Reading Order
Les Feuilles d'automne Reading Order
Les Feuilles d'automne (Autumn Leaves, 1831) by Victor Hugo is the lyric collection that marks his transition from the public Romantic leader to the private poet of intimate feeling. Published in the year of his political disillusionment after the July Revolution of 1830, it is the first of the great lyric collections in which Hugo withdraws from the political arena and the literary battlefield of the Préface de Cromwell to speak in a different register: the domestic, the personal, the elegiac. The collection opens with the poem 'Ce siècle avait deux ans' ('This century was two years old'), which establishes the autobiographical framework — Hugo born at the same moment as the nineteenth century, his childhood and adolescence the childhood of the age — and continues with poems about his children, his home, childhood memory, and the melancholy of the passing of time. The title is deliberate: these are the autumn leaves of the Romantic spring of the 1820s, the meditative withdrawal of the poet from public noise into private music.
Where to start
Les Feuilles d'automne is best read as the first of Hugo's lyric collections in the sequence that runs through Les Chants du crépuscule (1835), Les Voix intérieures (1837), and Les Rayons et les ombres (1840). The collection is most accessible to French readers without extensive classical training; the poems are lyrically rich without the mythological complexity of the later work.
Complete Les Feuilles d'automne Book List
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Les Feuilles d'automne
Victor Hugo·1831·Available in French in the Pléiade Œuvres poétiques complètes and in standalone volumes (GF Flammarion, Gallimard Poésie). Selections available in English translation in various anthologies. - Buy
Les Chants du crépuscule
OptionalVictor Hugo·1835·The direct sequel — poems of political uncertainty and personal feeling in the aftermath of the July Monarchy's first years.
Les Feuilles d'automne — Frequently Asked Questions
What is the place of Les Feuilles d'automne in Hugo's poetry?
Les Feuilles d'automne (1831) is the first of four lyric collections that Hugo published between 1831 and 1840, before the great middle silence of the 1840s and the transformation of his poetry into the epic and political work of the 1850s and 1860s. The sequence — Feuilles d'automne, Les Chants du crépuscule (1835), Les Voix intérieures (1837), Les Rayons et les ombres (1840) — represents the period in which Hugo is working out his relationship to the two great lyric vocations of the Romantic tradition: the private poet of personal feeling (the tradition of Lamartine and Musset) and the public poet of political and philosophical vision (the tradition he would ultimately claim as his own). The Feuilles d'automne are the most private of the four collections — the most directly autobiographical, the most domestically focused — and they established Hugo's credentials as a lyric poet of intimate feeling at the same moment that Hernani and Notre-Dame de Paris were establishing his credentials as the leader of the Romantic theatrical and novelistic movements.
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