French · Intermediate
Read Le Dernier Jour d'un condamné in Frenchwith every sentence explained
English title: The Last Day of a Condemned Man
Victor Hugo · 1829
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About the book
Le Dernier Jour d'un condamné by Victor Hugo was first published in 1829. In Passage you read the full text in the original French, marked intermediate and filed under historical fiction and thriller and suspense. It runs to about 34,600 words.
"Condemned to death!" For five weeks, he has lived with these words. Now he writes them down.
A man has been sentenced to the guillotine in Paris. We never learn his name or exactly what he did. From his cell in Bicêtre prison, and then in the Conciergerie, he keeps a journal of his final weeks and hours: the trial, the cold walls, the other prisoners, the guards, the priest, the crowds who come to watch, and his little daughter Marie, who is three years old.
Every page brings us closer to the scaffold, and every page asks the same question: what gives society the right to kill?
The Last Day of a Condemned Man was written by a twenty-seven-year-old Victor Hugo as a passionate cry against the death penalty, a cause he defended all his life. This edition includes Hugo's fiery 1832 preface and the satirical scene "A Comedy about a Tragedy". It remains a landmark in the fight that ended with abolition in France in 1981.
- Author
- Victor Hugo
- First published
- 1829
- Language
- French
- Level
- Intermediate
- Genre
- Historical Fiction, Thriller and Suspense
- Length
- About 34,600 words
How it opens
Il n'y avait en tête des premières éditions de cet ouvrage, publié d'abord sans nom d'auteur, que les quelques lignes qu'on va lire :
"Il y a deux manières de se rendre compte de l'existence de ce livre. Ou il y a eu, en effet, une liasse de papiers jaunes et inégaux sur lesquels on a trouvé, enregistrées une à une, les dernières pensées d'un misérable ; ou il s'est rencontré un homme, un rêveur occupé à observer la nature au profit de l'art, un philosophe, un poète, que sais-je ?
Reading Le Dernier Jour d'un condamné in Passage
Passage sets the book as a quiet, paginated reader in French. Read at your own pace, and when a sentence stops you, tap it. You get:
- a natural translation of that exact sentence,
- a short note on the grammar, in plain words,
- the key words, which you can save with the sentence they came from,
- all of it in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Turkish or Portuguese, whichever you read best.
It's marked intermediate: comfortable once everyday French feels familiar, with the harder sentences one tap away. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.
