A political reading of Les Contemplations can be superimposed on the autobiographical one. The loss experienced by the poet is not only that of the child drowned in the Seine river, but also that of liberty; for, after the political coup of December 2 in 1851, “liberty” “lies down like a woman who has just been drowned” (« couchée à terre/Comme une femme morte et qu’on vient de noyer » Châtiments, I, 11). We will therefore investigate the links which exist between the two collections and see how the autobiographical and the political meanings interact in Les Contemplations. If Victor Hugo felt the need to write a political allegory three years after the publication of an openly political one, it was to modify his perspective on the subject; indeed, in Les Contemplations, the focus is the representation of the suffering historical self ( i.e. the individual experiencing himself as a historical subject) and no longer that of the collective subject (the people). This phenomenon is not unique in the collections published after the proscription. The relationship between L’Année terrible (1872) and L’Art d’être grand-père (1877) is similar to the one which links Les Contemplations and Châtiments.