The example of Victor Hugo, who became one of the great symbols of opposition to Napoleon III during twenty years of exile, testifies to the role of exile as a period of political evolution in the 19th century. During his first years of exile (1851-1859), he became one of the spokesmen of the exiles, thanks to his literatures of exile, the installation in the Channel Islands and the attempts to put a brake by the emperor against the writer. In the 1860s, while the ‘liberal’ Empire allowed opponents to organize in France, the exile Hugo, who had refused the emperor’s amnesty in 1859, intervened in the cultural and political scene of France for the opposition. Thus, in the late 1860s, he was considered a formidable Republican rival to Napoleon III. After returning in 1870, Hugo became involved in politics, notably through the amnesty campaign of Communard, based on his exile experience. Hereby, he contributed, as a producer of republican integration, to the installation of the Third Republic. Thus, the evolution of a Hugo into a ‘great republican’ during his exile and his role in the 1870s show that the experience of exile was one of the decisive moments in political activists in the constantly tumultuous nineteenth century.