Victor Hugo is the colossus of French literature, outstanding as novelist, playwright and poet. To get some idea of his stature one would have to meld aspects of Dickens, Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson with Byron, Woodsworth, Swinburne and William Morris. Even though Balzac is the superior novelist in terms of total achievement, he never wrote a single novel as good as Les Miserables. One arms to Graham Robb immediately when he defends this great novel - probably the most underrated masterpiece in all literature - against the patronising faint praise of academic critics.
Hugo is also a king of monument to French culture in all its aspects, particularly illustrating the dialectic between Left and Right. A monarchist and Napoleon-worshipper, who moved every leftwards and ended as the most considerable thorn in the flesh of Louis Napoleon (whom he dubbed unforgettably Napoleon le petit) Hugo suffered 18 years of exile in the Channel Islands rather than truckle to the Second Empire and then endured another spell of banishment (in Belgium) for his forthright criticism of Their's cold-blooded murder of the Communards of 1871.
Finally, there is Hugo the rampant womaniser, promiscuous an extent that beggars belief. At the age of 69, when he was slowing down, he still managed to chalk up an average of one sexual encounter a day, enjoying 40 different partners in five months.
As well as giving us full measure on all these facets of Hugo, Robb probes into the Hugo family constellation. Madness ran in the family: Hugo had a psychotic brother who died in an asylum aged 37, while for those who like to link mental illness with creativity, Hugo himself is fruitful soil.
Graham Robb's book contains a number of marginal blemishes. There is too much from the academic's prosody kit, and the narrative is often turbid, especially when dealing with the revolutions of 1848 in France. Sometimes, too, the use of evidence is shaky.
In a word, the book could have been edited to advantage. But the pluses of the volume easily outweigh the minuses. Among the high spots are a truthful and accurate account of the 1871 Paris Commune and its aftermath and an inspired defence of Hugo against his detractors, which easily refutes the tired notion that he was paranoid in his dealings with Louis Napoleon. Most of all, sometimes buried in luxuriant verbal foliage, there is an outstanding and brilliant essay on Hugo which effectively answers all the questions any Hugoist could ask. This is by far the best book on Hugo that has appeared in English.