Notre-Dame de Paris—1482. Novel by Victor Hugo set in 15th-c. Paris, begun in 1828 and completed after the fall of the Restoration monarchy in 1831. Parallels with Hugo's own time are evident.
The medieval stone cathedral is transformed into a historical novel with a Romantic cast of characters: Quasimodo, the monstrous bell-ringer capable of sublime love and self-sacrifice; Esméralda, the beautiful and innocent gypsy girl who becomes the focus of the Faustian priest Claude Frollo's lust; Pierre Gringoire [see Gringore], a writer of incoherent mystery plays about Nobility, Clergy, Trade, and Labour, who fails to understand the significance of the events unfolding around him; the seething Paris underclass of the Cour des Miracles that lays siege to the cathedral in a scene reminiscent of the storming of the Bastille in 1789. Amongst the most original features of the work are Hugo's dramatic handling of crowd scenes, the imaginative use of historical documentation, and a depiction of the cathedral so erudite and familiar that it caused a revolution in architectural taste. The success of this darkly moving novel was immediate, establishing Hugo as the premier historical novelist of his time. Lamartine called him ‘the Shakespeare of prose fiction’.
[Suzanne Nash]
