'LE DERNIER JOUR D'UN CONDAMNÉ' BY VICTOR HUGO

The Grandma is not a person of habits, but on Thursdays, when she is not outside of Barcelona, she usually does one of her favourite activities: having breakfast with her friends.

 

As soon as she leaves her home, she crosses the street that separates Sants from Les Corts and, in five minutes, she is in front of the Camp Nou where, after looking at it for a while and discussing with the grandparents in the neighbourhood the current state of the works, she has breakfast with her friends, including Claire Fontaine. Some of them work in a public administration department and others in one of the best clubs in the world. 

 

Breakfasts always serve to catch up on national health issues and dark sports stories of those that are only told to you off the record and that later, after a more or less short time, end up appearing in the national press, because one of the important things that all these friends point out is that sooner or later you always end up knowing the truth.

After breakfast, if weather permits, The Grandma heads to the gardens of La Maternitat, where she spends the rest of the morning reading a good book. Today she has chosen Le Dernier Jour d'un Condamné by Victor Hugo, the author who was born on a day like today in 1802.

 

The weather has changed from grey clouds to bright sunshine and a cool breeze that has made reading enjoyable. It has also been a good opportunity to read in French, a wonderful language.

 

Victor-Marie Hugo, vicomte Hugo (26 February 1802-22 May 1885) was a French Romantic author, poet, essayist, playwright, journalist, human rights activist and politician.

His most famous works are the novels The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831) and Les Misérables (1862). In France, Hugo is renowned for his poetry collections, such as Les Contemplations and La Légende des siècles. Hugo was at the forefront of the Romantic literary movement with his play Cromwell and drama Hernani. His works have inspired music, both during his lifetime and after his death, including the opera Rigoletto and the musicals Les Misérables and Notre-Dame de Paris. He produced more than 4,000 drawings in his lifetime, and campaigned for social causes such as the abolition of capital punishment and slavery.

Although he was a committed royalist when young, Hugo's views changed as the decades passed, and he became a passionate supporter of republicanism, serving in politics as both deputy and senator. His work touched upon most of the political and social issues and the artistic trends of his time. His opposition to absolutism, and his literary stature, established him as a national hero. Hugo died on 22 May 1885, aged 83.  

 

He was given a state funeral in the Panthéon of Paris, which was attended by over two million people, the largest in French history.

Hugo was at the forefront of the romantic literary movement. Many of his works have inspired music, both during his lifetime and after his death, including the musicals Notre-Dame de Paris and Les Misérables. He produced more than 4,000 drawings in his lifetime, and campaigned for social causes such as the abolition of capital punishment.

Though a committed royalist when he was young, Hugo's views changed as the decades passed, and he became a passionate supporter of republicanism; his work touches upon most of the political and social issues and the artistic trends of his time. 

 

Victor-Marie Hugo was born on 26 February 1802 (7 Ventôse, year X of the Republic) in Besançon in Eastern France and died on 22 May 1885.

Le Dernier Jour d'un Condamné is a novella by Victor Hugo first published in 1829. It recounts the thoughts of a man condemned to die. Victor Hugo wrote this novel to express his feelings that the death penalty should be abolished.

Victor Hugo witnessed the spectacle of the guillotine several times and was outraged that society coolly gives itself permission to do what it condemns the accused for having done. It was the day after crossing the Place de l'Hotel de Ville where an executioner was greasing the guillotine in anticipation of a scheduled execution that Hugo began writing The Last Day of a Condemned Man. He finished very quickly. The book was published in February 1829 by Charles Gosselin without the author's name. Three years later, on 15 March 1832, Hugo completed his story with a long preface and his signature.

Hugo's text was translated twice into English in 1840. The first translation was published by George William MacArthur Reynolds, author of penny blood novel The Mysteries of London (1844-48), as The Last Day of a Condemned. The second translation in 1840 was completed by Sir P. H. Fleetwood, titled The Last Days of a Condemned. Fleetwood also added his own preface to the book, outlining why it was important that British anti-capital punishment campaigners ought to read it, whereas Reynolds did not add any substantive new material but reprinted Hugo's preface and provided a few footnotes which he signed as Trans.

Though The Last Day of a Condemned Man is lesser known than some of Hugo's other works, the novel had the distinction of being praised as absolutely the most real and truthful of everything that Hugo wrote by Fyodor Dostoevsky, who referenced it in both his letters and his novel, The Idiot.

Notably, Dostoyevsky had suffered the psychological insight of himself being condemned to death and suffered a mock execution after reprieved. Furthermore, Dostoevsky pays tribute to the novel in the format of The Meek One, citing Hugo's novel as a means of justifying the fantastic idea of writing down a person's thoughts at a moment of distress.

Download The Last Day of a Condemned Man by Victor Hugo

Change your opinions, keep to your principles; 
change your leaves, keep intact your roots.

Victor Hugo