This dissertation studies the critical reception of the poetry of Victor Hugo in France over the period 1914-1944. Relying on an inclusive conception of “critical reception”, it considers the way in which Hugo’s poetic work was reproduced and circulated (in scholarly editions and cheap popular editions, in luxury books and school textbooks, in poem collections...) or adapted (turned into parody or pastiche and set to music by various composers). It also looks at the many discourses that were held on Hugo’s poetry, whether by academics, professional writers and intellectuals, journalists, political men and activists, etc. Drawing on an extensive corpus and a wide range of sources, confronting methodological approaches borrowed from different study fields, our work helps to throw light on Hugo’s importance as an integral part of French cultural heritage; on the centrality of poetry (especially of the three major collections published while Hugo was in exile, Les Châtiments, Les Contemplations, La Légende des siècles) within his work; on the political readings and the political uses that were made of Hugo’s poetry; on the competing ways of categorising Hugo’s work within French poetry and among French poets, as a Romantic akin to Lamartine and Musset or as a modernist equated with Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Mallarmé. Beyond the sole case of Hugo, our dissertation also sheds light on the importance of poetry in the imagination of the early 20th century, and on the way in which the literature of the period sought to define itself in relation to a two-fold poetic legacy, that of romanticism and that of modernism.