“ Usually, the murmur that rises up from Paris by day is the city talking in the night it is the city breathing but here it is the city singing. However, the narrative goes well beyond that of an alluring melodrama. The principal characters are Quasimodo, a hideous and disfigured hunchback Frollo, the Archdeacon of Notre Dame and Quasimodo’s evil guardian Esmerelda, a beautiful roaming street dancer, with whom both Quasimodo and Frollo fall in love and Phoebus, captain of the king’s archers and Esmerelda’s lover who is murdered by Frollo. Many might characterize the medieval tragedy as a love story. The book is aptly titled since the story takes place in and around the declining church. Hugo’s writing symbolizes that which he loved most about Notre Dame, a mixture of the sublime and the grotesque.

Illustration from an 1888 edition, by Luc-Olivier Merson. Quasimodo, the hunchback of Notre Dame, looks down on Paris. Whatever the reason, Victor Hugo holed up in his Paris apartment for the next 4.5 months and doggedly cranked out the masterpiece that we know today. Others point out that Hugo’s debts were mounting and his publisher was on the brink of suing him for breach of contract. Some say this revolt, which led to the overthrow of King Charles X, crystallized Hugo’s vision of his novel. Then in July of 1850, the second French revolution (lasting only 3 days) erupted. They provide clues about his process, which initially was somewhat scattered and interrupted by other projects.

Fortunately, many of his notes and the original manuscript for the novel were never lost. His early efforts languished for a couple of years. He wanted to write a novel that would depict the church as a sacred work of art, condemn society’s indifference to its plight, and encourage its preservation. Hugo worried that they were falling into ruin. After the French revolution, Notre Dame and other gothic monuments were neglected. Several years prior, Hugo became aware of the cathedral’s alarming condition. In 1831, a young Victor Hugo enjoyed publication of his first smash hit, Notre-Dame de Paris, known by anglophones as The Hunchback of Notre Dame. First page of Victor Hugo’s manuscript for the Hunchback of Notre Dame, circa 1830.

Hunchback de notre dame