The cathedral of Notre Dame symbolizes the city of Paris and the whole of medieval society. The characters are products of their historical era, just as the Gothic architecture of Notre Dame marks it as a product of the medieval period. In this sense, Notre Dame is the characters’ natural environment and the cathedral is frequently compared to a natural organism, a plant, or a living thing. Notre Dame serves as a microcosm of Paris throughout the novel and is portrayed as the heart and center of the city—the whole of Paris, and all other landmarks that the city contains, can be seen from Notre Dame. The major characters live inside the cathedral or find themselves trapped there, and this symbolizes the way that the medieval period was, in some ways, limited: by its lack of scientific knowledge, by strict religious beliefs, and by oppressive systems of government, such as the monarchy. Notre Dame represents the powerful institutions that upheld this oppression, namely the Church and the king; at the time, the king was believed to be appointed by God and was considered head of the Church as well as the state. At the same time, the architectural beauty of Notre Dame symbolizes the creativity and vitality of the medieval period. Notre Dame is a product of its age in both positive ways and negative ones, so overall, it reflects how the medieval period itself has both sinister and admirable aspects.
Notre Dame Quotes in The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Gringoire was what today we would call a true eclectic, one of those elevated, steady, moderate, calm spirits who manage always to steer a middle course […] and are full of reason and liberal philosophy, while yet making due allowance for cardinals […] They are to be found, quite unchanging, in every age, that is, ever in conformity with the times.
This was the first taste he had ever had of the delights of vanity. Hitherto, he had known only humiliation, contempt for his condition and disgust for his person. And so, stone deaf though he was, he relished the acclamation of the crowd like a real pope, that crowd which he had detested because he felt it detested him. What did it matter that his people was a pack of fools, cripples, thieves and beggars, it was still a people and he its sovereign. And he took all the ironic applause and mock respect seriously, although it should be said that mixed in with it, among the crowd, went an element of very real fear.
[…] a vast symphony in stone, as it were; the colossal handiwork of a man and a people, a whole both one and complex, like its sisters, the Iliad and the Romanceros; the prodigious sum contributed by all the resources of an age where, on every stone, you can see, standing out in a hundred ways, the imagination of the workman, disciplined by the genius of the artist; a sort of human creation, in short, as powerful and as fecund as that divine creation whose twin characteristics of variety and eternity it seems to have purloined.
And what we have said here of the facade has to be said of the church as a whole; and what we have said of the cathedral church of Paris has to be said of all the churches of medieval Christendom. Everything is of a piece in this logical, well-proportioned art, which originated in itself. To measure the toe is to measure the giant.
They make us aware to what extent architecture is a primitive thing, demonstrating as they do, like the cyclopean remains, the pyramids of Egypt, or the gigantic Hindu pagodas, that architecture’s greatest products are less individual than social creations; the offspring of nations in labor rather than the outpouring of men of genius; the deposit left behind by a nation; the accumulation of the centuries; the residue from the successive evaporations of human society; in short, a kind of formation. Each wave of time lays down its alluvium, each race deposits its own stratum on the monument, each individual contributes his stone. Thus do the beavers, and the bees; and thus does man. The great symbol of architecture, Babel, is a beehive.
So it was that, little by little, developing always in harmony with the cathedral, living in it, sleeping in it, hardly ever leaving it, subject day in and day out to its mysterious pressure, he came to resemble it, to be incrusted on it, as it were, to form an integral part of it. […] One might almost say that he had taken on its shape, just as the snail takes on the shape of its shell. It was his abode, his hole, his envelope. So deep was the instinctive sympathy between the old church and himself, so numerous the magnetic and material affinities, that he somehow adhered to it like the tortoise to its shell. The gnarled cathedral was his carapace.
‘No,’ said the archdeacon, seizing Compere Tourangeau by the arm, and a spark of enthusiasm rekindling in his lifeless pupils, ‘No, I don’t deny science. I have not crawled all this time on my belly with my nails in the earth, along the countless passages of the cavern without glimpsing, far ahead of me, at the end of the unlit gallery, a light, a flame, something, doubtless the reflection from the dazzling central laboratory where the wise and the patient have taken God by surprise.’
Firstly, it was the thought of a priest. It was the alarm felt by the priesthood before a new agent: the printing-press. It was the terror and bewilderment felt by a man of the sanctuary before the luminous press of Gutenberg. It was the pulpit and the manuscript, the spoken and the written word, taking fright at the printed word; something like the stupor felt by a sparrow were it to see the angel legion unfold its six million wings. It was the cry of the prophet who already hears the restless surge of an emancipated mankind, who can see that future time when intelligence will undermine faith, opinion dethrone belief and the world shake off Rome.
Notre Dame Symbol Timeline in The Hunchback of Notre Dame
