The Hunchback of Notre Dame

The Hunchback of Notre Dame

by

Victor Hugo

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Gothic Architecture, History, and Art Theme Analysis

Themes and Colors
Gothic Architecture, History, and Art Theme Icon
Lust, Sin, and Misogyny Theme Icon
Appearances, Alienation, and Hypocrisy Theme Icon
Fate and Predestination Theme Icon
The Supernatural, Rationalism, and Knowledge Theme Icon
Justice, Punishment, and Freedom Theme Icon
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Gothic Architecture, History, and Art Theme Icon

The Gothic cathedral of Notre Dame, in Paris, is a central motif in Victor Hugo’s novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame. The novel documents the lives of several characters who live in and around Notre Dame, including Quasimodo, the titular “hunchback” who lives in isolation in the cathedral. Hugo’s novel was written in the 1800s but is set during the medieval period (specifically the 1400s), when Notre Dame was still relatively new. The cathedral is an example of Gothic architecture (recognizable by its pointed spires, great height, and decorative gargoyles), which was popular during the medieval period. Gothic architecture was largely replaced by neo-classicist architecture (which favored round shapes and harmony over the extremes of the Gothic) during the Renaissance (a period of intensive scientific and philosophical enlightenment in Europe), which would arrive in France soon after the years in which the novel is set. The constant presence of Notre Dame in the novel, especially combined with the lengthy descriptions of Gothic architecture elsewhere in Paris, suggest that, although Gothic architecture was no longer fashionable in the 1800s, Hugo believed that it was an artform which should be preserved and appreciated, despite its often grotesque appearance. Hugo suggests that Gothic architecture is a collective artform, reflecting the experience of humanity as it develops over time and across different historical periods.

Hugo argues that architecture is something vital and alive. This is most clearly demonstrated through the relationship between Quasimodo and Notre Dame. Due to his deformity, which leaves him an outcast from society, Quasimodo has spent most of his life inside the cathedral. He is so familiar with the building that he feels that Notre Dame is alive. Furthermore, his presence “seems to infuse the whole building” with life. His presence also brings the cathedral to life for the inhabitants of Paris, who associate Notre Dame with Quasimodo and see them as one and the same: Quasimodo is the spirit of the church. This suggests that, when architecture is viewed imaginatively, it is a lively artform. Similarly, the surrounding city of Paris, which was mostly Gothic in the medieval period, is given a sense of vitality when Hugo describes the main streets as “arteries.” He also frequently describes people seeming to “turn to stone” or to look like “statues” throughout the story. This suggests that the lines are blurred between the people and the architecture of Paris and that people’s surroundings shape who they are. After the medieval period, Hugo suggests, people lost their connection to Gothic architecture and began to dislike its apparent deformity in comparison with the neater neo-classicist style. In this sense, Quasimodo’s deformity reflects the “disfigurement” of Notre Dame as the cathedral ages. Quasimodo’s death at the novel’s end represents the decline of interest in Gothic architecture, something Hugo considers a tragic loss.

While Gothic architecture featured grotesque shapes, such as the gargoyles on the facade of Notre Dame, neo-classicist architecture preferred forms that were neat and picturesque, in line with classical ideas of beauty as comprised of symmetry and harmony. Hugo rejects this idea in The Hunchback of Notre Dame and suggests instead that all types of people and experiences—classically beautiful or notcan be portrayed in art. This is demonstrated in his description of the face-pulling contest during the “Feast of Fools,” when the crowd takes turns making the most horrifying faces they can. This not only connects the faces of the populace with the stone gargoyles on the walls of Gothic cathedrals, but it also highlights the idea that human experience is varied, and that life is not only beautiful; ugliness, violence, and horror also play a part. Hugo further supports this idea through the range of characters he includes in his novel, from beggars to the King of France. The contrasts in the characters’ statuses are highlighted by their interaction with Gothic architecture. In the novel, people frequently observe each other from a great height, from the towers of Notre Dame, or from far below, from the square beneath the cathedral. These extremes of height and depth also reflect the extreme emotions which the characters experience throughout the novel, such as The Archdeacon of Notre Dame’s (Claude Frollo) sexual obsession with Esmeralda, a gypsy girl who dances in the square beneath the cathedral. Hugo, therefore, views Gothic architecture as a medium to express the scope of human emotion and suggests that all kinds of experience can be suitable subjects for art. 

The idea that architecture is a mode of artistic expression is further expanded upon through the idea that buildings can be read. During his description of Paris, Hugo refers to the architecture of the city as a “chronicle in stone.” This suggests that the city tells a story and that, like a book, architecture can be examined in order to gather a picture of those who created it. This idea is further developed through the character of Claude Frollo. Frollo is a philosopher as well as a priest and he practices alchemy, a form of medieval science interested in the transformation of chemicals and metals. Rather than work from books, few of which existed in the medieval period, Frollo studies buildings, specifically the carvings on the facade of Notre Dame and several other historical sites around Paris. This suggests that architecture is a fount of knowledge, in terms of what it reveals about the past and also because, before people had access to books, they carved knowledge and ideas into stonework. Hugo states that before the advent of the printing press, which provided easy access to books and increased literacy, “anyone born a poet became an architect.” This supports his thesis throughout Notre Dame that medieval architecture is not only worthy as an artform but can be read like a history book in order to understand the past. This further supports Hugo’s overall idea: that all forms of art and architecture are valuable because they reflect varied and historical facets of human experience from which people can learn.

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The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Gothic Architecture, History, and Art appears in each chapter of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.
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Gothic Architecture, History, and Art Quotes in The Hunchback of Notre Dame

Below you will find the important quotes in The Hunchback of Notre Dame related to the theme of Gothic Architecture, History, and Art.
Book 1, Chapter 1  Quotes

To the onlookers at their windows, the palace square, which was packed with people, resembled a sea into which, like so many river-mouths, five or six streets were constantly disgorging fresh torrents of heads. As they continued to swell, the waves of people collided with the corners of the houses which, here and there, jutted out into the irregular basin of the square like so many promontories. In the center of the palace’s tall Gothic facade, twin streams flowed up and down the great staircase without interruption and then, after breaking halfway, below the entrance steps, spread down the two ramps at the sides in broad waves, so that the great staircase emptied ceaselessly into the square like a waterfall into a lake.

Page Number: 32
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 1, Chapter 3 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Esmeralda, Claude Frollo, Pierre Gringoire, The Cardinal
Related Symbols: Notre Dame
Page Number: 53
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 1, Chapter 5 Quotes

There was something about this spectacle which made the head spin, it had some peculiar power to bewitch and intoxicate hard to convey to a reader of our own day and from our own salons. Picture to yourself a succession of faces displaying all the known geometrical shapes one after the other, from triangle to trapezium, from cone to polyhedron; every known human expression, from anger to lust; every age of man, from the wrinkles of the newly born to the wrinkles of the dying crone; a whole religious phantasmagoria, from Faunus to Beelzebub; every kind of animal profile, from jaws to beaks and from muzzles to snouts. It was as if all those mascarons on the Pont-Neuf, nightmares turned to stone by the hand of Germain Pilon, had taken on life and breath and had come, one by one.

Related Characters: Jacques Coppenole
Page Number: 68
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 2, Chapter 2 Quotes

It must be said that a gibbet and pillory, a ‘justice’ and a ‘ladder’ as they were then called, stood permanently side by side in the middle of the paving and helped not a little to avert people’s gaze from that fateful square, where so many human beings full of life and vigor had met their death, and where, fifty years later, ‘Saint-Vallier’s fever’ would be born, that sickness of the terror of the scaffold and the most monstrous of all sicknesses because it comes not from God but from men.

Page Number: 80
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 2, Chapter 3 Quotes

Around her, all eyes were fixed and all mouths agape; and as she danced, to the drumming of the tambourine she held above her head in her two pure, round arms, slender, frail, quick as a wasp, with her golden, unpleated bodice, her billowing, brightly-colored dress, her bare shoulders, her slender legs, uncovered now and again by her skirt, her black hair, her fiery eyes, she was indeed a supernatural creature.

Related Characters: Esmeralda, Pierre Gringoire
Page Number: 82
Explanation and Analysis:

[…] it was lit by the harsh red light of the bonfire, which flickered brightly on the encircling faces of the crowd and on the dark forehead of the girl, while at the far end of the square it cast a pale glimmer, mingled with the swaying of the shadows, on the black and wrinkled old facade of the Maison-aux-Piliers on one side and the stone arms of the gallows on the other.

Related Characters: Esmeralda, Claude Frollo, Pierre Gringoire
Page Number: 83
Explanation and Analysis:

Neither crust nor resting-place; he found necessity crowding in on him from all sides and thought necessity mighty churlish. He had long ago discovered this truth, that Jupiter created man in a fit of misanthropy and that, throughout his life, the sage’s destiny lays siege to his philosophy.

Related Characters: Pierre Gringoire, The Cardinal
Page Number: 85
Explanation and Analysis:

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.

Related Characters: Quasimodo
Related Symbols: Notre Dame
Page Number: 88
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 2, Chapter 4 Quotes

Such voluntary abdication of one’s free will, such a subjection of one’s own fancy to that of some unsuspecting other person, has about it a mixture of whimsical independence and blind obedience, a sort of compromise between servitude and freedom which appealed to Gringoire, whose mind was essentially a mixed one, both complex and indecisive, holding gingerly on to all extremes, constantly suspended between all human propensities.

Related Characters: Esmeralda, Pierre Gringoire
Page Number: 90
Explanation and Analysis:

Had Gringoire lived in our own day, how beautifully he would have bisected the Classics and Romantics!

Related Characters: Pierre Gringoire
Page Number: 91
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 3, Chapter 1 Quotes

[…] 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.

Related Symbols: Notre Dame
Page Number: 123-124
Explanation and Analysis:

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.

Related Symbols: Notre Dame
Page Number: 124
Explanation and Analysis:

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.

Related Symbols: Notre Dame
Page Number: 128-129
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 4, Chapter 3 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Quasimodo
Related Symbols: Notre Dame
Page Number: 164
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 5, Chapter 2 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Claude Frollo, Louis XI/Compere Tourangeau, Jacques Coictier
Related Symbols: Notre Dame
Page Number: 189
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 8, Chapter 4 Quotes

When one does evil one must do the whole evil. To be only half a monster is insanity. There is ecstasy in an extreme of crime.

Related Characters: Claude Frollo (speaker), Esmeralda
Page Number: 329
Explanation and Analysis: