Victor-Marie Hugo was one of France's most distinguished writers: a poet, dramatist and novelist of the romantic school of the 19th century. His most famous works in English are his two epic novels, The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831) and Les Misérables (1862), both of which have been adapted many times for stage and screen. He was exiled in 1851 by Napoleon III, but returned to France in 1870 in triumph, and his final years marked by public veneration.

Extra credit: Hugo's character Quasimodo -- the Hunchback of Notre Dame -- has been played on-screen by Anthony Quinn (1956), Anthony Hopkins (1982), Charles Laughton (1939), and most famously by Lon Chaney (1923).