Victor Hugo wrote Les Miserables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, but his life was as dramatic as his fiction. He served in the French legislature, went into nineteen years of political exile for opposing Napoleon III, conducted affairs so numerous he communicated with his mistresses in coded diaries, and returned to France as a national hero whose funeral procession drew two million mourners — the largest in French history.

This episode traces Hugo from his childhood during the Napoleonic wars through the novels that made him the most famous writer in France, the exile that radicalized him, and the coded diaries that concealed a spectacular private life.

• Hugo's childhood amid the Napoleonic wars and the early literary fame of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame
• Les Miserables — the novel written in exile that became a global phe ...