Victor Hugo Column

The Victor Hugo Column is a memorial located on the edge of the Waterloo battlefield erected in 1911-1912 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of French poet and writer Victor Hugo's stay in Waterloo, Belgium.It took Victor Hugo forty-five years to visit the site of the battle. During his stay in Brussels in 1837, he wrote: "I did not want to see Waterloo. I thought it unnecessary to pay this visit to Lord Wellington. Waterloo is more odious to me than Crecy. The famous lines Waterloo, dreary plain in the poem The Atonement were written in Jersey between 1852 and 1855 when Hugo had not yet visited Waterloo. Hugo arrived in Mont-Saint-Jean on May 7, 1860 and stayed for two months at the Hôtel des Colonnes. It was there that he finished writing Les Misérables.

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