Joseph Léopold Sigisbert HUGO

The story

Born in Nancy on 15 November 1773, Léopold Hugo enlisted at fifteen and served under the Revolution and then the Empire. He followed Joseph Bonaparte to Spain, where he governed Ávila and then Segovia and received the title of Count of Sigüenza.

His feat of arms was a siege. In 1815, after Waterloo, he held Thionville for three months under Allied blockade and never gave the town up. It is that town held that his son would have carved on his grave.

That son, Victor, would write the most famous line a poet ever addressed to his father: “Mon père, ce héros au sourire si doux” — my father, that hero with so gentle a smile — which opens “Après la bataille” in 1859, thirty-one years after the general's death. The line tidies up the memory: in 1818 the civil court of the Seine had granted Léopold Hugo and Sophie Trébuchet a legal separation, and the writer's childhood had been spent between two camps.

He died in Paris on 29 January 1828, at fifty-four. Victor was twenty-five: the battle of Hernani, the theatre riot that would make him the leader of the Romantics, came two years later.

In 1870, with Paris besieged by the Prussians, Victor Hugo, back from exile, had this carved on the obelisk: “Par lui Thionville resta française” — through him Thionville stayed French. Thionville capitulated on 24 November of that same year and became German in 1871. The stone, for its part, makes the general two years younger than he was: it gives his birth as 1775. Lying there, in Division 27, are Sophie Trébuchet, who died in 1821; Eugène, Victor's brother (1800-1837); his two sons, Charles (1826-1871) and François-Victor (1828-1873); and his grandson Georges Victor-Hugo (1868-1925). Victor Hugo himself is in the Panthéon.