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The Hunchback of Notre Dame | Introduction

By the time Victor Hugo wrote The Hunchback of Notre Dame (published in French as Notre-Dame de Paris), he had already made a name for himself as a poet and dramatist. Although he had written one other novel (Han d’Islande, 1823), he had not really been known as a novelist. The Hunchback of Notre Dame was to change all that. Even more popular than it became throughout the twentieth century and into the early 2000s, this romantic story grabbed the imagination of the French people who embraced it for its melodramatic storyline and Hugo’s detailed rendering of the life and culture of fifteenth-century Paris.

On the surface, The Hunchback of Notre Dame is a story of unrequited love between a man horribly disfigured and a beautiful woman who loves someone else. But Hugo was a very complex writer who gave his readers a much more complicated story. Underneath the unfolding of Quasimodo’s love of La Esmeralda is a historical drama set in 1482, a time that in many ways mirrored the times and political struggles of Hugo’s nineteenthcentury world. With almost the entire novel set in the cathedral of Notre Dame, the novel also conveys a spiritual element not only in its setting but in its characters. There is a priest who has lost his spiritual path; there is a physically disfigured man who is shunned and must find solace not in the material world but deep within himself; and there is the beautiful woman, innocence personified, who searches for a spiritual form of love.

Although his contemporaries applauded his novel, in many ways Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame was also shocking in its time. Hugo was, after all, a central figure of the Romantic Movement in literature. Readers, prior to Hugo’s works, were used to literature that was influenced more by the classical form, which emphasized rational rather than emotional topics and points of view. Also, Hugo’s main character, Quasimodo, is physically repulsive, whereas in classical works, writers focused on idealized form. The Hunchback of Notre Dame also focuses on the personal rather than on classical universal themes, which may be one of the reasons why the novel retained its popularity for almost two hundred years.

The Hunchback of Notre Dame Summary

Chapters 1–11
Hugo begins The Hunchback of Notre Dame with a detailed account of the life and culture of fifteenth-century Paris. There is to be a royal wedding, and the city is alive with performances and pomp. One of the main characters is introduced in the person of Pierre Gringoire, a poet and playwright, whose drama is presented amidst noise and many interruptions.

One of those interruptions is caused by La Esmeralda, a woman whose beauty attracts crowds and cheers. After the play is finally abandoned, Gringoire follows La Esmeralda, watches her dance, and later witnesses Quasimodo attempting to kidnap her. Claude Frollo has prompted Quasimodo to take the woman back to the cathedral. When Gringoire tries to rescue La Esmeralda, Quasimodo hits him and knocks him out. In the meantime, the handsome captain of the king’s archers, Phoebus, arrests Quasimodo as Frollo sneaks away.

Chapters 12–20
Gringoire searches for a place to sleep and ends up with the gypsies, whose leader Clopin Trouillefou threatens to kill him unless a woman in their midst agrees to marry him. La Esmeralda, who recognizes Gringoire, agrees to save him. After they are married, La Esmeralda tells him she wants only a platonic relationship. Gringoire accepts but secretly hopes that one day he will win her love.

Hugo then describes the cathedral of Notre Dame. Great details are provided about the church’s history and its architecture. Next Hugo offers a broader view of fifteenth-century Paris, its buildings and its various centers. There is a flashback to the time when Quasimodo was abandoned as an infant and left in the church. The history of priest Frollo is then provided. Readers learn about Frollo’s singular focus on an intellectual life as well as his concern for Quasimodo and for Frollo’s younger brother Jehan, whose care Frollo undertook upon the death of their parents. Jehan has turned out to be a disappointment, and Frollo plans to do a better job with Quasimodo.

A fuller description is offered about Quasimodo’s life, which is fairly well cloistered in the cathedral. Not being able to socialize because people are fearful of him, Quasimodo makes friends with the statues and the bells, which are his responsibility to ring on special occasions. The bells, however, have deafened him.

Chapters 21–30
King Louis XI makes a surprise visit (under disguise and using the name Compère Tourangeau) to Frollo, who has gained a reputation as a learned scholar not only in the spiritual realm but also in medicine and alchemy. The king’s physician, Jacques Coictier, does not trust Frollo and insists that Frollo is a madman. Frollo discusses the power of the new printing presses, which he suggests to the king will eventually undermine the authority of the church as well as diminish the other arts such as architecture, which in classical and medieval times was decorated to display in stone sculpture and relief the stories of ancient civilizations.

Then the scene changes to the trial of Quasimodo for having... » Complete The Hunchback of Notre Dame Summary