The fecundity of the emblematic poet and playwright of romanticism in France produces vertigo in those who look into that bottomless universe.

Mario Vargas Llosa

On December 2, 1851, the president of the Second French Republic, Louis Bonaparte, Napoleon's nephew, led a coup that a year later led to the establishment of the Second Empire and the transformation of the republican president into Emperor Napoleon III. . The day after the coup, Victor Hugo, who, due to his status as a deputy in the National Assembly, faced the coup plotters, began to write a diary in which he recorded everything he saw around him in those convulsive days, almost hour by hour. These notes crystallized in the publication in 1877 of History of a crime, declaration of a witness, the chronicle of the first four days that followed the coup and that ended in a bloody way with the crushing of a large part of the opposition in the Assembly as well as of those who offered some resistance. In the story of that tragedy that Hugo divided into five acts and that "not even Aeschylus himself would have dreamed of", he manages to maintain a narrative tension that captivates the reader from the first page.

With 49 years of age and public recognition, Victor Hugo undertook exile to Belgium. He only returned to France in September 1870, after the defeat of the army in the battle of Sedan in the Franco-Prussian war. Hugo considered it “urgent” to publish Historia de un crimen because he knew that at any time and place in the world there will always be some despot willing to impose himself on the popular will and crush without hesitation those who oppose his shady plans.

"The fecundity of the emblematic poet and playwright of romanticism in France produces vertigo in those who look into that bottomless universe."