The Last Day of a Condemned Man

by Victor Hugo, Christopher Moncrieff (Translator)

Overview

A first-person diary of a prisoner's final day before being executed for an unspecified crime, Victor Hugo's poignant tale vividly conveys the mental anguish of a man confronted with the intransigent mechanism of justice, as his mind seeks refuge in recollections from his past and philosophical musings on his inevitable fate.

As relevant today as when it was first published in 1829, The Last Day of a Condemned Man is an eloquent plea for compassion and a masterpiece of realist fiction. This edition includes the Preface to the 1832 edition of the book, a manifest of Hugo's personal opinions, 'A Comedy about a Tragedy' and 'Claude Gueux', an early example of “true crime” fiction.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781847498700
Publisher:	Bloomsbury USA
Publication date:	04/12/2022
Series:	Alma Classics 101 Pages
Pages:	101
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.70(h) x 0.50(d)

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

Absolutely the most real and truthful of everything that Hugo wrote.” - Fyodor Dostoevsky

“Hugo . . . provides a convincing reminder of what political argument should really be about” - The Observer

From the Publisher