Short Fiction Hugo, Victor: Claude Gueux. v1 12 June 2016

[AlexBell]

Victor Hugo (1802-1885) was a French poet, dramatist, artist, and social activist who wrote many short stories and novels. He was a Royalist in early life and then a Republican, and spent many years in exile before his return to Paris. After his death his body was laid in state under the Arc de Triomphe and was buried in the Pantheon.

Claude Gueux was his fifth prose work, and was published in 1834. It contains a short story about a murder, followed by a passionate condemnation of the social injustices which led up to the murder. He later wrote that Claude Gueux was a precursor to Les Misérables.

The source text was taken from Wikisource and checked against the Delphi Classics version. I have silently corrected typos, curled quotes, replaced italics, used British English, and made changes to spelling, punctuation, and hyphenation using oxfordictionaries.com.

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