Victor Hugo's Shipwreck Lighthouse Cycle by Peter Russella

Today’s special episode is by Peter Russella. Russella is a graduate student in French at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he is writing a dissertation titled À Feu Tournant: The Lighthouses of French-Language Literature, Comics, and Film. He has recently published two articles on literary lighthouses. His work on comics, “Making the French Lighthouse Breton in Emmanuel Lepage’s Ar-Men”, was included in Contemporary French and Francophone Studies in June 2025. He also wrote “The Lighthouses on Victor Hugo’s Sea/Shore” for the Autumn 2025 issue of the Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics. This seemingly eternal fixture on the shoreline, a literal beacon of hope to sailors, were then undergoing a modernization. Mythic, poetic and now mechanic, Russella explores the lighthouse in the life and writings of Victor Hugo.

Part I. Introduction

In the time it took Victor Hugo to write The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Ruy Blas, Les Misérables, and the frequently assigned poem “Demain, dès l’aube,” France added 63 new lighthouses to its coasts. This made sea travel safer and changed France’s coastlines dramatically. Suddenly, imagining the seashore without lighthouses was almost as difficult as imagining a world before Jean Valjean.

As they appeared along the English Channel and the coasts of the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea, lighthouses also appeared in Victor Hugo’s work. My study of these works led to a dissertation chapter, a scholarly article, and a greater understanding of how technologies and places are represented in literature. In this podcast I’ll present Victor Hugo’s lighthouses alongside the ships and sailors who depend on them.

These three appear in concert with storms repeatedly in Hugo’s poetry and prose. Regardless of setting, storms cause shipwrecks, shipwrecks call for the construction of lighthouses, and lighthouses are unable to prevent the next shipwreck. They are a place provoked by and dependent upon a repeated phenomenon. This cycle defines what I am calling Hugolian Lighthouses, or Victor Hugo’s lighthouses.  

Before we begin, a quick note on the term lighthouse. In English, when I say lighthouse, I am referring to signal lights and beacons used by mariners to navigate safely, whether they actually include a house or not. In French, the word phare, P-H-A-R-E, is the general term, but it comes with some complications when we’re talking about in literature. Phare can mean lighthouse, but also a general beacon. In Hugo’s texts, maritime language helps me to identify a lighthouse rather than just a light. The term phare also has variations based on generations of technology like phare à feux tournants (lighthouse with a rotating lens assembly) or phare fixe (lighthouse with a fixed beam). To add to the confusion, is, of course, the symbolic sense of something like a light in the darkness during the Romantic period. I have found that very few lighthouses exist without being metaphorically charged by the weight of bright shining beacons in the night.

Part II. Victor Hugo and the 19th-Century Lighthouse

Hugo, who lived from 1802 to 1885, is often referred to as L’Homme siècle or the Man of the Century so much was the 19th century impacted by his life and work. Before Hugo and before the modern lighthouse, there were, of course, other lighthouses. Signal fires have been in burning as long as people have navigated out of sight of the coast.

There are Ancient Greek lighthouses, Ancient Roman ones, and of course, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, the nearly 400-foot-tall Lighthouse of Alexandria, built in the 3rd century B.C.E. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert’s Encyclopedia, published in the mid-to-late 18th century, focused on the ancient and the significant around the Western world, ignoring the, admittedly few, lighthouses in France at the time. When Victor Hugo was born there were just 15 lighthouses in France, which was causing some problems.

According to science historian Theresa Levitt, 19th-century France had a shipwreck problem. In her book A Short Bright Flash: Augustin Fresnel and the Birth of the Modern Lighthouse (2013), she writes that (quote) “In France, two naturalists counted nearly a hundred French ships that disappeared every year just in the English Channel in the period 1817-1820” (end quote) (Levitt 14). She writes that this problem was the catalyst for two responses: one artistic and one scientific. The artistic response was Théodore Géricault’s painting “The Raft of the Medusa” which is hanging today in the Louvre Museum (Levitt 18). The painting depicts a shocking current event in which a ship called the Méduse sank off the coast of West Africa and, as some of the shipwrecked, confined to a raft, died one by one, others purportedly resorted to cannibalism. The painting was originally on view at the Paris Salon beginning on August 25, 1819.

The same week, Levitt writes, the physicist and engineer Augustin Fresnel presented his plan to make lighthouses brighter (Levitt 18). The optics he designed still carry his name; we call them Fresnel Lenses. Following the lenses, his colleagues, a group of scientists, mathematicians, and engineers, including François Arago and his own brother Léonor Fresnel, redesigned the towers and, more importantly, mapped the coastline to assure that there was always a lighthouse visible to sailors as they navigated along the French coast. Their designs were produced by the optician François Soleil, glass manufacturer Louis Sautter, and mechanician Jacques Tabouret who fabricated the new lenses by Fresnel’s design. This monumental effort was the scientific response. Fresnel’s work on the optics are called by Levitt and others as The invention that saved a million ships, which is no doubt true. But, his success was very much that of a team effort.

Levitt suggests that each response to the shipwreck problem signaled a distinct approach to Nature. Géricault depicted humans being broken by the power of Nature, whereas (quote) “Fresnel’s work offered the tantalizing hope that human progress might eradicate such scenes altogether” (end quote) (Levitt 18-19). While Géricault was painting and Fresnel was harnessing and projecting light, Victor Hugo was writing his first novel. The writer was born into the shipwreck problem; he is a contemporary of this lighthouse expansion. As there was an artistic and scientific response to the shipwreck problem, there is also an artistic, in this case literary, response to the lighthouse solution. Victor Hugo is perfectly placed to determine whether these new places saved ships, whether they solved the problem.

Part III. Those lost at sea

Victor Hugo puts lighthouses to the test in his poetry and prose. In one poem, “Une nuit qu’on entendait la mer sans la voir” or “A Night we heard the sea without seeing it,” from Hugo’s collection called Inner Voices published in 1836, sailors are caught off guard by an approaching storm. On the shore is a lighthouse. The poet is on land watching a shipwreck; this also mean he is watching the lighthouse fail to save the sailors.

Hugo describes those threatened by their environment. He calls the sailors lost souls, pitiful far off in the in the shadows. Hugo rhymes the darkness of Au loin, dans cette ombre [Far off in the shadows] with Sur la nef qui sombre [On the sinking ship] tying the storm to the situation on board. The homonym of sombre returns a few lines later when sailors are reaching out vers la terre sombre [towards the dark land]. As the poem continues, the poet calls the sailors reckless because they can’t handle the situation. They are losing their fight with the sea and they reach out for a lighthouse, what the poet calls a (quote) “candlestick that God set on the shore” (end quote). If the first mention of the lighthouse inspires hope, the second dashes it: (quote) “Phare au rouge éclair // Que la brume estompe!” (Red flashing lighthouse // obscured by the fog). The lighthouse is steadfast, present, but incapable of helping: the light cannot reach the shipwrecked. We never learn the fate of the sailors.

The narrative of sailors in peril in addition to the language associated with lighthouses and shipwrecks appear again and again throughout Hugo’s work. Another example comes from The Man Who Laughs, a novel published in 1869. Early in the work, set in the 1690s, a ship called the Matutina leaves Portland, England, and sails into the English Channel. Aboard are a mix of honest passengers and others from a group called the comprachicos who kidnap children and mutilate them to later sell them to carnivals. The ship disembarks straight into a snowstorm, no doubt a punishment for the compracico’s moral fecklessness.

Tossed around in the foul weather, they find themselves rudderless. Cast about by the sea, they encounter a lighthouse and hopefully cry out with relief “Un phare !” before their ship is wrecked.

When this lighthouse, called Les Casquets, is seen by the shipwrecked in 1690, it is still operating as it has for centuries, unchanged since the Middle Ages or even before. But just as the passengers of the Matutina are crying out to the lighthouse for help, Hugo’s narration zooms out so that he can address his readership in the 19th century. He compares what he calls the vieux phare barbare [old savage lighthouse] with the modern lighthouse with its watch-like mechanism, what we know today as part of the apparatus holding up the massive Fresnel lenses. The latter were housed in the dozens of lighthouses being built in France when this novel was being published. Literary critic Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly considered this chapter as one of many digressions which threw the novel off balance. It’s one of my favorite passages in Victor Hugo’s œuvre.

Here Hugo writes about two generations of the same lighthouse, each, naturally, watching over the same sea. Hugo’s treatment of the shipwreck problem presents a clear opportunity to comment on the modern lighthouse solution from the point of view of the 1860s. Unsurprisingly, Victor Hugo thinks that the older generation of the lighthouse is more powerful. However, regardless of progress and technological innovation, the efficacy of the beacons in this situation is dependent not on the power of light in the dark storm, but on the state of one’s vessel. Hugo writes: (quote) “To a ship at sea with all its rigging that its captain can control, the Casquets Lighthouse is useful. […] To a ship lost at sea it is nothing less than horrendous” (end quote) (Hugo, Homme 180). If one’s ship is damaged, Hugo writes, its relationship to the lighthouse changes. In these cases, the beacon cannot save, guide, or communicate in any way. All it can do, as Hugo puts it, is (quote) “point out their final resting place” (end quote) (Hugo, Homme 180).

Here, inverting the candlestick metaphor from the 1836 poem, Hugo calls Les Casquets (quote) “la chandelle du sépulchre” [the burial or funeral candle] (180). The 19th-century lighthouse (what he calls the lenticular lighthouse) is different, but not anymore affective than the medieval one. This is because of what Hugo calls a tragic irony. The lighthouse is present, but powerless to help a ship that is lost itself. In this sense, the capability of lighthouses has not changed over time. By bringing together two literary iterations of the Casquets lighthouse, Hugo makes a clear point: technological progress does not change the basic dangers of sea travel. The onus is therefore not on the lighthouse to save, but on the sailors to navigate safely.

While the poem is set in Normandy in 1836 and this part of The Man Who Laughs in 1690, the ships, the sailors, the storms, and the land are described in strikingly similar ways. The vessels are called ship, skiff, raft, ancient ship, a two masted ship, as well as proper names like La Matutina. Their crews are poor sailors, lost sailors, sailors, and the shipwrecked. Water is often flot or houle (both meaning swell) or onde (meaning wave, water, or flow) in addition to sea and ocean. Wind is vent, but also phrases for north and northwestern winds. Wind also, undoubtedly, inhabits the expression of clouds: coups de vent et coups de mer or wind and sea strikes, and storms. Land is shore, earth, coast, as well as inland features like hills, woods, villages, and valleys and coastal features like reefs and shelves. As for the lighthouse, it is often referred to as feu [fire]. (Note that feu is synonymous with light in many parts of the French language.). Each work uses phare [lighthouse], specifying at times with features like lighthouse with a flashing red light and unwavering lighthouse. Victor Hugo repeatedly creates the same scenario in works throughout his writing life. In each lighthouse work, a ship of some kind is caught in a storm. He introduces a lighthouse, and the lighthouse, regardless of its modernity, can’t prevent a shipwreck and save the poor, lost, shipwrecked sailors.

Before going any further, I want to remind you that the works in my study have lighthouses in them. Some of Hugo’s most famous other works include shipwrecks, too, like for example “Oceano Nox” and The Toilers of the Sea. But without lighthouses, the sailors’ hopes of being saved by humanity and humanity’s hope of saving them does not exist, and that’s what I find most significant in these situations.

Victor Hugo is not without hope. In the poetry collection The Legend of the Ages he writes of a need to continue to build lighthouses to try to prevent shipwrecks. This example, which features the Lighthouse of Alexandria, is one part of a longer poem written in 1862 called “The Seven Wonders of the World.” Here, one of the most emblematic lighthouses ever is constructed as a response to a  shipwreck. Again there are “lost sailors” shipwrecked by a threatening sea (Hugo, Légende 274). The Lighthouse of Alexandria appears at the end of the poem in response to the catastrophe. In doing so, Hugo uses what I find to be the most beautiful description of a lighthouse in French-language literary expression.

He writes that this is humanity’s effort to (quote) “suppléer, // sur les eaux, dans les nuits fécondes en désastres, // À l’inutilité magnifique des astres” [It is humanity’s effort to compensate, on the sea, in the dark and stormy nights, for the magnificent uselessness of the stars] (Hugo, Légende 275).

Because of this I don’t believe that the shipwreck problem is just a 19th-century one (although Levitt is right that things had gotten out of hand). The lighthouse solution is also not a 19th-century phenomenon. In this example Hugo is writing about why one of the first major lighthouses was built, which is, of course, not surprising. Lighthouses will always be tied to shipwrecks. (In fact, my dissertation was partially inspired by what I believed to be a cruel decision to put the lighthouse shelf next to the shipwreck shelf in a local used bookstore). Really though this makes perfect sense. But Victor Hugo’s shipwreck-lighthouse situations take this relationship further. The powerless examples from 1836 and 1869 depict the same capital L lighthouse as the hopeful one in 1862. Lighthouses are always both types of place at once, especially when connected to a shipwreck. Hugo’s work emphasizes as much the evolution and construction of new lighthouses as the hopelessness of the ones already in place. These are the logical consequence of shipwrecks. And if shipwrecks lead to more lighthouses, there will be another shipwreck that leads to another lighthouse.

The world in which Hugo is writing is essential to understanding his depiction of the Lighthouse of Alexandria. Having recently quintupled the number of lighthouses on their coasts, France was actively taking part in an ongoing effort dating back to Antiquity to make the seas safer by building new, better beacons. Through the exportation of French technology, coastlines around the world were being renovated as well. Given this, Hugo’s shipwrecks, storms, and lighthouses are as universal and timeless as are humanity’s efforts to protect themselves at sea.

Part IV. The shipwreck-lighthouse cycle today

One of the most prominent Romantic literary tropes is that of humanity’s inability to match the power of nature. This plays out as you would expect in Victor Hugo’s writing. We expect to be safe at sea, then there’s a storm. We built the lighthouse to save ourselves, but the lighthouse can’t move, it can’t actually save us, no matter how impressive the lens is. After studying these works for a while, however, I notice a variation on that trope. Victor Hugo understands that we will keep building new lighthouses, even though we know they won’t solve the shipwreck problem forever. The role of Hugo’s fiction should not be undervalued in current maritime and ecological discussions.

This shipwreck-lighthouse cycle was as much the reality of maritime safety technology in Hugo’s 19th century as it is today. The cycle of the sea, shipwrecks, and lighthouses continues to be seen in the 20th and 21st centuries. On March 16, 1978, the oil tanker Amoco Cadiz was caught in bad weather entering the English Channel. A strong wave hit the rudder and the crew lost control of the vessel. It eventually ran aground near Portsall, Brittany, and split in two the next day, spilling over 200,000 tons of oil into the sea. The floundering ship would have been within range of several lighthouse beacons before it wrecked.

As a response, projects for two new maritime safety structures were initiated. The first was the “Aide majeure à la navigation” [Chief Navigational Aide], a lighthouse anchored by a tripod on the sea floor with a helipad. The second, the Stiff Radar Tower, also known as the C.R.O.S.S. was the only one to come to fruition (Fichou 422). It stands  at more than 200 feet tall, nearly 400 feet above sea level, on the island of Ouessant off northwestern Brittany. (To me it looks like an air traffic control tower than a lighthouse. This very well may be what our generation of maritime safety technology looks like). Its position on the edge of the sea dwarfs one of the oldest lighthouses in France, called Le Stiff, built only a few years after Victor Hugo’s fictional Matutina sank. There has been a maritime safety tower at the top of this cliff since the 13th century.

In capturing the shipwreck-maritime safety cycle with the technology of his time, Victor Hugo highlighted the inevitable more than a century before human-made catastrophic ecological events like the Amoco Cadiz oil spill were imaginable. At the same time, though, he emphasized a sense of perseverance and initiative, however fated, to build another lighthouse, to try to protect humanity.

Nearly 50 years after the Amoco Cadiz shipwreck, safe sea travel is still a concern. Glacial melting will eventually result in a sea-level rise in France of more than 200 feet. This catastrophic event would redefine the country’s coastlines by flooding islands and coastal towns. In doing so, it would put many if not most of the 19th-century lighthouses under water. Into this world comes a growing number of cargo ships that are more than1000-feet-long. Some nearing or even surpassing the size of the Empire State Building. It would make sense to anticipate another shipwreck. We must not forget, however, that it will always be followed by a new maritime safety system which itself, someday, will not be enough.

          So how do we understand Victor Hugo tragic irony when it comes to this lighthouse-shipwreck cycle. In one sense, we should be resigned to the fact that nothing can keep us perfectly safe at sea. But also, the hope that comes with building a new lighthouse is undeniably human. These emotions come with each phase of the cycle. The tragic irony is that we believe in lighthouses even though we know they will fail. In the lighthouse-shipwreck cycle, hope and resignation are constants.