721
cation for French exiles. François-Victor was to come
a few months later. The family stayed at Marine Ter-
race until their fi nal relocationto Guernsey on October
31 1855. The poet lived on this Island close to Jersey
until the French empire collapsed and the Republic was
proclaimed on September 4th, 1870.
While this upper middle class family had led a busy
social life in Paris and Brussels, in Jersey, they had to
adapt to a new pace, which largely contrasted with their
former life. They had to get along with new kind of
distractions. So, plans for a book illustrated with pho-
tography shaped up as soon as November 1852: Jersey et
l’Archipel de la Manche. Made up of two volumes, one
rather inexpensive, would have contained the poet’s 400
verses, and a more luxurious one with text (pertaining
to Jersey’s history and institutions) would have been il-
lustrated with the photographs taken by his sons Charles
and François-Victor, and Auguste Vacquerie.
The Hugos pictures have to be understood within the
context of exile and the framework of this project. This
publication, and the photographs as well were aiming to
distract the Hugo family. For their father Victor Hugo, it
could have served to solve some fi nancial problems. The
project was also conceived of a common work between
the writer and his sons and friend, and an opportunity
to have them busy experimenting with a new medium
for which V. Hugo was enthusiastic (photography). For
Victor Hugo, taking advantage of his interest in Jersey’s
nature and history and avoiding any political references,
such a book of photography let the French public know
that not far away from the French shore, was a small
group of opponents to the imperial regime.
In 1853 Jean-Jacques Sabatier, another French exile,
apparently taught the Hugo sons daguerreotype, and the
very basics about photography using negatives. Though
François-Victor apparently kept on using this technique,
Charles came back to Caen (France) in March–April
1853, where he learnt the use of glass negative, (collo-
dion and albumen plates), and large size cameras, under
a friend of his father, the photograph Edmond Bacot.
Compared to François-Victor’s daguerreotype, Charles
gained the possibility of printing several images from
a sole negative, mainly using a salted paper technique
which gave softness and a result that resembled a draw-
ing, especially with portraits.
Victor Hugo, though he never was the operator during
the photographic sessions, acted as a director during the
shootings. The Hugos sons’ images, particularly in the
case of landscapes, show a close attention to scenery,
dramatic grandeur, sublime, strangeness, and above all
an incredible admiration for their father. Their photo-
graphic images of him emphasized his daring attitude as
an exiled republican and militant writer. Through those
images, Victor Hugo was eager to attest differently his
political commitment by spreading his image widely as
a message from the determined handful of men standing
up against the regime.
Illustration books presenting picturesque or romantic
travels belonged to a well-established tradition in the
eighteen fi fties. Victor Hugo had been earlier included
in a project of an illustrated book on Rhine and Mont
Blanc. And in this same year 1852, Blanquart-Evrard
published “Voyage en Egypte, Nubie et Palestine” with
Maxime Du Camp’s photographs. Yet this project which
mingled poems and prose with photographs remained
unfi nished for several reasons: fi rst, Hetzel, Hugo’s
usual publisher, proved to be very cautious, fearing the
high costs for such a publication. Then the censurship
organized by the imperial regime threatened the press;
the reviews refused to be partners of the project, even
though it were publicized in “La Lumière” the Parisian
journal specialized in photography (August 6 1853, no.
32, and October 8 1853, no. 41). The pictures made in
Jersey were to be circulated separately as single images
or albums to be given to close friends. For the texts
already written, Auguste Vacquerie was to use part
of them in Profi ls et Grimaces (1856), Les Miettes de
l’histoire (1863), and Victor Hugo would publish his
poems in Les Contemplations (1855). François-Victor
published his texts in La Normandie inconnue (1857),
while his brother never undertook the part he was sup-
posed to write.
All hopes for publication apparently were dropped by- At that time, the Hugos had moved to Hauteville
House in Guernsey, and even if a dark room had been
organized there, only four new photographs seemed to
have been taken in this island (though some reprints
from the Jersey negatives seemed to have been done
somewhat later on). With the end of this illustrated book
project came little by little for the Hugos sons a fading
interest in photography, even though Charles seemed
to have perfected his technique in1860, when photog-
raphers Leballeur and Auzou stayed with the family.
The brothers turned to other activities, such as writing
plays or translating Shakespeare in French. The exile
was getting tiresome and their sojourns abroad, without
their father, longer.
Mathilde Leduc-Grimaldi
Biography
Charles (1826–1871) and François-Victor (1828–1873)
were respectively Victor Hugo’s second and third chil-
dren of four, and his only two sons. Both of them were
very deeply infl uenced by their father (1802–1885), his
work and interests, artistic as well as political.
In 1848, Charles, after a short term as Lamartine’s
personal secretary, started a newspaper l’Evènement,
along with his brother François-Victor, and two close
friends, Paul Meurice and Auguste Vacquerie. They all