Victor Hugo

 Victor Hugo wept over poverty by day and sexually exploited it by night.

Behind the figure of the revered old sage, celebrated for his defense of the oppressed, lurked a cynical bourgeois who directly profited from the hunger of street urchin girls, frantically buying up young girls often just fifteen or sixteen years old. The man who made entire generations weep over the tragic fate of working-class women reduced to selling their bodies to survive offered himself that same misery for a few centimes. The great moralist even kept a horrifying ledger of his abuses. In his intimate notebooks, he methodically recorded the sordid rates, the ages, and the sexual acts, reducing the flesh of the wretched to a mere ledger of accounts. His encrypted journals are filled with chilling entries, such as: "The little laundress, 15 years old: 2 francs," or "Girl from the Rue de la Verrerie. 16 years old. 1 franc 50," amid cold anatomical descriptions coded in Spanish. The cruelty of this man is illustrated in an even more tragic way with Juliette Drouet, the devoted mistress who sacrificed fifty years of her life to him. While the writer positioned himself as the universal champion of freedom, he demanded total submission from his companion, locking her away behind double bolts and destroying her acting career. As he amassed a colossal fortune from his royalties, he took sadistic pleasure in keeping her in humiliating poverty. His correspondence reveals the ordeal of a broken woman. Shivering with cold in winter, Juliette had to beg him to pay the butcher or buy firewood, writing to him in despair: "I am so poor, my adored one, that I no longer have shoes to put on my feet." While she pawned her own dresses to survive, Hugo spent without restraint to multiply his encounters with adolescent girls from the poor neighborhoods. The literary world today maintains a convenient amnesia to protect the golden statue of the great republican in the Panthéon. His own writings depict rather a profiteer of morality who sublimated poverty in his books in order to better buy and enslave it in his bed.