This is a good way to get to know who Victor Hugo was as a person. This edition, however, isn't very well annotated, and as a result if you aren't intimately familiar with French history and the more or less obscure French politicians of the time, then you'll have to rely on Wikipedia to keep up wit

A read of famous history

Easy to read and understand, interesting snippets of history, instead of needing to read a whole book on a fact you can read a chapter to get the same result.

This is a fascinating read but you really need to be up on your mid-1800s French political history.

Some of the book is just character sketches, edited and polished bits from his journal. But the majority of the book is about his participation in the legislative and parliamentary processes before the

I read this as research for a novel i'm working on in which the Paris revolution of 1848 figures in peripherally, and Victor Hugo was there in the streets and wrote about it in a section of this book. So, i didn't read it for fun but i am glad that i did read it, and i wound up reading the whole thi