In The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Victor Hugo presents the medieval period as an intensely superstitious age in which people often believe in supernatural explanations for events rather than rational ones. Hugo undermines this attitude and provides a logical explanation for every supposedly supernatural occurrence in the novel. This demonstrates the difference in knowledge between the medieval period, in which the novel is set, and the 1800s, in which Hugo wrote the novel. In the 1800s, there was a widespread belief in rationalism and a growing understanding of the natural sciences, and Hugo uses the events of the novel to support the value of this perspective. By contrasting it with a medieval worldview, Hugo also suggests that superstition played an important role in medieval society as it helped people to rationalize seemingly inexplicable events.
The characters in the novel are extremely superstitious. Medieval society is presented as a time in which belief in superstitions, such as the belief in ghosts, astrology, or witchcraft, is normal. Many of the characters believe that Frollo is a sorcerer (in reality, he practices alchemy, which was an early form of experimental science) and he is thought ridiculous because he does not believe in astrology. This suggests that, in the world of the novel, it is considered more reasonable to believe in supernatural forms of knowledge like astrology than in natural science. Similarly, people genuinely fear the supernatural and feel it is a real threat to their wellbeing. For example, when Phoebus is approached by Quasimodo in the street at night, he is frightened by Quasimodo’s appearance and thinks he must be a supernatural entity. Phoebus rushes away before he hears Quasimodo’s message from Esmeralda, who has taken refuge in Notre Dame to avoid being executed and who desperately needs Phoebus’s help to escape. Phoebus’s behavior shows how much power ideas about the supernatural carry in the medieval period. Characters often jump to supernatural conclusions before rational ones. When Frollo accompanies Phoebus to a brothel, where Phoebus plans to seduce Esmeralda, the landlady who greets them sees both Frollo and Phoebus, although Frollo is disguised by a dark cloak. During the seduction, Frollo hides in a cupboard and then escapes out the window after he stabs Phoebus in a jealous rage. The landlady, who finds only Esmeralda and Phoebus in the room, assumes that Frollo must have been the devil, or a demon monk who has been rumored to haunt the streets, rather than concluding rationally that he was simply a man who escaped through the window. This supernatural explanation gains popularity in Paris, however, and demonstrates that the supernatural is considered rational by the medieval populace.
Hugo counteracts these superstitions and provides rational explanations for events in the novel. While the characters in The Hunchback of Notre Dame take apparently supernatural events at face value, Hugo’s narration shows the reader that nothing supernatural really takes place. For example, although the people of Paris believe in the story of the demon monk, Hugo reveals to the reader that it is really Frollo in disguise. Instances like this emphasize Hugo’s point that the supernatural is not actually prevalent, as medieval society believes, and that most events have rational explanations. Hugo takes a skeptical approach to the supernatural because he writes from a 19th-century perspective. During the Enlightenment, which lasted approximately from the 17th to the 19th century in Europe, developments in philosophy and science meant that people gradually moved away from superstitious beliefs and, instead, looked for natural explanations for things. It is through the character of Frollo that this attitude is most clearly demonstrated, as, before his obsession with Esmeralda, Frollo is interested in science, shuns superstition, and wishes to develop a more rational understanding of the world. This suggests that society is already moving in this direction during the medieval period and that, although he is the antagonist of the novel, Frollo is ahead of his time. In fact, it is when Frollo abandons his studies that his responses to the world grow more irrational and he falls back on his belief in witchcraft, accusing Esmeralda of bewitching him and causing his obsession. This suggests that the pursuit of scientific knowledge, which took place across the Enlightenment period, improved society because it dispelled many ideas, such as belief in witchcraft, that previously led to widespread persecution in Europe.
However, Hugo also makes it clear that medieval society’s reliance on superstition is understandable. Hugo argues that the advent of Enlightenment thought in Europe began with the invention of the printing press. The reproduction of books allowed information to spread rapidly among the population and increased literacy levels. Hugo describes books as “a flock of birds” that carried information across the world and helped explain many natural occurrences which had previously been thought supernatural. But despite the progress made by these changes, Hugo suggests that belief in the supernatural was a rational response to a world in which events could not be explained by science. Although many Enlightenment writers and philosophers looked down on the medieval period as an irrational and barbarous time, Hugo delves into the psychology of people in the medieval period and empathizes with their perspective. By doing so, he is able to recognize the important difference that widespread literacy made to the world, while also acknowledging the imagination and ingenuity of medieval society as it looked for ways to explain and understand mysterious events. This balanced perspective reflects Hugo’s overall thesis that there is knowledge to be gained from examining other cultures and time periods. Though he celebrates rational thought, he also indicates that limiting oneself to only a rationalist, Enlightenment perspective is as ignorant and arbitrary as the superstitious beliefs that many of his medieval characters cling to.
Related Themes from Other Texts
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The Supernatural, Rationalism, and Knowledge Quotes in The Hunchback of Notre Dame
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.
[…] 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.
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.
Had Gringoire lived in our own day, how beautifully he would have bisected the Classics and Romantics!
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.
He realized there were other things in the world besides the speculations of the Sorbonne and the verses of Homerus, that man has need of affection, that without tenderness and love life was just a harsh and mechanical clockwork, in need of lubrication.
‘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.
In those days they saw everything thus, without metaphysics, without exaggeration, without a magnifying glass, with the naked eye. The microscope had not yet been invented, either for material things or for the things of the spirit.
