Victor Hugo Quotes
We say that slavery has vanished from European civilization, but this is not true. Slavery still exists, but now it applies only to women and its name is prostitution.
Hugo, Victor. Les Misérables. Translated by Charles E. Wilbour, Carleton, 1862.
The sexual exploitation of female slaves by the slave owner and/or his relatives was a phenomenon about which most Southerners were in denial. Light skinned and even white babies, born to Negro slaves was fairly common. The gross immorality was so great that it was too painful for most Southerners – especially white females to even contemplate much less discuss. At the same time, the abolitionists had to be very careful that to raise this problem as delicately as possible lest the lost their audience with such gross and indelicate behavior. This quotation was particularly artfully phrased.
See {642028} & {642029} for another quotation relating to this terrible abuse.
As part of his sermon, Beecher would auction the freedom of a slave girl.
Southern secession and the Civil War This is one of the major quotations with which historians rebut the revisionist view that the Civil War was about States’ Rights or other economic factors.
Victor-Marie Hugo was a French poet, novelist, and dramatist of the Romantic movement. During a literary career that spanned more than sixty years, he wrote abundantly in an exceptional variety of genres: lyrics, satires, epics, philosophical poems, epigrams, novels, history, critical essays, political speeches, funeral orations, diaries, letters public and private, as well as dramas in verse and prose.
