• Victor-Marie Hugo was born, 1802 in France.1
• He had a royalist-inclined mother and his father was a general for Napoleon's army.2 This living situation of conflict and difference of opinion is often portrayed in his work.
• 1828 Victor is allocating a large portion of his time researching 13th century Paris for this novel.3
• 15 November 1828 He signs a contract with the publisher Gosselin to write Notre-Dame de Paris. He was given 4000 francs on the spot to have the novel finished on April 15th 1829, with rights for a year and 2750 copies.3
• However, money does not last long the way it goes, and Mr. Hugo, being the head of a family with a newborn third child sets out to make some money. For an author this means writing a play. A play is less work then a novel and can make a lot of money quickly. So he gave his play Hernani priority over Notre-Dame de Paris.3
• A publisher named, Mame, offers Victor 6000 francs for a year's exclusive rights for his play. Victor gets so excited he signs, forgetting he gave Gosselin the option to purchase any of his works for a year.3
• Gosselin is raging mad and demands the novel Notre-Dame de Paris of which not a single word has been written yet.3
• 15 June 1830 His friends intercede for him and push the due date back to December 1st 1830.3
• Late July, the Revolution of 1830 breaks out which enables Victor to push the due date back another 2 months.3
• Writes Ode a la Jeune France.3
• With four months till the deadline he begins writing Notre-Dame de Paris.3
  • MMe. Victor Hugo described her husband at work. "He bought a bottle of ink and a thick gray wool sweater which covered him from his neck to his big toes, locked up his suits so that he wouldn't be tempted to go out and entered into his novel as if it were a prison. He was very sad. From that moment on he left his table only to eat and sleep..." However, after writing a few chapters his sadness was replaced with the joy of writing this novel he had researched for so long. He lived in the pages of this book where the characters became his companions for five months. Victor only went out once during this writing marathon, and that was to attend the trial of Charles X's ministers.3
  • According to his wife on his return he "Then he returned to the rue Jean Goujon and got back into his sweater and his work. On the fourteenth of January, the book was finished. The bottle of ink which Victor Hugo had bought on the first day was finished too; he had reached the last line and the last drop at the same moment, which made him think for a minute of calling his novel, 'What there is in a bottle of ink.'"3
• 14 January 1831, Hunchback of Notre Dame finished.4 In the chaos a chapter was left out of the first printing because it was misplaced.2
• 16 March 1831 the novel appeared.3
• In the 1840's his interests shifted from writing to other interests:
  • Rioting erupted in Paris along with a cholera outbreak.3
  • 1843 Victor's oldest daughter and her husband drown.1
  • 1843 His play The Burgraves failed miserably.1
  • After his monarchist views shifted to republican he was elected to the new National Assembly.1
  • December 1851, Louis Napoleon overthrows the republic and crowns himself Emperor Napoleon III dictator.1
• 1851 Victor is driven from his homeland (France) by the dictator he once believed in.
• 1862 Les Miserables published.3
• 1870 He Returns to France.1
• Died, May 22, 1885 in France.1

Victor Hugo did extensive research for this novel. He wanted the reader to step into and dwell in a different time. According to Andre Maurois of the Academine Francaise:3

He wanted to depict a fifteenth-century Paris, the Paris of Louis XI. At the same time, through his portrayal of Paris, he wanted to depict the whole fifteenth century, its art, law, and customs. In order to do so he had to "ransack every palace and every hovel." He learns that a certain pot-house was in such-and-such a neighborhood; he learns that at a certain crossroads there burns a lamp before a certain statue of the Virgin. There is nothing he doesn't know about the Cour des Miracles where the riffraff gather, or about the gallows at Montfaucon where their adventurous, villainous lives come to an end. Every detail in the description of his characters is exact-the clothes they wear, the songs they sing, the proverbs they quote, the coins they take from their pockets, the Latin they speak. He found their names in old accounts: there was a real Claude Frollo, and a real Jehan Frollo, and of course, a real Gringoire. What he relates of Louis XI, Olivier le Daim, and Coictier, the king's physician, he owes to the chroniclers. No historian has ever accumulated more notes than this poet.

-Andre Maurois of the Academine Francaise

There is a French phrase and a Greek word that will round out this background of this story.

Ananké

This is Greek for "Fate". During Victor Hugo's intense study he found many words scratched into the walls of Notre-Dame itself. This Greek word was one of those that he deciphered. It is possible that this inspired his fate theme which is strung about throughout the novel.3 The characters frequently refer to the Roman gods, and seem more driven by fate then free-will. I should note that this fate factor does not play the dominant a role in all of Hugo's works.

Ceci tuera cela (This will kill that)

This French phrase foreshadows the loss of huge intricate cathedrals, both for that time and the future. Lost to mass produced bibles read by a population that will find there is no need for such elaborate architecture as that found in Notre-Dame cathedral. Victor goes into a vivid detail of the cathedral, giving it feeling and life. He wanted the reader to understand the architectural, artistic, and historical beauty of this cathedral from a bygone era.

The other meaning of this phrase is that mass production of literature will kill religion. Think about it, 15th century Paris, plus printing press, plus Martin Luther, plus indulgences from the church, equals a shattering of Catholicism into hundreds of sects of Christianity. Also at this point in time in the author's life he was struggling with his own faith.

Nonetheless, here is the passage from the story.

"Our readers must excuse us if we stop a moment to investigate the enigmatic words of the archdeacon: "This will kill that. The book will kill the edifice."

In our opinion, the thought had two meanings. first of all, it was the view of a priest. It was the fear of an ecclesiastic before a new force, the printing press. It was the frightened yet dazzled man of the sanctuary confronting the illuminating Gutenberg press. It was the pulpit and the manuscript, the spoken work and the written word, alarmed because of the printed word; something like a sparrow frozen at the sight of a legion of angels spreading their six million wings. It was the cry of the prophet who already hears the rumbling of emancipated humanity; who sees in the distant future intelligence sapping faith, opinion dethroning belief, the world shaking the foundations of Rome. It was the prognostication of a philosopher who sees human thought, volatized by the press, evaporating from the theocratic vessel. It was the terror of the solider who examines the steel battering-ram and says, "The tower will crumble." It signified that one great power was following upon the heels of another great power. It meant: The printing press will destroy the Church. But besides this first thought, there was, in our opinion, a second, the more obvious of the two, a more modern corollary to the former idea, the less easily understood and the more likely to be contested, This view is quite as philosophical, but it no longer belongs to the priest alone but to the scholar and to the artist as well. Here was a premonition that human thought had advanced, and, in changing, was about to change its mode of expression, that the important ideas of each new generation would be recorded in a new way, that the book of stone, so solid and so enduring, was about to be supplanted by the paper book, which would become more enduring still. In this respect, the vague formula of the archdeacon had a second meaning: That one art would dethrone another art. It meant: Printing will destroy architecture." Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, book 5 chapter 2

If you read that passage carefully, you have felt Victor Hugo's wonderful descriptive technique. The entire book is not written in this manner of a philosophical dissertation, just certain sections.

Bibliography

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1.The World Book Encyclopedia, pgs 409-410, 2000

2. Introduction by Curtis Dahl, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame: published by Dodd, Mead and Company, INC. Copyright 1947, pgs 3-5

3.Afterword, by Andre Maurois, from 1965 edition of Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, pgs 501-511, Copyright 1965 by New American Library, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc.by Andre Maurois, Penguin Books

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David Lammers
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