Avenue Victor Hugo

Arrondissement 16

Numbers: 14, 60, 69, 72, 124

This, the second longest of the twelve roads leading out from what is since 1970 the Place Charles-de-Gaulle (previously the place de l’Étoile), was renamed three times before Victor Hugo moved and died there. In 1840 it was simply called Departmental Road 64, and then after land speculators took over in 1850 it was the avenue de Saint-Cloud and subsequently, at the time Victor Hugo moved in, the Avenue d’Eylau. This name dated from the Third Empire and was its attempt to associate itself with Napoleon I’s military successes, even including the inconclusive Battle of Eylau of 1807.

As a continuation of the same attempt to weaken the anti-Republican monarchists and Bonapartists by celebrating France’s biggest-ever Republican celebrity, the road’s present name was adopted on Victor Hugo‘s 79th birthday in 1881.

Number 14 was where Guy de Maupassant, the author of Boule de Suif (The Dumpling), lived from 1889-1890.

The office organising the recruitment of French citizens into the Waffen SS was based at No. 60. Pierre Laval signed the decree, which led to some 2,740 French joining up by 1944. Laval was one of just three French men executed by the French High Court in 1945.

In August 1940 Laval ordered the arrest of Georges Mandel, who had lived at No. 69. A Radical Party deputy in the National Assembly he had opposed the Vichy regime and was deported to Buchenwald. Returned to Paris as a hostage in 1944 he was seized by the French Milice and shot in the Fontainbleau Forest on July 7 1944. The Milice’s leader, Joseph Darnand, was tried and executed in 1945. Thousands of other Milice members were never caught or tried.

The former fascist founder of the resistance Hector escape network and the Civil and Military Organisation, Jacques Arthuys, lived and was arrested at No. 72. He was killed in December 1941 at the Hinzert concentration camp.

Hugo on the lintel above 124 avenue Victor Hugo, sculpted by Marcel Fonquergne from a photograph

The building at No. 124 was built in 1907 on the site of the previous home of Hugo and Juliette Drouet, who moved there together in 1878. This was where Juliette died on May 11 1883.

On February 28 1882, on the initiative of a journalist and political exile from 1871 to 1877, Edmond Bazire, a huge 600,000 strong celebration of Hugo’s 80th birthday took place outside his home. Victor Hugo died there on 22 May 1885.

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