On Monday, April 15, 2019 a devastating fire raged through the Notre Dame cathedral of Paris, causing its central spire to collapse. The full magnitude of the colossal damage is not yet known but the French President, Emmanuel Macron, vowed that the Paris landmark would be rebuilt. A 19th century work of fiction made the French to rediscover the cathedral of Notre Dame. Can that book produce the same miracle again?
Let us seek an answer by revisiting Victor Hugo’s monumental novel Notre Dame de Paris, known in English by the widely used title The Hunchback of Notre Dame. It is this work of fiction that brought renewed attention of the French nation to this Gothic edifice in the 19th century and made it a symbol of national unity. In that novel, the cathedral of Notre Dame is not just a cold and lifeless location. For Hugo the damages suffered by the monument are as much from the wounds inflicted on it through the ages as they are from attempts at restorations that damaged more than they saved, adding inert plaster to an organism even though it is made of stone.
Ironically, it is on April 15, 1829 that Victor Hugo, all of 27 years and not yet bearded, gave to his publisher Gosselin the manuscript of his novel Notre-Dame de Paris. The book is finally published in 1831 and its success established it as a major work of French fiction. So great was its success and such was its association with the cathedral that a famous caricature of Benjamin Roubaud represented a gigantic Hugo, leaning against the cathedral and Auguste Vacquerie, friend of the poet and novelist, wrote about him noting that “the towers of Notre-Dame resemble the H of his name”.
The story of Victor Hugo’s novel is well- known: in the Paris of 1482, the hunchback Quasimodo, bellringer of Notre Dame, loves the beautiful Esmeralda, gypsy dancer who is also courted by Captain Phœbus de Châteaupers and coveted by the sinister archdeacon Claude Frollo, adoptive father of the hunchback. Quasimodo's is an unrequited love. When Esmeralda rejects the archdeacon’s lecherous approaches, Frollo hatches a plot to destroy her that only Quasimodo can prevent. Victor Hugo’s sensational, evocative novel brings life to the medieval Paris he loved, and mourns its passing in one of the greatest historical romances of the nineteenth century.
In Notre Dame de Paris, the cathedral is the central place: Frollo and Quasimodo live there, the crowd presses on to its forecourt, Esmeralda finds refuge there. It is difficult today to read the novel and miss the gloomy prophecy of a blazing fire when Quasimodo pours on the vagabonds who assail him, streams of molten lead: "All eyes were raised to the top of the church. They beheld there an extraordinary sight. On the crest of the highest gallery, higher than the central rose window, there was a great flame rising between the two towers with whirlwinds of sparks, a vast, disordered, and furious flame, a tongue of which was borne into the smoke by the wind, from time to time.”
It is sometimes said that the cathedral is the main character of Victor Hugo’s novel. In fact, Notre Dame is not a cold and lifeless setting. Metaphors continually humanize it. The stone becomes flesh and the damages suffered by the monument are as many wounds: “The church of Notre-Dame de Paris is still no doubt, a majestic and sublime edifice. But, beautiful as it has been preserved in growing old, it is difficult not to sigh, not to wax indignant, before the numberless degradations and mutilations which time and men have both caused the venerable monument to suffer……. three sorts of ravages to-day disfigure Gothic architecture. Wrinkles and warts on the epidermis; this is the work of time. Deeds of violence, brutalities, contusions, fractures; this is the work of the revolutions from Luther to Mirabeau. Mutilations, amputations, dislocation of the joints, “restorations”; this is the Greek, Roman, and barbarian work of professors according to Vitruvius and Vignole…...”
Not that Victor Hugo is opposed to the idea of restoring a monument. But these ‘restorations’ sometimes damage more than they save. This conception, as Delphine Gleizes and Chantal Brière have shown, animates Hugo, a great advocate of heritage, when he sits between 1835 and 1848 at the Committee for Arts and Monuments. To save a monument is not to replant it, but to respect its principles, its spirit and soul. Notre Dame had one, and his name is Quasimodo. Hugo never stops insisting on this fact. The bell-ringer, like the cathedral he haunts, combines in him the monstrosity with the sublime. But another man lives in Notre-Dame. If the hunchback represents a vital principle, Frollo embodies petrified authority, deadly frustration and sexual predation.
In Notre-Dame de Paris Victor Hugo tells us about people from all sorts of social backgrounds, students, the bourgeoisie, marginalised people like Esmeralda or Quasimodo, the outcasts and the vagabonds. It is as if he informs his readers that he is going to immerse them in an inclusive national community. This is a work of fiction in which all the characters are significant, including the anonymous extras. Hugo opts for a new narrative mode and a new perception of the social world in the lines of Walter Scott.
Yet, in spite of this expansive communal element, what is remarkable in this novel is that the eponymous heroine is the cathedral. She's alive with all her splendours in spite of the fact that she is despised and defaced. Spitting is vandalism and then there are the bad renovators. The latter are those who imparts to Notre-Dame, which is a marvel of Gothic architecture, later additions and alterations. Renovation is a subtle and difficult art for great monuments have evolved over many centuries. The novelist explains the process memorably and eloquently: “Great edifices, like great mountains, are the work of centuries. Art often undergoes a transformation while they are pending, pendent opera interrupta; they proceed quietly in accordance with the transformed art. The new art takes the monument where it finds it, incrusts itself there, assimilates it to itself, develops it according to its fancy, and finishes it if it can. The thing is accomplished without trouble, without effort, without reaction,— following a natural and tranquil law. …. The man, the artist, the individual, is effaced in these great masses, which lack the name of their author; human intelligence is there summed up and totalized. Time is the architect, the nation is the builder.”
The cathedral is thus a changing, evolving entity and it is this evolution that makes it so strong and yet so fragile and perishable. Whatever external changes are made, the basic structure and the basic principles of the form architecture are never altered. Again in Victor Hugo’s inimitable words: “All these shades, all these differences, do not affect the surfaces of edifices only. It is art which has changed its skin. The very constitution of the Christian church is not attacked by it. There is always the same internal woodwork, the same logical arrangement of parts…..The trunk of a tree is immovable; the foliage is capricious.”
In the chapter ‘This will kill that’, Hugo proclaims the victory of the written word, distributed by the printing press, over a monument: "The stone book, so solid and so durable, would make room for the paper book, more solid and more durable still.” Hugo could not foresee that the cathedral would burn, but he could not dismiss it either. A flood can always engulf a mountain, he recalls. We now know that fire can consume Notre Dame. But if the cathedral is a stone book, the book is a paper cathedral. And history gives reason to Hugo: the church burns, the book remains, and we pick it up in bookstores. In these distressing times, a consolation remains: the façade and the towers have held firm. The H of Hugo is still erect. The great French novelist prophesied that ‘the book will kill the edifice’. Yet, as we receive news of a sudden spurt in the sale of the novel, we realise that the book has helped in restoring the edifice to the mind of man.
All the excerpts are taken from the English translation of the novel entitled The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Tr. Isabel F. Hapgood)
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