Notre-Dame de Paris, the French capital’s massive and ornate cathedral, reopens this weekend restored, 5½ years after it caught fire on April 15th, 2019. Not everyone can afford the time and expense to see the Parisian monument for themselves. But a cheaper, simpler way of marking the occasion is to revisit a book closely tied up with the cathedral’s history: Victor Hugo’s tragic novel Notre-Dame de Paris (1831), known in English as The Hunchback of Notre-Dame.
Hugo wrote the novel in part to raise public interest in the cathedral and encourage the state to finance restoration works. In the 1830s, Notre-Dame was a shadow of its former self. “It is hard,” he says in one chapter, “to repress a sigh, to repress indignation over the countless degradations and mutilations which time and men have simultaneously inflicted on the venerable monument, showing no respect for Charlemagne, who laid its first stone, or for Philip-Augustus, who laid the last.”
Characteristically Hugo’s line conflates truth and myth. The construction of Notre-Dame began (rather than finished) during the 12th-century reign of King Philip-Augustus and lasted 200 years. It was paid for and overseen not by the state but the Catholic Church: above all then-bishop of Paris, Maurice de Sully. As a religious seat, Notre-Dame’s function was political from the outset. It helped, alongside the slow establishment of the university of Paris and a new royal fortress at the Louvre, to consolidate the city’s emergence as the foremost in France.
But during the French Revolution its adornments were ripped off, its treasury sacked, its bells reduced to material for coins and cannons. Above the western entrance, its 28 statues of the kings of Judah were pulled down, beheaded and used to fill in roadworks. Robespierre dreamed of making Notre-Dame a shrine for his cult of the Supreme Being; after his death it became a storage depot. Napoleon allowed its reconsecration, and in 1804 was crowned emperor by its altar, but the decorations he had installed for the day were temporary.
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In Hugo’s time, this tumultuous period of French history which had marked Notre-Dame cathedral was not yet finished. His writing was interrupted by the July revolt of 1830 in which France’s Bourbon dynasty fell for the second time. A compromise between politicians and the people installed Louis-Philippe, the duke of Orleans, as a constitutional monarch (he too would fall in 1848). Amid the commotion, Hugo lost a notebook carrying two months of research. He fell behind schedule and was forced to work quickly under threat of fines from his publisher. In the end he had all his clothes locked away in a drawer so that, naked, he could not go out and would be forced to stay home finishing the manuscript.
The result, Notre-Dame de Paris, is unusual for the fact that its main character is not a person. It is the cathedral, which, Hugo claimed, inspired the story with a word he found carved on the wall of one of its towers, anankē: an ancient Greek term he loosely translates as fatality. Just as there is an architectural element to writing, Hugo claims – a bond between its structure and its sense – so the best way to understand a building is to read it like a book. In that case Notre-Dame is scripture. “Mankind has two books, two records, two testaments: masonry and printing, the stone Bible and the paper Bible.”
His mention of paper is not an accident. The printing press he claims was “the mother of revolutions”, so much it dimmed our understanding of how earlier people recorded their lives and histories. They built monuments. In the past “anyone who was a poet became an architect”. But after the Gutenberg Bible the convenience of print triumphed over the longevity of stone. Although in future great buildings may still arise, “architecture will no longer be the social, the collective, the dominant art. The great poem, the great building, the great work of mankind will no longer be built, it will be printed.”
Adapted some revolutions later in 1996 as a happy Disney movie, perhaps the most familiar element of Hugo’s Notre-Dame is its so-called hunchback, the cathedral’s resident and bellringer, Quasimodo. At birth, he is abandoned at Notre-Dame and raised by its archdeacon, Claude Frollo. During the story proper, he is about 20. In Hugo’s description Quasimodo’s face and body resemble the cathedral: “You could almost say that he had taken its shape, as the snail takes the shape of its shell.” Reviled for his ugliness, deafened by his work, Quasimodo becomes cruel and misanthropic until he is transformed by an act of kindness. He is like one of Hugo’s later heroes, Jean Valjean of Les Miserables (1862). Both exemplify his belief that our individual natures develop in response to the world around us, so that bad people are a product of social ills.
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Readers of the book who know the film may be surprised how little prominence Quasimodo has. Like Les Miserables, Notre-Dame de Paris is not one story but several intertwined. Apart from Quasimodo there is Claude Frollo’s obsession with the dancer Esmeralda, and Esmeralda’s with the unscrupulous Captain Phoebus. Next to these are the travails and traumas of the poet Pierre Gringoire and the student Jehan Frollo. Hugo’s version is more morally complex than Disney’s and the line between good and evil is not straightforward. In part this is because important characters mirror each other as in the plays of Hugo’s idol, Shakespeare.
The plot in general is just one aspect of the book’s vivid 19th-century drawing of the late 15th century. Its countless vignettes and descriptions have the effect of a large and detailed painting. Hugo’s ambition was not just to tell a story, but to depict a place and time: late medieval Paris, the condition of its “morals, laws, arts, civilisation”, as he later wrote. It is a world here depicted from below where life is cheap and criminality the norm. People die by hanging as if by illness. In a crucial scene near the book’s climax, the King Louis XI makes a frightening appearance.
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Hugo’s novel was both a commercial success and a cultural one that fanned people’s interest in medieval architecture. Hugo himself was named to a national heritage committee, and the French state gradually funded restoration works of landmarks across the country, including Notre-Dame de Paris. In that sense, both monuments, the cathedral and the book, are joined by a shared history. His contemporary, the French historian Jules Michelet, wrote that Hugo had “marked [Notre-Dame cathedral] with such a lion’s claw that, from now on, no one will dare touch it”.
Michelet was wrong. In a speech last Friday to the reconstruction workers, French president Emmanuel Macron called Notre-Dame “a metaphor for the life of the nation”. In saying so, Macron extended a long tradition of French leaders who have made the cathedral a mirror of their ideals. Perhaps someday another future Napoleon will be crowned there. But all the same, behind this mirror remain two monuments, the first a book in stone, the other paper: both, we can now say once more, standing, legible; both, it can at least be wished, timeless.
Rory O’Sullivan is a writer and researcher living in Paris
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