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50 free Victor Hugo trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Victor Hugo wrote Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, started a riot with a play, sat in three parliaments, spent 19 years in exile on Guernsey rather than forgive Napoleon III, drew 4,000 pictures, ate zoo animals during the siege of Paris and was carried to the Panthéon by a crowd of two million. He also kept a mistress for 50 years, coded his other affairs like Pepys and became a saint in a Vietnamese religion. These 50 questions cover the man and the work: his general father and the origin of prisoner 24601, the Chateaubriand vow, the Hernani premiere, the novels from Hans of Iceland to Ninety-Three, the Belgian publisher and the one-character telegram, Hauteville House, the Napoléon le Petit pamphlets, the campaigns against slavery and the scaffold, Liszt's one-finger piano lessons, Léopoldine, Juliette Drouet, the 1881 avenue renaming and the state funeral. Easy questions stick to the famous titles; the expert tier asks about pieuvre, Louise Bertin and the 740 Catholic attacks. Every answer is cited to a page we checked, with a short explanation so you learn something even when you miss. Play it solo or print it for a book-club night.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Who is the hero of Les Misérables?
Jean Valjean
Hugo first scribbled the name Jean Tréjean in his notes on the Toulon prison.
Q 02Which Paris cathedral gives its name to Hugo's 1831 novel about a hunchback?
Notre-Dame
The novel shamed the city into restoring the neglected building.
Q 03In which city was Hugo born?
Besançon
His father was a general in Napoleon's army, so the family moved constantly.
Q 04What was Hugo's father's profession?
General in Napoleon's army
Léopold Hugo enlisted in the Revolutionary army at 14; Hugo's grandfather was the wood merchant.
Q 05Prisoner number 24601 in Les Misérables comes from what?
The date Hugo believed he was conceived
Hugo believed he was conceived on 24 June 1801.
Q 06What did the teenage Hugo write in his diary in 1816?
I shall be Chateaubriand or nothing
His life went on to parallel Chateaubriand's in Romanticism, politics and exile.
Q 07Why did the Académie française doubt Hugo's 1817 competition poem?
They refused to believe he was only 15
The poem earned him an honourable mention.
Q 08Whom did Hugo marry in 1822?
Adèle Foucher
They lived together for nearly 46 years despite affairs on both sides.
Q 09Hugo's first poetry collection in 1822 earned him a pension from which king?
Louis XVIII
He was only 20 when Odes et poésies diverses appeared.
Q 10Which 1830 play's premiere sparked nights of rioting between romantics and classicists?
Hernani
It announced the arrival of French Romanticism at the Comédie-Française.
Q 11Which Verdi opera is based on Hugo's play Le roi s'amuse?
Rigoletto
Verdi also adapted Hernani as Ernani in 1844.
Q 12Hugo's 1829 novel about a man awaiting execution was called what?
The Last Day of a Condemned Man
It influenced Camus, Dickens and Dostoyevsky and was published anonymously.
Q 13What was Hugo's first novel, published in 1823?
Hans of Iceland
Bug-Jargal followed three years later.
Q 14What name did Hugo first scribble for the hero of Les Misérables in his prison notes?
Q 21How many attempts did Hugo need before being elected to the Académie française in 1841?
Four
Academicians hostile to the romantic evolution had delayed his election.
Q 22Which king made Hugo a peer of France in 1845?
Louis-Philippe
In the upper chamber he spoke against the death penalty and for Polish self-government.
Q 23Whose 1851 seizure of power drove Hugo into nearly two decades of exile?
Louis Napoleon
Hugo openly called him a traitor to France.
Q 24On which island did Hugo live in exile from 1855 to 1870?
Jean Tréjean
He visited the Bagne of Toulon in 1839 but did not start writing until 1845.
Q 15Which Belgian publisher issued Les Misérables after a six-month press campaign?
Lacroix and Verboeckhoven
Only the first part, Fantine, was launched at first, selling out within hours.
Q 16In the famous (if apocryphal) tale, what did Hugo telegraph his publisher in 1862?
A single question mark
The publisher supposedly replied with a single exclamation mark.
Q 17Which author privately called Les Misérables "repulsive and inept"?
Baudelaire
Flaubert found in it neither truth nor greatness; the masses loved it anyway.
Q 18Toilers of the Sea features a battle with what creature?
A giant squid
The book popularised the Guernsey word pieuvre in French.
Q 19Which French word for squid entered the language thanks to Toilers of the Sea?
Pieuvre
It was the term used on Guernsey, where Hugo spent 15 years in exile.
Q 20Hugo's last novel, Ninety-Three, is set during which period?
The Reign of Terror
It was a subject he had avoided until 1874.
Guernsey
He had been expelled from Jersey for supporting a newspaper that insulted Queen Victoria.
Q 25What was the name of Hugo's home in Saint Peter Port?
Hauteville House
It is now a museum owned by the City of Paris.
Q 26Why was Hugo expelled from Jersey in 1855?
For backing a paper that insulted Queen Victoria
He moved on to the smaller island of Guernsey.
Q 27What was the title of Hugo's famous pamphlet mocking Napoleon III?
Napoléon le Petit
It was banned in France but still had a strong impact there.
Q 28Why did Hugo refuse Napoleon III's 1859 amnesty?
It would have meant muting his criticism
He returned only when the Third Republic was proclaimed in 1870.
Q 29Which American abolitionist's life did Hugo plead with the US government to spare in 1859?
John Brown
His drawing Le Pendu was an homage to Brown after the hanging.
Q 30Hugo's 1848 speech against the death penalty ended with which line?
Now overthrow the scaffold
His influence was credited with removing the death penalty from the constitutions of Geneva, Portugal and Colombia.