PARIS -- France begins a year of tributes to the memory and ongoing influence of perhaps her greatest literary son on Monday, the eve of the bicentenary of Victor Hugo's birth.

The author of "Les Miserables" and "Notre Dame de Paris" popularised -- on stage and screen as ****The Hunchback of Notre Dame*** -- was born on February 26, 1802 in the Eastern French town of Besancon.

On Monday, a gallery of political and cultural figures will meet there to celebrate the life of an author whose long career of politically committed work laid a road map for the development of post-revolutionary France.

"Victor Hugo belongs to no one in that he embodies the entirety of humanity in its struggle against fatalism and its fight for progress," the speaker of the French senate, Christian poncelet, said during a debate in his honor. ss Alongside the public tributes, reams of newsprint, hours of television and dozens of new books have been dedicated to the life and works of the man whose range, depth and wild energy led him to be dubbed "the man-ocean".