Victor Hugo presents the medieval Paris of The Hunchback of Notre Dame as an unjust society, despite the many incidents of apparent “justice” which take place. The characters are often falsely accused of crimes or unjustly imprisoned, and the threat of capital punishment is very real in the novel. However, Hugo indicates that even in the face of a corrupt judicial system, ordinary people nonetheless have the power to overcome injustice through collective action.
Medieval Paris is portrayed as an unjust society in which people may face persecution and punishment at any time. For instance, Quasimodo is tried after he attempts to kidnap Esmeralda on Frollo’s orders. Later, Esmeralda is put on trial when she is accused of witchcraft. It’s clear from the characters’ experiences that Paris in this era has an active system of justice. However, although a justice system is in place, it is a corrupt and often laughable one. This is demonstrated at Quasimodo’s trial when he is tried by Florian Barbedienne, who is deaf. To save face, Florian pretends to hear Quasimodo’s answers and replies according to what he guesses Quasimodo has said. Quasimodo is deaf too, however, and so he does not hear the questions. The trial devolves into a farce and Quasimodo is sentenced to be publicly flogged even though his evidence has not been heard. This suggests that the justice system will sentence people based on the whim of the judge rather than on the results of the trial. Similarly, Esmeralda is convicted of witchcraft on dubious evidence. The court believes that her pet goat, Djali, whom she has taught to do tricks, is a demon. During the trial, the judge encourages Djali to perform his tricks to convince the crowd of Esmeralda’s guilt. However, the judge knows how to do this because Gringoire, Esmeralda’s husband, told Frollo that Djali does tricks based on the sounds of a tambourine. The judge, therefore, knows how to control Djali and easily convinces the crowd of Esmeralda’s guilt. Esmeralda’s false conviction demonstrates that courts were extremely quick to convict people based on misleading evidence.
What’s more, Hugo shows that punishment and so-called justice often serve as entertainment. In the novel, courts are incentivized to convict people because of the popularity of public punishment. Public punishment is depicted as exceptionally cruel when Quasimodo is beaten for several hours in the town square. Hugo is deeply critical of capital punishment and uses its presence in the novel to criticize attitudes towards capital punishment in 19th-century society, as public execution was still a popular spectacle in France in the early 1800s, when Hugo was writing. By including critiques of capital punishment in his historical novel, Hugo suggests that French society has not learned from its mistakes and that its justice system is still unjust because it subjects convicts to this degrading death. These attitudes are parodied again when Gringoire stumbles into the Court of Miracles (a den of thieves who live outside the law and take refuge in this infamous part of the city) and is put on trial for being innocent. The judge of this trial, Clopin Trouillefou, explains to Gringoire that the thieves hang innocent citizens who wander into their midst as revenge for the “truants” who are executed for minor offences. The Court of Miracles is a direct parody of the Palace of Justice and suggests that the judges in the official court are also a group of criminals who take out their frustrations on unfortunate members of society, just as the “truants” do in their court. It is not only the populace, and the “truants,” who enjoy cruel and arbitrary punishments in Hugo’s novel. In one scene, Hugo depicts the King of France himself, Louis XI, as he visits the famous prison in the Bastille, where political prisoners were kept. The king is totally oblivious to the pleas of a prisoner who has been locked in a tiny cage for 15 years, allegedly for treason. This implies that the people have been led by example and that an oppressive system, in which people live under the sway of a cruel monarch, will breed a cruel and bloodthirsty populace.
However, although medieval monarchs and cruel justice systems wield enormous power in the novel, Hugo also indicates that if the people decide they want freedom, nothing will be able to stop them. The will of the people is a palpable force throughout the novel. The great crowds in Paris are frequently compared to a sea which sweeps everything along in its path. This suggests that the power of the people is like a force of nature—more powerful and lasting than human institutions, such as the monarchy. Fear of the mob is felt by everyone in Paris, including King Louis XI. When Louis XI comes to Paris, he chooses to sleep in the Bastille. The Bastille is a prison and a fortress, and this suggests that, although Louis XI is a powerful monarch, he feels unsafe in the city. This is further demonstrated when a riot breaks out in Paris. At first, Louis XI is happy about this and believes the riot is against one of his bailiffs, whom he sees as a competitor for his power. When he discovers that the riot is against Notre Dame and, therefore, against himself (King and Church were closely connected in the medieval period), he is terrified and immediately agrees to the people’s terms. This suggests that those who wield power or dole out justice do not have as much control as they would have their people believe. Hugo indicates that these corrupt institutions, though they may seem powerful, can in fact be overthrown by the collective will of the people. Given the parallels between the deeply flawed justice systems in the novel and the similarly unjust institutions of Hugo’s own time, he may be suggesting that even in his own present day, readers still have a duty to remain alert to corruption and act to overthrow it when necessary.
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Justice, Punishment, and Freedom Quotes in The Hunchback of Notre Dame
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.
Hanged by the populace for waiting, hanged by the cardinal for not waiting; either way he could see only the abyss, that is a gallows.
We should add that Coppenole was of the people, just as the crowd around him was of the people. Thus the contact between him and it had been prompt, electric and, as it were, on level terms. The Flemish hosier’s haughty quip had humiliated the courtiers and aroused, in all these plebian souls, some sense of dignity as yet, in the fifteenth century, dim and uncertain. This hosier who had just answered the cardinal back was an equal: a sweet thought indeed for poor devils used to showing respect and obedience to the servants of the serjeants of the bailiff of the Abbot of Sainte-Genevive, the cardinal’s train-bearer.
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.
It is comforting, as I say, that today, having lost all the pieces of her armor one by one, her superfluity of torments, her inventive and fantastic punishments, the torture for which, every five years, she remade a leather bed in the Grand-Châtelet, this old suzeraine of feudal society has been almost eliminated from our laws and our towns, has been hunted down from code to code and driven out town-square by town-square, until now, in all the vastness of Paris, she has only one dishonored corner of the Grève and one miserable guillotine, furtive, anxious and ashamed, which always vanishes very swiftly after it has done its work, as if it were afraid of being caught in the act!
[…] 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.
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.
In this city, the boundaries between races and species seemed to have been abolished, as in a pandemonium. Amongst this population, men, women, animals, age, sex, health, sickness, all seemed communal; everything fitted together, was merged, mingled and superimposed; everyone was part of everything.
As you use our kind among you, so we use your kind among us. The law you apply to the truants, the truants apply to you. If it’s a vicious one, that’s your fault. We need now and again to see a respectable face above a hempen collar; it makes the whole thing honorable.
Most of these privileges, be it remarked in passing—and there were better ones than this—had been extorted from the king by revolts and mutinies. Such is the immemorial pattern. The king only lets go when the people snatches.
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.
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.
