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Why was Victor Hugo’s play Marion de Lorme banned from the stage?
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Victor Hugo
French poet, novelist, and dramatist Victor Hugo, photograph by Nadar (Gaspard-Félix Tournachon). Hugo's best-loved works are the novels Notre-Dame de Paris (1831; The Hunchback of Notre-Dame) and Les Misérables (1862).
The stage performance of Victor Hugo’s play Marion de Lorme (1829) was prohibited by the censor because it portrayed the French king Louis XIII in an unfavorable light.1
This act of censorship was part of a broader climate of restricted artistic and press freedom under King Charles X, which ultimately fueled Hugo’s move toward liberalism and his subsequent defiance of traditional theatrical constraints.1