In 1845 Hugo began to take an active part in politics. Son of a Vendean mother,égendedesSiè he had been in early life a fervent royalist, and even in 1830 he could write of the fallen royal family with respectful sympathy. Yet by that time his democratic leanings had declared themselves, and he accepted the constitutional monarchy of Louis Philippe only as a step towards a republic, for which he considered France was not yet ripe. In 1845 the king made him a peer of France, but this did not prevent him from throwing himself with all the ardour of his nature into the revolution of 1848. Divining the ambition of Louis Napoleon, he resisted his growing power, and when the Second Empire was established the poet was among the first who were exiled from France. He took refuge first in Jersey, and afterwards in Guernsey, where he lived in a house near the coast, from the upper balcony of which the cliffs of Normandy could sometimes be discerned. Thence he launched against the usurper a bitter prose satire, _Napoléon le Petit_, and a still bitterer satire in verse, _Les Châtiments_, and there he wrote two of his greatest novels, _Les Travailleurs de la Mer_ and _Les Misérables_, two of his finest volumes of poetry, _Les Contemplations_, the greater part of the first series of _La Légende des Siècles_, and the two remarkable religious poems, _Dieu_ and _La Fin de Satan_. He returned to France on the fall of Napoleon in 1870, to be for fifteen years the idol of the people, who regarded him as the incarnation of the spirit of liberty. Several volumes of poetry were issued during those fifteen years, notably _L'Année Terrible_, _Les Quatre Vents de l'Esprit_, and a second series of _La Légende des Siècles_, none perhaps equal as a whole to the best of his earlier volumes, but all, especially the second-named, abounding in beautiful and striking poetry. He died in 1885, and was buried in a manner befitting one who had filled Europe with his fame, and had been for so many years the 'stormy voice of France.'
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