Victor Hugo is the most famous French writer even though Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Little prince is the most popular novel of all time. He was a Tory politician who understood that a fair society depended upon the end of pauperism. If his first novel, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831), enjoyed a huge success in France, Les misérables (1862) turned him into a kind of prophet whose aim was to show mankind the path toward goodness.