How the French Author Victor Hugo Saved Notre Dame

However, during the French Revolution this building was completely desecrated. Much of its religious imagery damaged or destroyed. And so by July of 1801, Notre Dame was given back to the Catholic Church in a horrendous state of disarray.

But thanks to Victor Hugo and the huge success of his book Notre Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre Dame) the Cathedral was saved. This work planted appreciation back in the public’s hearts.

Victor Hugo first began writing the Notre-Dame de Paris masterpiece in 1829. The bell-ringing, half-blind hunchback of Quasimodo has become iconic of ‘a courageous heart beneath a grotesque exterior.’ This character urges readers to look beyond the surface and find the beauty beneath, with the hope that they’ll do the same for the Notre Dame.

The descriptive sections of the book are so extended, going far beyond the requirements for the story, that his conservation efforts are clear. ‘There exists in this era, for thoughts written in stone, a privilege absolutely comparable to our current freedom of the press. It is the freedom of architecture’, he wrote in praise of its construction.

‘A universal cry must finally go up to call the new France to the aid of the old,’ he wrote in a paper entitled Guerre aux Démolisseurs (War to the Demolishers). He declared war on the ‘demolishers’ and aimed to save Paris’ medieval architecture, and the city of Paris is very glad he did.