Notre-Dame de Paris
Victor Hugo
Notre-Dame de Paris
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In the Paris of 1482, the deaf bell-ringer Quasimodo, the archdeacon Claude Frollo and a captain of the guard all want the same thing from a Roma dancer named Esmeralda, and none of them will leave her alone. Hugo wrote it to make the French care about their Gothic buildings again, and the cathedral is as much a character as anyone in it.
About the book
Published in 1831 and set in the Paris of 1482, Notre-Dame de Paris turns on a sixteen-year-old Roma dancer named Esmeralda and the three men who cannot leave her alone: Quasimodo, the deaf hunchbacked bell-ringer the cathedral has raised; Claude Frollo, the archdeacon who took him in and whose desire for her has become a theology of its own; and Phoebus, a captain of the guard who wants an afternoon. A false charge of witchcraft and a scaffold in the square bring all of them together. Hugo wrote it as a campaign as much as a novel. Medieval Paris was being demolished around him, and the long chapters on the cathedral’s stonework and on the printing press replacing the building as the memory of the human race are the argument: the restoration of Notre-Dame began because the book made France look at it again.
Characters
Quasimodo — Bell-ringer
Deafened by his own bells and shown to the city as a monster, devoted to the one person who was kind to him.
Esmeralda — Dancer
A young Roma street dancer with a trained goat, accused of a crime committed in front of her.
Claude Frollo — Archdeacon
The scholar-priest who raised Quasimodo, and whose obsession with Esmeralda destroys everyone it touches.
Phoebus de Châteaupers — Captain
A handsome, engaged captain of the archers, flattered by her devotion and not troubled by it.
Pierre Gringoire — Poet
A failed playwright married to Esmeralda by the law of the Court of Miracles, and fonder of the goat.
Clopin Trouillefou — King of the beggars
Ruler of the Court of Miracles, who brings the whole underclass of Paris against the cathedral.
Jehan Frollo — Frollo’s brother
The archdeacon’s dissolute young brother, a student who spends his allowance on taverns and dice.
About the author
Victor Hugo (1802–1885) was a French poet, novelist and dramatist, the leader of French Romanticism, and by the end a national institution. He wrote Notre-Dame de Paris partly as a campaign to stop the demolition of Gothic buildings, and it worked: the cathedral was restored because of the book. A republican who had begun as a royalist, he opposed Napoleon III's coup in 1851 and spent nineteen years in exile on Guernsey rather than accept an amnesty, writing Les Misérables there. Two million people lined the streets of Paris at his funeral.