The romantic drama Hernani, penned by twenty-eight-year-old Victor Hugo, debuts on the stage of the Comedie Francaise, formerly a bastion of classicalism, on February 25, 1830.

Ongoing strife between the conservative neoclassicalists and the romantics culminates in a riot over the work’s metrical irregularities, violation of Aristotelian unities, and calculated disregard of conventions.

Hugo's first mature work of fiction, Le Dernier jour d'un condamné (The Last Day of a Condemned Man), had appeared in 1829, and reflects the acute social conscience that is to infuse his later work.

The novel, which recounts the thoughts of a man condemned to die, will have a profound influence on later writers such as Albert Camus, Charles Dickens, and Fyodor Dostoevsky.