Indeed, the novel proved its worth in the 1830s with a number of successes-among them Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir (The Red and the Black, 1830) and Balzac’s La Peau de chagrin (The Magic Skin, 1831)—increasingly validating the capacities of the form. As realism gradually emerged as the aesthetic and literary movement that would transform the novel into the principal literary genre, and as the serial publication of novels in newspapers spurred on the industrialization of literature, the novelist of the nineteenth century—well known or not-had to live by his or (much less often) her pen, and with this reality often came practical and artistic constraints. In Hugo’s case, however, his careful management of the publication and republication of not only The Hunchback of Notre Dame but also his theatrical works and poetry resulted in a financial independence that ultimately allowed him to avoid the same kinds of concerns about content and style; he could write what he wanted, when he wanted. With regard to his fiction, which subsequently included Les Misérables (1862), Les Travailleurs de la mer (The Toilers of the Sea, 1866), L‘Homme qui rit (The Man Who Laughs, 1869), and Quatrevingt-treize (Ninety-three, 1874), this freedom gave Hugo the space he needed to continue pursuing the concept of the novel outlined in his review of Quentin Durward, one in which core, universal truths are transmitted through an expansive exploration of the human condition.

While the majority of French novelists of the nineteenth century who are still read and studied today—Stendhal, Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, Émile Zola—focused their gaze inward on the workings of contemporary society and the ways the political turmoil of their recent past affected their present and the social behavior that defined it, and while the most celebrated French historical novelists, such as Alexandre Dumas—author of Les Trois Mousquetaires (The Three Musketeers, 1844) and Le Comte de Monte Cristo (The Count of Monte Cristo, 1844)—looked to the distant past as a way of distracting from the uncertainties of the here and now, Hugo wrote during the course of his career a decidedly different kind of novel. Hugo’s novel viewed history—from long-ago medieval France in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, to the more recent post-Revolutionary and Restoration France in Les Misérables and The Toilers of the Sea, to the seemingly immaterial history of seventeenth-century England in The Man Who Laughs, to the haunting history of Revolutionary France in Ninety-three—as neither an explanation for the present nor an escape from it, but rather as a catalyst for grap pling with ideological and philosophical questions of the highest order relative to the passage of time itself and the nature of progress. Each of Hugo’s novels tells and retells the same story of universal man and his struggles; in this larger context we can understand Hugo’s surprising assertion, in an 1868 letter, that although he considered the historical novel a very good genre because Walter Scott had distinguished himself with it, he had “never written ... a historical novel” (Oeuvres complètes, vol. 14, p. 1;254; translation mine). If, strictly speaking and by modern definition this declaration rings false, since all of Hugo’s novels do meet the criteria to qualify as “historical,” it is more significant that this disavowal—which was made while Hugo was in self-imposed exile in protest of the unfolding history of the Second Empire and its emperor, Napoleon III—underscores the complex understanding of and relationship to history that characterizes all of Hugo’s work.

In The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hugo’s first real attempt to tell this universal story, this complexity finds its ideal expression in the symbol of the cathedral. Firmly planted in the historical moment of the crepuscule of the Middle Ages—the year 1482, as the subtitle to the French edition clearly specifies—the novel showcases one of the medieval period’s great architectural achievements, the cathedral of Notre Dame, which is literally and figuratively at the center of all action (no wonder, then, that Hugo condemned the English translation of the title for shifting the focus from the cathedral to its bell ringer). This choice was undoubtedly affected by the zeal of the Romantic age for all things medieval. Ever since Chateaubriand’s Genie du Christianisme (The Genius of Christianity, 1802), in which Chateaubriand sought to rehabilitate Gothic art and architecture as well as the Christian faith, there had been a renewed and even frenzied interest in this underappreciated period of history. Hugo himself had jumped enthusiastically on the bandwagon with an 1825 article titled “Sur la destruction des monuments en France” (see endnote 28), in which he calls for an end to the demolition and mutilation of the monuments of the Middle Ages, pieces of a collective past in which history was inscribed. This idea of the monument as living history is developed and magnified in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, as the cathedral serves as the transitional marker both in art, between Roman and Gothic architecture, and in history, between the periods of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Yet this role of the monument as witness bearer, as “carved” history, is destined to be supplanted by the advent of a different kind of record, the printed page.

In “The One Will Kill the Other,” one of the three chapters Hugo reintegrated into the definitive edition of the novel, the narrator seeks to elucidate the enigmatic words spoken by the Faustian priest Claude Frollo, who, during a mysterious visit from King Louis XI, makes, while looking alternately at an open book and the great cathedral, the melancholy assertion that “the book will kill the building” (p. 169). Frollo and the narrator, however, view the relationship between architecture and the written word in quite opposite ways. While Frollo, a high-ranking representative of the Church, laments the invention of the printing press in predicting that it will reduce the Church’s theocratic stronghold, the narrator sees the printing press positively as a democratic invention that will serve to enlighten the masses. Implicit in this notion of inevitable enlightenment are the political dimensions of the more accessible printed word, a form of progress that will propel the masses out of the darkness and tyranny of the Middle Ages. The novel, in which the fictional trajectories and events are shadowed by the major political events of the year 1482—the final full year of the reign of the dying Louis XI—depicts in this way a world on the cusp of change. Using a technique opposite to that employed by most writers of the historical novel, in which the author strives to render time timeless, to transport the reader in a way that makes him unaware of the temporal abyss, Hugo, through his narrator, a man of 1830, repeatedly draws attention to the differences between these two eras, to the great divide between “then” and “now.”

It is the representation of the masses—the people, who are at the height of their religious, judicial, social, economic, and political oppression—that best incarnates the essence of this transitional moment. First seen during Gringoire’s mystery play at the Palace of Justice, the assembled throng (indistinct in its motivations and distinct in its restlessness) has a decidedly moblike quality. This menacing aspect is heightened through the development of the Parisian underworld of “vagrants” (thieves, beggars, vagabonds) in the “Court of Miracles.” The cruelty, superstition, and barbaric ways that govern medieval Paris are mirrored and magnified in this city within the city, presided over by its own ruffian leaders. This group is characterized by its dynamic aspects, by a constant state of motion, yet motion in no way signifies movement in a forward direction or, figuratively, evolution; on the contrary, this group is equally defined by its inherent confusion and blindness. Just as its chosen “Pope of Fools,” Quasimodo, is only “partially made,” the vagrants are without any kind of ideological shape: They are ruled entirely by instincts of base survival and by their own self-interest. At no moment in the novel is this central lack of a guiding ideology more evident than in the scene in which the vagrants storm the cathedral to “save” Esmeralda, as this noble effort quickly degenerates into a frenzied desire to rebel and to pillage the cathedral of its treasures, and results in a staggering loss of lives. At the very heart of the vagrants’ defeat is a chaos rooted in the breakdown of any common linguistic understanding (“There was an awful howl, intermingled with all languages, all dialects, all accents” [p. 410]). Indeed, in an ironic twist that highlights their inability to communicate, the vagrants and Quasimodo work at cross purposes, each believing the other to be the enemy.