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The City of Paris preserves the two places where Victor Hugo lived the longest. The flat he rented for sixteen years (from 1832 to 1848) at the second floor of the Hôtel de Rohan- Guéménée in place des Vosges in Paris, and Hauteville House on the island of Guernesey, where he lived in exile for 15 years (from 1856 to 1870).

In 1851, the banned poet left France for an exile which would last 19 years.

On 16 May 1856, thanks to the success of his Contemplations, Victor Hugo bought Hauteville House in Guernesey, a large white building with a garden overlooking the sea. An enthusiastic collector of secondhand furniture and bric-à-brac, he brought back a profusion of chests, sideboards, carpets, mirrors, crockery, figurines and other objects from his excursions around the island. He put his boundless imagination to work on the house, spending months overseeing a major conversion on a medieval pattern, which gave this unique building an inner force and mystery. Hugo lived in Hauteville House until 1870, when he returned to France after the fall of the Second Empire, but he stayed here again for a year in 1872- 73, for a week in 1875 and for four months in 1878. Here he completed many of his masterpieces, including La Légende des siècles, Les Misérables, William Shakespeare, Les Chansons des rues et des bois, Les Travailleurs de la mer and L’ Homme qui rit.

In March 1927, the centenary year of the Romantic Movement, the house was donated to the City of Paris by the poet’s descendants Jeanne, Jean, Marguerite and François.

Hauteville house has been preserved exactly as it was. Hugo’s abundant creativity is displayed in the astonishing richness of its decoration. As Charles Hugo put it, the house is “a veritable three-storey autograph, a poem in sereval rooms”.