Digireads.com Publishing
Publication date:	12/11/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Victor Hugo (1802-85) was a French dramatist, novelist, and poet who in 1830 was called "the most powerful mind of the Romantic movement". His early success came in drama, and he used the stage as a platform for his social and political ideas. Hugo published his forceful verse drama Cromwell in 1824. Three years later, he added a provocative preface supporting the claims of Romantic drama as against the French classical tradition and calling for works that combined tragedy and comedy in the free style of Shakespeare. The controversial Hernani, presented at the Comédie-Française in 1830, marked the beginning of a prolific period of playwriting, which was partly inspired by his love for the actress Juliette Drouet. Their affair began in 1833; she eventually left the stage and became his companion until her death in 1883. Hugo's other works included the verse-drama Le Roi s'amuse (1832), which was banned from the French stage but subsequently used by Verdi as the libretto for Rigoletto, and the prose plays Lucrèce Borgia and Marie Tudor (both 1833). The failure of Les Burgraves (1843), together with the advent of realism in the mid 19th century, brought the Romantic experiment to an end. Owing to his opposition to the government, Hugo spent the years from 1851 to 1870 in exile, first in Brussels and then on the Channel Islands of Jersey and Guernsey. During his exile he wrote a few plays and the epic novel Les Misérables (1862), which returned to the stage as a vastly successful musical more than a century later. He returned to Paris after the proclamation of the Third Republic and died in 1885. He was buried in the Panthéon after being driven there, at his own request, in a poor man's hearse.

Date of Birth:

February 26, 1802

Date of Death:

May 22, 1885

Place of Birth:

Besançon, France

Place of Death:

Paris, France

Education:

Pension Cordier, Paris, 1815-18

Editorial Reviews

This impassioned early (1829) work, which depicts the "six-week death agony and . . . day-long death rattle" of a condemned prisoner awaiting execution, isn't so much fiction as it is a broadside against the barbarity of the guillotine. (The text is accompanied by a brief satirical playlet in which bureaucrats and aristocrats denounce its author as a troublemaker.) There are moments when the plight of Hugo's nameless protagonist and narrator stirs faint anticipatory echoes of (the later) Les Misérables. But the novella's awkward swings between high emotion and jejune sociological comment and its profusion of accusatory rhetorical questions make it of only minimal literary interest.

Kirkus Reviews

"The whole World's Classics series is tremendous boon to the literature offerings—beautifully edited and packaged."—Charles Riley, Baruch College, City University of New York

From the Publisher