Bug-Jargal is a novel by the French writer Victor Hugo

Victor Hugo

Victor-Marie Hugo was a Frenchpoet, playwright, novelist, essayist, visual artist, statesman, human rights activist and exponent of the Romantic movement in France....

. First published in 1826

1826 in literature

The year 1826 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:* The Juvenile Miscellany, an American magazine for children, begins publishing in Boston...

, it is a reworked version of an earlier short story of the same name published in the Hugo brothers' magazine Le Conservateur littéraire in 1820. The novel follows a friendship between the enslaved African prince of the title and a French military officer named Leopold D'Auverney during the tumultuous early years of the Haitian Revolution

Haitian Revolution

The Haitian Revolution was a period of conflict in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, which culminated in the elimination of slavery there and the founding of the Haitian republic...

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Hugo later claimed that the story was to have been part of a collaborative work called Contes sous la Tente (Tales under a Tent), and that he had written it in 1818 (at the age of sixteen) in two weeks; the manuscript is however dated April 1819.

Several translations into English exist. The first, a modified version with the title The Slave-King, was published in 1833. The only modern translation is by Chris Bongie and was published in 2004.