Forum: Bildung and the State 251

Nation/Building: Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris and the Novelist as Post-

Revolutionary Historian

Nicola Minott-Ahl
Hobart & William Smith Colleges

Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) is Victor Hugo’s most famous novel; the variety of
interpretations it has received attests to both the artistic richness and complex
ambiguities of the text: the individual characters, indeed the novel itself, elude
precise definition. In this study I argue that one reason for their elusiveness is
that the building that is Notre-Dame, the heart of Hugo’s masterpiece, is both
its most important character and the text in terms of which other characters read
themselves and the world around them. Hugo develops the idea of the cathedral
as a text chapter by chapter. We become acquainted with the characters who
are actively reading and overwriting the text, even as we are ourselves reading
and being absorbed into it. The literary Notre-Dame becomes, in our reading, a
monument constructed of words and literary images, which we help erect along-
side our reading of the actual building. My focus, like that of Bernstein (1999),
Hoekstra (2005), and Purdy (2008), is the building in “Bildung”.
Hugo’s novel initiates this mutually transformative relationship in a time and
place in which radical change was the order of the day. But whereas much politi-
cal and social change in nineteenth-century France was designed (or served) to
distance people from the past, often tearing them violently away from it, Hugo
sought change that would reconnect the past with the present. His novel repre-
sents the existence of the cathedral and other architectural relics of feudal Chris-
tendom as fundamental to the French identity of his day. Notre-Dame de Paris is
about a building that is itself a literary and historical narrative written in stone,
wood, and glass. Stone, however, is not a stable signifier, nor can the cathedral
be reduced to a single aesthetic principle: “Notre-Dame de Paris is not of pure
Roman stock . . . not of pure Arab stock. . . . It is a transitional building” (1993:
124) — its very form the embodiment of what Hugo considered the changing,
hybrid nature of France itself.
As Notre-Dame does not embody just one principle, so it does not belong
to just one part of the French populace. Hugo demonstrates how novelists can
transform stone into words and claims for them the authority to use this ability
to re-narrate the national past and define national identity — hence Hugo’s dedi-
cation of Notre-Dame to the people of France. If readers left the novel thinking
that the cathedral at its center represented the hard work, ingenuity, and artistry
of their own ancestors, Notre-Dame would acquire the status of a popular monu-
ment. It had not enjoyed this status while it was limited to its own self-narrative

Partial Answers 10/2: 251–271 © 2012 The Johns Hopkins University Press
252 Partial Answers

and that of architectural historians. Hugo, in effect, claims for the novelists and
poets of nineteenth-century France the power to create Frenchness.
This work of literary nation-building was already begun by Royalist histo-
rian René de Chateaubriand’s The Genius of Christianity (1802). Chateaubri-
and bypassed current revolutionaries, republicanism, and the displaced Bourbon
monarchy as foundations of the new France; he associated the national past with
an idealized medieval world. In situating the essence of the French character
in a distant and mythicized past, he asked his readers to consider what a nation
could accomplish when its people’s creative energies were harnessed to a com-
mon purpose.
Jules Michelet contradicted Chateaubriand in his Histoire de France (the
first part of which appeared in 1833), insisting on the importance of narrating
the Revolution. An entire class of people usually ignored in traditional historical
narratives had now entered history and could no longer be omitted. Michelet saw
a past teeming with divisive political decisions and racing intellectual crosscur-
rents, all with implications for ordinary people. A single lifetime was insufficient
to narrate such intricacies. When Michelet died in 1874, his story of the revolu-
tion in France had only reached the 1815 Battle of Waterloo.

Building Narrative
Nation building is a challenging business. Politicians are as keenly aware as
Hugo that, even if one can apply great military and economic force, it is a pro-
cess requiring the persuasive use of narration, of the spoken or written word.
Overwhelming military power can force people together, but it cannot create
unity among disparate elements; and common economic interests are rarely a
sufficiently effective agent of cultural cohesion. Narratives of nationality have
never been the exclusive province of politicians, philosophers, and historians,
nor are the materials needed for such narration found only in print. Poets have
always played their part, from the great epics of antiquity and the renaissance
until quite recently. This is why Hugo mentions the cathedral in the context of
oral tradition and narrative poetry — the “Iliades et Romanceros” which he iden-
tifies as “sisters” to Notre-Dame.
Earlier in the nineteenth century, the poet and novelist Sir Walter Scott took
the scattered relics of Scotland’s past — art, artifacts, buildings, and landscapes,
as well as legends (and forged legends), ballads, and folklore — and wove them
into the fabric of his own story of Scottish nationality and ethnicity.1 He taught a
vast and expanding readership to view the Scots as a heroic people with a storied

In fact, his novel The Antiquary (1816) grapples, among other issues, with the dilemma
1 

presented by the preservation of the relics of the past in the face of the need to live in the
present.
252 Partial Answers

and that of architectural historians. Hugo, in effect, claims for the novelists and
poets of nineteenth-century France the power to create Frenchness.
This work of literary nation-building was already begun by Royalist histo-
rian René de Chateaubriand’s The Genius of Christianity (1802). Chateaubri-
and bypassed current revolutionaries, republicanism, and the displaced Bourbon
monarchy as foundations of the new France; he associated the national past with
an idealized medieval world. In situating the essence of the French character
in a distant and mythicized past, he asked his readers to consider what a nation
could accomplish when its people’s creative energies were harnessed to a com-
mon purpose.
Jules Michelet contradicted Chateaubriand in his Histoire de France (the
first part of which appeared in 1833), insisting on the importance of narrating
the Revolution. An entire class of people usually ignored in traditional historical
narratives had now entered history and could no longer be omitted. Michelet saw
a past teeming with divisive political decisions and racing intellectual crosscur-
rents, all with implications for ordinary people. A single lifetime was insufficient
to narrate such intricacies. When Michelet died in 1874, his story of the revolu-
tion in France had only reached the 1815 Battle of Waterloo.

Building Narrative
Nation building is a challenging business. Politicians are as keenly aware as
Hugo that, even if one can apply great military and economic force, it is a pro-
cess requiring the persuasive use of narration, of the spoken or written word.
Overwhelming military power can force people together, but it cannot create
unity among disparate elements; and common economic interests are rarely a
sufficiently effective agent of cultural cohesion. Narratives of nationality have
never been the exclusive province of politicians, philosophers, and historians,
nor are the materials needed for such narration found only in print. Poets have
always played their part, from the great epics of antiquity and the renaissance
until quite recently. This is why Hugo mentions the cathedral in the context of
oral tradition and narrative poetry — the “Iliades et Romanceros” which he iden-
tifies as “sisters” to Notre-Dame.
Earlier in the nineteenth century, the poet and novelist Sir Walter Scott took
the scattered relics of Scotland’s past — art, artifacts, buildings, and landscapes,
as well as legends (and forged legends), ballads, and folklore — and wove them
into the fabric of his own story of Scottish nationality and ethnicity.1 He taught a
vast and expanding readership to view the Scots as a heroic people with a storied

In fact, his novel The Antiquary (1816) grapples, among other issues, with the dilemma
1 

presented by the preservation of the relics of the past in the face of the need to live in the
present.
 Forum: Bildung and the State 253

past. At the same time, he also demonstrated a new approach to historical writing
that shunned bare facts or political figures in favor of a creative narrative con-
structed of available facts, informed conjecture, and outright invention. From
Scott, the novelists that came of age in the early nineteenth century learned the
seamless blending of history and fiction, and applied it to the construction and
articulation of their own cultural, political, and national identities. What Scott
did for Scotland in Waverley, The Heart of Midlothian, and Rob Roy, Victor
Hugo, William Harrison Ainsworth, Alexandre Dumas, and other novelists of
this younger generation did for their own countries.
Scott did not invent the philosophy underlying this approach; he learned di-
rectly from Dugald Stewart, Adam Ferguson (who taught Stewart), and Thomas
Reid that the inevitable gaps in the historical record could be filled through in-
formed speculation. The result is conjectural history. These professors of moral
philosophy at the University of Edinburgh supplied the basic principles that al-
lowed the novelists of post-revolutionary France and England to piece together
and revivify, rather than merely catalogue, a national past. According to Stew-
art, “the principal power we possess over the train of our ideas is founded on
the influence which our habits of thinking have on the laws of Association; an
influence which is so great, that we may often form a pretty shrewd judgment
concerning a man’s prevailing turn of thought, from the transitions he makes
in conversation or in writing” (239). Once we have discovered the patterns of
thought that inform the actions and ideas of historical figures, it becomes pos-
sible to imagine how they behaved in private or viewed historically significant
events. And if it was possible for a scientist, philosopher, or historian to “argue
from the known to the unknown parts of the moral world” (ibidem), it was also
possible for Scott to extend the principle to the novelist’s craft. Scott’s prodi-
gious output shows how Stewart also empowered novelists in the blending of
historical facts with fictional people and events. In fact, Scott and his imitators
inherited a methodology for the development of narrative fiction that afforded a
comprehensive view of the past and conveyed a strong sense of the spirit of an
age. Scott’s own development of Stewart’s ideas allowed his works to be read
both as history and as literature.
To the lessons learned from Stewart and mediated through Scott, Hugo add-
ed two ideas of his own. The first is that narrative and architecture are analogous.
Both are elaborate human-made constructs that transmit culture in ways that
transcend their basic functions, of communication and the provision of shelter
respectively. Hugo’s other contribution is the notion that a conjectural collective
past could be sufficiently influential, if presented in the appropriate medium and
to a receptive audience, to end the destructive phase of the Revolution and initi-
ate nation building. One did not have to move single-mindedly into the creation
of new buildings to represent a regenerated, modern state; one need only alter
the significance of problematic existing ones in a way that most people could en-
dorse. The key to political stability was the construction of commonality through
254 Partial Answers

the nation’s language and the nation’s history. The preservation of Notre-Dame,
as of other such buildings, would not only allocate space for commonality in that
history but also demonstrate that Notre Dame is, in itself, that history — written
in stone, the mass medium of its day.
Hugo maintains that a narrative can be conveyed through a variety of media
selected by different ages from the materials at hand. The choice of medium is
determined by the level of literacy, the degree of public receptivity to a given
mode of public address, and the available technology. But to make a narrative
work, one has to get it right. And there are many ways of getting it wrong.
At the beginning of Notre-Dame, Hugo establishes the analogy between
narrative and architecture through the tale of the poet Gringoire’s near-death
experience in the Court of Miracles when he offers the wrong narrative at a cru-
cial moment in his interactions with the people who want to kill him. Gringoire
has wandered into a slum governed and populated by beggars and thieves. He
must talk his way out of danger by creating a sense of kinship between them
and himself. In much the same way, Hugo must offer readers a narrative that
will convince them that Gothic architecture is French and belongs in the new
France. In both cases, the stakes are high. Gringoire’s unsuccessful attempts
at self-presentation — as a writer, no less — earn him a death sentence since
Clopin, the underworld king, constantly interrupts him and thus prevents him
from explaining what he is. When he finally gets his chance to identify himself
— after the sentence has been passed — the uselessness of his curriculum vitae
becomes glaringly evident:
“Ah! so it’s you, maître!” said Clopin. “I was there, by God! Very well!
Comrade, is there any reason, because you bored us this morning, for not
hanging you this evening?” (1993: 98 [1974b: 133])
Gringoire is condemned and though the verdict is not carried out, it is not his
narrative that saves him. The failure of Gringoire’s attempts to use a narrative of
his life to escape a death sentence may well be a comment on the vanity of any
writer’s hopes of literary immortality.
Hugo, a shrewd rhetorician, grasped that a narrator must gauge the receptivi-
ty of his audience and tailor his material so as to attract that audience’s attention.
Gringoire, however, starts and ends with his personal experience: his world, not
theirs. He does not even move from the particular to the general, much less to
the universal. His hearers pay attention at first, perhaps hoping that his story may
have some wider significance. Clopin, however, quickly realizes that Gringoire
will talk only about himself and that his story will be utterly irrelevant to the
denizens of the Court of Miracles, whose very name whets the appetite for the
spectacular rather than for the boring.
Gringoire’s failure to supply the needed narrative, when prompted, is a
missed opportunity to engage in dialogue the crowd that is becoming an unruly
 Forum: Bildung and the State 255

mob. He destroys rather than builds trust, foreclosing all possibility of finding
common ground with his hearers.
The episode demonstrates how easily a narrative can go wrong; its outcome
perhaps indicates Hugo’s sense that the moment for the cult of the individual
“great man,” in which the likes of Robespierre and Napoleon flourished, has
passed, at least for the moment. Hugo surely did not want his narrative to go
the way of Gringoire’s. Hugo saw Gothic buildings as the media through which
the people of the Middle Ages expressed grand ideas to contemporaries and
to posterity. Their disadvantage was that each construction was unique, fixed
in location, hugely demanding in terms of money and skills, potentially unin-
telligible in the future, and, ultimately, destructible. But the printed novel, the
popular mass medium of his day, allowed buildings and their social history to
be replicated ad infinitum and transmitted to people the world over. It made the
grand but immovable architectural statement of a cathedral or fortress portable
and capable of reassembly in the minds of French-speaking people, and, in trans-
lation, those of readers in other languages.
No less important, Notre-Dame de Paris allowed the cathedral to plead its
case to a wider public. Ideologues, prone to give verbal abstractions precedence
over concrete reality, might come to regard the buildings as obsolete or symbolic
of what they do not want remembered. The feverish activity of printing presses
had fomented the riots that brought down the Bastille — “This will kill that, the
book will kill the building” (1993: 192).2 The medium shapes the message: the
popular press could cast Gothic architecture as a potentially counter-revolution-
ary force. At the time, indeed, existing buildings were likely to become irrel-
evant and new Gothic cathedrals would not be built. People’s attitudes and ideas
would be influenced and expressed by the print medium. The stone medium,
ruled by the clergy, would give way to a medium accessible to the laity, one that
would lend itself to debate rather than the promulgation of doctrine.
Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses underscored this idea and revolutionized Chris-
tianity by transferring theological debate from clerical circles to the public fo-
rum. Luther’s document, attached to a building, had served as the Protestant
challenge to Catholic doctrine and its traditional non-verbal medium, the church,
as vehicles of truth. Although Notre-Dame’s historical setting is 1482, long be-
fore Luther posted his famous declaration, this famous moment in church history
is recalled in Dom Claude’s desperate and defiant Greek graffito in Notre-Dame.
The written word, coming from the press, threatened to end the central role
of Gothic buildings in French culture by advocating their destruction: castles,
associated with oppressive monarchs and aristocrats, and cathedrals, associated
with an often no less oppressive hierarchy of Ecclesiastical authority, no longer
bore commonly held ideas; they were Gothic stone records of a past better for-
gotten. The Bastille and the monarchy had been destroyed, why not the cathedral

2 
“Ceci tuera cela. Le livre tuera l’édifice” (1974b: 237).
256 Partial Answers

and the catholic hierarchy? Yet if these monuments could be read differently,
their continued existence could relieve society of its duty to provide a new and
unifying architectural narrative for France. Otherwise, they would become ir-
relevant and threatened with neglect, or destruction. At best, they would be mere
relics, and any effort at their preservation would devolve into an (expensive)
exercise in antiquarianism.
Hugo, however, contributed greatly to the campaign to preserve the actual
building, even to the point of membership in the Comité des Arts et Monuments
(1835–1848) and playing a role in the selection of E. Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc
to restore Notre-Dame de Paris.3 In his novel, he uses the pamphleteers’ tools
against them by making his words a warning about and defence against any
threat to Notre-Dame cathedral. Five years before Notre-Dame de Paris was
rushed into publication, Hugo had inveighed against department administrators
in the pamphlet “Guerre aux démolisseurs!” He accused them of authorising the
destruction of castles and other medieval buildings to serve short-sighted politi-
cal ends. His main argument against such demolition was a simpler version of
the argument he advances in the novel, namely that only people who could not
read the building — or who, like Dom Claude, read it selectively — could per-
petrate such atrocities against themselves. After all, their own ancestors had fi-
nanced and built them. Hugo’s approach to convincing those who read his novel
that Gothic buildings are narratives was to treat them as such from the outset.
However, his strategy to save them was more complex, since it also entailed
convincing them that the buildings represent a national narrative that included
the very revolutionary changes that threatened their existence.
Notre-Dame was not under immediate threat in 1830, but precedent and the
political instability of the period in which he wrote taught Hugo not to rely on
the judgment of the agitated public or of successive governments to ensure its
continued existence. The likelier scenario was that it would become a scapegoat
for people and institutions Parisians would hold responsible for the persistent
ills of French society. But if any advocates of destruction should hope to elimi-
nate the memories associated with Notre-Dame, its transformation into a novel
would defeat them. The existence and success of Hugo’s novel defy its ominous
refrain. Even if the book (or a political pamphlet) will kill the edifice (1993:
192), the edifice will still exist in the public imagination, in printed words and
images. Its “virtual” existence in print makes it infinitely reproducible and porta-
ble. Notre-Dame’s foes would have gained little else than removing a relic of the
past in real space and denying the French people a national meeting place. Such

3 
Hugo “assisted in the conservation of monuments throughout Europe and truly achieved
the goal enunciated in the 1832 author’s preface to Notre-Dame de Paris” (Emery and Mo-
rowitz 89) to inspire readers to see in Gothic buildings a national architecture rather than a
target of revolutionary fervor.
 Forum: Bildung and the State 257

damage control is possible because the building can be made to represent the
personal as well as the public in French society. Hugo recognizes the necessity
for a narrative that presents the building as a narrative of personal experience
that recalls or lends insight into French history and the collective experience of
its signal events.
To counterbalance failing narratives, such as the mystery play Gringoire at-
tempts to present to a distracted audience in the Great Hall of the Palais de
Justice or like the irrelevant biography the same poet attempts to construct in the
Court of Miracles, Hugo develops a paradigm of effective narrative that mirrors
the structure of the cathedral and the symbolic role he thinks it should play —
and why should this not be so? The novel is itself another Notre-Dame de Paris;
Hugo’s narrative is an edifice in print. It is not merely named after the cathedral,
nor is it simply a metaphor, rendering comparison implicit or transforming one
thing into another in the realm of signs while leaving the signifier unchanged. It
is the cathedral in another medium and meant to replace the building should it
ever be lost. Should the building disappear, we would still be able to access its
past and discuss its architecture by reading Hugo’s novel, just as we still have
access to London’s Old St. Paul’s through William Harrison Ainsworth’s 1841
reconstruction of it.4 Through Notre-Dame de Paris, we can explore the archi-
tecture of the building and trace its history. What happens to the building of the
book affects the building of stone.
But Hugo’s Notre-Dame also supersedes the cathedral as it simultaneously
affirms and subverts its uniqueness. It threatens to render it obsolete because,
like Luther’s Theses, it provokes discussion and debate, rather than represent-
ing a static set of ideas to be accepted without questioning. Print renders a thing
permanent and influential through repetition; the medium that makes content vi-
sually indistinguishable (at first glance) from any other printed matter makes the
Notre-Dame cathedral accessible to people outside Paris and to a posterity that
may one day have to do without the stone text. The printed text itself presents
the building in greater detail than any other visual medium can do, yet remains
interactive and easily alterable. The product of one mind and a publisher’s pro-
duction team, rather than of the collaborative effort of thousands of anonymous
artists and craftsmen, it speaks more eloquently to an age increasingly engaged

4 
Ainsworth patterned Old St. Paul’s on Hugo’s Notre-Dame. Like Hugo, he uses the
novel to keep a building in collective memory. However, in his case, the actual building
had disappeared more than two centuries earlier. His novel, which recreates London and its
cathedral before the Great Fire of 1666, is the only Old St. Paul’s still in existence. “At the
time Leonard Holt gazed upon the capital its picturesque beauties were nearly at their close.
In a little more than a year-and-a-quarter afterwards, the greater part of the old city was
consumed by fire; and though it was rebuilt, and in many respects improved, its original and
picturesque character was entirely destroyed” (Ainsworth 180). The character Leonard Holt
views London of 1665 from the top of the cathedral.
258 Partial Answers

with the role of the ordinary individual in the larger context of history — and
encourages the reader to speak in his or her turn.
Hugo recognized print as the medium of the modern, post-revolutionary age.
Indeed, the vocabulary of today’s new technologies borrows heavily from that
of sixteenth-century print technology and paper documents. It is a writing instru-
ment that can be wielded by anybody who learns to operate a printing press or
who knows someone else who can. For this reason, ordinary people can sidestep
the building in stone and communicate through print. If the message is timely
and well constructed, it can change the way people think — and act. Gutenberg’s
printing press was a harbinger of democracy that gave everyone an opportunity
to be heard.5
The scene in Hugo’s novel in which three women trace the fear of gypsies
exhibited by one of them to her elaborate story of a kidnapping and supposed
child-murder illustrates several of the author’s points about the structure, pur-
pose, and conditions of an effective narrative. That this important story is in the
hands of three middle-class women marks the democratization that occurs when
the stone narrative is exchanged for one of words. The decision to frame and
then share a narrative is made not by a traditional authority figure but by people
who are usually left out of this process — a reminder that narratives of great sig-
nificance often come disguised as trivial personal stories. An effective narrative
requires a reason for its construction, and succeeds because, unlike Gringoire’s
interrupted story, it meets a need.
One of the three women, Mahiette, is a rustic, the others are Parisian. All are
minor characters: types, drawn with broad strokes. Hugo presents them through
their social status, dress, and places of residence and leaves readers room to flesh
them out. The three are making a pilgrimage, like the speakers of Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales, but they are not on their way to visit some grand cathedral,
the Holy Ampulla at Reims, or the tomb of an important dead saint. They are go-
ing to the Parisian stone cell of a recluse, Sister Gudule, so tiny and constricting
that it is a tomb for the living. Hugo has inverted the grander pilgrim’s progress
and presented us with a pilgrimage that leads two Parisians away from their
cathedral and one provincial away from the Royal city of Reims (where kings
were crowned up to the time of Charles X) to a stone hut in the Place de Grève
where there was also a pillory, a site for punishment and mourning, rather than
for penance and redemption.6

Richard Maxwell (192) provides a detailed discussion of this concept.

5 

See Rose (93) for discussion of the history and significance of the Holy Ampulla to
6 

the city and cathedral of Reims and its destruction by a revolutionary. Rose’s discussion
underscores the fact that Mahiette’s home town is actually of major ecclesiastical and politi-
cal importance at the time when Hugo’s novel is set, as well as the scene of an emphatic
symbolic gesture — the breaking of the Ampulla at the foot of a statue of Louis XV during
the French Revolution.
 Forum: Bildung and the State 259

The pilgrims’ attention is temporarily diverted from their mission by the

gypsy Esmeralda’s presence in the area. When Mahiette hears that Esmeralda is
a gypsy, she attempts to run, dragging her young son to safety. This unreason-
ing reaction prompts Mahiette’s companions to enquire about the origin of her
fears of gypsies as child-stealers. Her story is thus prompted by an event that oc-
curs before her companions’ eyes; and they want to probe her memories and the
causes of her emotional reaction. Her tale of La Chantefleurie lacks the poetic
expansiveness of a Chaucerian pilgrim’s tale, but though she has an audience
of only two traveling companions, not Gringoire’s angry mob, Gervaise and
Oudarde have explicitly asked her to tell her tale. Unlike Gringoire, she gauges
and even guides the response of her hearers; she does not bore or fail to engage
them.
Mahiette begins by re-forming her identity. Since her companions see her as
a naïve provincial, she presents herself, rather, as a citizen of the cathedral city
of Reims which rivals Paris in importance, the city where French monarchs were
accorded political and religious legitimacy and acceded to absolute power. Its
status provides its citizen Mahiette with a means of escape from rural stereotyp-
ing and a claim to a sophistication matching that of her Parisian counterparts
(Hugo 1974b: 275). Our symbols (cathedrals, holy relics, etc.) can be co-opted
to define us just as we define them. But Hugo has staged a curious inversion. His
Gudule is not only a living recluse but a reformed prostitute compared to a statue
and at one with her tiny cell, yet she shares her name with the virgin patron saint
of Brussels, who lends her name to a cathedral that defines fifteenth-century
Brussels and Belgium as surely as Notre-Dame defines Paris and France. Hugo
prompts us to compare and contrast the two Gudules when her companions ask
Mahiette whether she has seen the Flemish ambassadors who, like Mahiette, are
represented as rustics, bourgeois, and tradesmen on holiday.
Mahiette’s story is pivotal for the novel. It is essentially a folktale with ele-
ments Vladimir Propp might have recognized: a stolen child, a sorrowful mother
who does not know her own child years later, the reunion of the two. But Hugo
darkens the tale by having Gudule bring about her own daughter’s death by act-
ing as her accuser, unaware that Esmeralda is the child she believed killed. He
also transforms Mahiette’s story into a complex of personal history, mystery,
journey, and revelation, replicating the experience of the cathedral as a holy text.
In its sublimity, the architecture of the Gothic cathedral presents a mystery, a
soaring reach into shadows, a long perspective to a screen hiding the holiest of
mysteries. But there is an underlying structure beneath these mysteries — the
structure of the cross at the transept, the journey from death at the west door to
eternal light at its opposite wall. The tale of her suffering and the mystery of
her stolen child transform Sœur Gudule’s cell into a miniature cathedral and the
woman herself into its sole item of statuary, affording the three women who visit
it the experience of the sacred they might have had if they had gone to Notre-
Dame like ordinary tourists (Hugo 1974b: 292).
260 Partial Answers

What distinguishes Mahiette’s story, Gudule’s sanctuary, and Notre-Dame

Cathedral is the medium of expression, in keeping with Hugo’s points in the
chapter “Ceci tuera Cela.” There he reveals his views on the nature of archi-
tecture and the written word, and explains why their common origins in human
creativity and need to communicate (expanded by the ability of printed words to
reach greater numbers across time and space) render the verbal symbol a threat
to the symbol in stone:
[L]a pensée humaine en changeant de forme allait changer de mode
d’expression, que l’idée capitale de chaque génération ne s’écrirait plus
avec la même matière et de la même façon, que le livre de pierre, si solide
et si durable, allait faire place au livre de papier, plus solide et plus durable
encore. (Hugo 1974b: 238)
[I]n changing its form, human thought was going to change its mode of
expression, that the most important idea of each generation would no lon-
ger be written in the same material and in the same way, that the book of
stone, so solid and durable, would give way to the book of paper, even
more solid and durable. (1993: 192)
Mahiette’s story is framed in the medium most accessible to her — the spoken
word; it is reproducible and can travel with the speed of gossip; circumstances
can also bring it into print. Gudule’s reaction to Esmeralda leads her companions
to observe that the recluse hates gypsies as violently as Mahiette fears them.
However, Mahiette’s willingness to speak, contrasted with the recluse’s deter-
mined silence (except in the expression of her hatred), provides an opportunity
for her hearers, and for Hugo’s readers, to gain insight into both the recluse’s
hatred and Mahiette’s fear.
Mahiette’s story develops into the story of Gudule and Esmeralda. Esmer-
alda’s mysterious origins and the recluse’s mysterious past, while seemingly
unconnected, are reconciled through this narrative. Instead of a digression, the
inset story reveals crucial information about Gudule and Esmeralda’s mother-
daughter relationship, even if the characters themselves understand this much
too late. The trip to a recluse’s cell leads up to the novel’s greatest mystery:
Esmeralda’s identity. Mahiette’s narrative consolidates two subplots: the story of
the recluse and that of the gypsy girl’s identity. By linking plot-lines and control-
ling a sprawling narrative structure Hugo suggests an interconnection between
narrative and life, history and the present, building and narrative.
This story also reveals the extent to which identity is bound up with one’s
memory of that past: Esmeralda has no idea who she really is because she has
no memory of her life before her kidnapping. Her identity is therefore fluid and
is easily determined and altered by anyone willing to assert the power to create
a new one. This is why it is so easy for Dom Claude to assign her the identity
of a sorceress when he encounters her dancing outside of the cathedral. But,
 Forum: Bildung and the State 261

lest we think that information about the past is all that is necessary to create a
strong and unassailable sense of self, Hugo shows us Gudule, whose memory
of the past is extraordinarily vivid. Her problem is the same as the one suffered
by Louis XVIII; content to see only the past, she cannot see the present clearly
and therefore cannot hope to reconcile the two. This reconciliation of the past
and present, of her story with that of her long lost daughter, is only achieved by
a third party, Mahiette.
The complex function of Mahiette’s story of Sœur Gudule (or Paquette La
Chantefleurie) replicates that of the cathedral at the centre of the novel. Hugo
makes the argument that the categories of narrative and Gothic building are more
fluid than we are accustomed to think: if the cathedral can embody narrative, if it
can be an epic written in stone, we can also conceive of narrative in architectural
terms, as Romantic writers tended to do.7 Indeed, the crutches, canes, and other
implements of the beggars in the Court of Miracles are referred to as “scaffold-
ing” (91): even human identity is an architectural construct.8 All of these struc-
tures originate from the same creative impulse, responding to present conditions
and addressing a clearly defined audience. Buildings, bodies, the printed word
all represent different media. For Hugo, architecture and print are analogous: the
tensions he senses between them result from the way human beings understand
and make use of the fact that a building can have a virtual existence in printed
narrative and that narrative is constructed on intellectual principles similar to
those of a cathedral.9 The story of La Chantefleurie or Sœur Gudule illustrates

7 
See Nicole Reynolds’ fascinating study Building Romanticism and its careful discus-
sion of how architectural motifs, ideas, and structures infiltrated the way poets and other
intellectuals of the Romantic period conceived of their intellectual and creative endeavors.
Reynolds argues that Romantic writers and authors of Gothic fiction considered human mind
analogous to the structure of an intricate Gothic building.
8 
Indeed, Chantal Brière maintains that the language of architecture infiltrates Hugo’s
treatment of all other subjects of his novels.
9 
One of Brière’s major points is that in enumerating the buildings of Paris in Notre-
Dame de Paris, Hugo re-appropriates them for French culture. His novel becomes a virtual
museum of antiquities. She also implies that this approach could be effective only because
his target audience was already familiar with the buildings. The very mention of Notre-Dame
de Paris and other buildings sufficed to invoke their presence, their historical significance,
and their importance to French culture: “L’énumération des ‘sommités’ architecturales défi-
nit la ville comme une collection archéologique, un musée monumental. Le nom distingue et
l’addition de ces noms sous forme de liste accroît le prestige et la cohérence de Paris” (128).
The buildings of the novel will also be comprehensible even to those who have no access to
them because Hugo presents their histories and their descriptions. The first two chapters of
my dissertation (2003), show how in the works of several authors buildings become signi-
fiers for cities, their history, their people, and, by extension, the people of the nation as a
whole. See also Reynolds 2010.
262 Partial Answers

the analogy by focusing on the construction of a narrative whose effectiveness,

like that of the cathedral, depends on it being created at the right time and in the
right way.
The effect of Mahiette’s story’s hinges on the background information about
the family and early life of La Chantefleurie, provided at the outset. In this part
of the narrative, we learn that its subject is a young girl of a decent family who,
though vain, did not appear inclined to vice until the death of her father left her
and her mother destitute and she turned to prostitution to support them. Mahiette
illustrates a steady slide from light-hearted optimism to despair and tragedy,
which mirrors what happens to La Chantefleurie’s daughter, Esmeralda. By re-
counting the circumstances that have led to her character’s downfall, Mahiette
makes it difficult for her hearers to detach themselves from the story and to
avoid identifying with its protagonist. Mahiette thus leads us into the world of
the novel through sympathy with human frailty and through the universality of
misfortune. She keeps a close rein on her story, allowing no interruptions except
her own occasional interjections: “La malheureuse!” (1974b: 280). Such excla-
mations give her audience clues to appropriate reactions.
Like an architect or builder, Mahiette arranges the details of her story in ac-
cordance with her rhetorical priorities. Oudarde understands the need to tell the
story in the linear and chronological sequence established by Mahiette so that
the mystery at its heart will be revealed at the moment when its implications will
be best appreciated. She urges Mahiette to resist Gervaise’s impatience to know
immediately how the story will relate to gypsies and kidnapping:
“Un moment donc, Gervaise!” dit Oudarde dont l’attention était moins
impatiente. “Qu’est-ce qu’il y aurait à la fin si tout était au commence-
ment  ? Continuez, Mahiette, je vous prie. Cette pauvre Chantefleurie!”
(1974b: 280)
[“Just a moment, Gervaise!” said Oudarde, whose attention was not so
impatient. “What would there be at the end if everything came at the
beginning? Go on, Mahiette, please. Poor Chantefleurie!” (1993: 229)]
As a more responsible listener, Oudarde ensures that the narrator is not made to
stray from her original plan and that the narrative is not dismantled in the interest
of instant gratification — a guarantee that Hugo would like the cathedral at the
center of his novel to share. Oudarde’s “pauvre Chantefleurie!” is also an indica-
tion that she is following the storyteller’s cues. She realizes that, for the sake of
insight, the structure of the story is almost as important as its content.
The novel’s treatment of storytelling sheds light on Hugo’s sense of the
plight of the Gothic building wrenched from its original, Catholic context. In
the nineteenth century, as a religious narrative it became incomprehensible and
incomplete, while as an historical one, it became extremely provocative. Hugo’s
novel places it in its religious, aesthetic, historical, and social contexts, and thus
 Forum: Bildung and the State 263

suggests that the needs generated in all of them have contributed to the creation
of the building and that the result is a palimpsest — layers of different narratives
come together but are not joined: “at the same time one and complex, like its
sisters the Iliads and Romanceros” (1993: 120).
Within the world of the novel, Mahiette’s narrative can please the curious as
well as satisfy the hearer who enjoys both the telling and the insight it conveys.
In the context of Hugo’s views on narrative, it suggests, as mentioned above,
that a story needs a reason to be told, while it also needs a scheme for the un-
folding of events that exploits their communicative value. When Hugo wrote
his novel, Notre-Dame cathedral had become a mere stage prop in the theater of
French politics; its significance was so easily changed that it was no longer suffi-
ciently compelling to garner the attention of the masses. In 1832, Notre-Dame de
Paris was an unexpected place to anchor an important narrative of a new France.
The success of Notre-Dame de Paris ensured immortality for both cathedral
and novelist. People identified Hugo with the image of the cathedral as he pre-
sented it, as they would soon identify Alexandre Dumas with the island of Monte
Cristo and the Château d’If. Hugo did not limit his commitment to Notre-Dame
to the act of literary metamorphosis, transforming the novel into a cathedral and
the cathedral into a literary and historical narrative. He took an active part in its
restoration, serving on the Comité des Arts et Monuments. Yet the extensive and
costly renovations by Jean-Baptiste Lassus and Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-
Duc ultimately dismayed him. They added to the tracery on the rose window to
make it stand out, perhaps failing to recognize that doing so would cast shadows
on the stained glass. They filled the niches that had been emptied during the
revolution with nondescript saintly figures (whose forms they borrowed from
Chartres and Amiens) instead of the kings that had once occupied them. They
added scrolled ironwork on the parapets and ridgelines on the cathedral roof,
making use of the latest wrought iron technology and of Victorian Gothic aes-
thetic principles. What they produced was meant to be an improvement on the
original building, but the changes appeared to Hugo no less wrongheaded than
the improvements made during the reign of baroque and neoclassical tastes. Yet,
the time and resources dedicated to the project are an indication that Hugo’s ef-
forts and those of the government cataloguers, historians, and other writers to
insert the relics of the French past into the cultural landscape of modern France
did not go entirely to waste. The popularity of Hugo’s novel restored the cathe-
dral as an icon of French culture. Destroying it now would be sacrilege.
The full title of the novel is, of course, Notre-Dame de Paris. 1482. Hugo is
redefining Paris as well as — and in terms of — its cathedral at a historical mo-
ment in which it was of great importance as a symbol of the wealth and power
of the Catholic Church. Notre-Dame is at the centre of the novel and the city,
and Hugo presents it as one of the principal achievements of the Parisians them-
selves. In this context, those closest to it become its special guardians, rather
than the people most likely to harm it. By 1830, Notre-Dame was no longer the
264 Partial Answers

symbol of ecclesiastical authority, defended by a vital and powerful Church.

“The cathedral [had] had its day,” as Sue Bridehead in Thomas Hardy’s Jude
the Obscure (1895: 158) declares. It had been so frequently co-opted by one
political faction or another in attempts to assert supremacy that it would have
been difficult for the faithful to rally round such a compromised symbol. For his
historical setting and literary space, Hugo reconstructs fifteenth-century Paris,
not his own present. It is a pre-revolutionary world where the cathedral is in the
center. Yet he does not focus on the cathedral as the embodiment of Christian
doctrine, as was customary in the sixteenth century, or as a target of political
unrest, as in his own day. He presents it as history written — and overwritten
— by the French people in a way that transcends politics and religious doctrine.

Reading the Cathedral

The cathedral is a palimpsest. Hugo suggests that successive ages have inscribed
their aesthetic principles, religious doctrines, history, and politics in it, on it,
and through it. Readers would, of course, be aware that various post-Revolu-
tionary factions had continued to overwrite it, their attempts culminating in the
extensive, though largely superficial changes to the building before Napoleon’s
strange self-coronation there. But Hugo does not draw our attention to these
events. Hugo’s novel argues that the people—powerful and ever restive, like
the sea10—had to re-appropriate their Gothic cathedral. In order to do this, they
required both a narrative that could enable all factions to endure change, and also
the ability to read it. If the narrative succeeded in changing popular attitudes,
the buildings would escape neglect, vandalism, even demolition. Hugo could
then set it in a new and more stable context. But once he had appropriated the
cathedral for the people, Hugo had to show them how to read it, which he did by
negative example. Notre-Dame de Paris is, first and foremost, a lesson in how
not to read the real-world Cathedral of Notre-Dame.
Though Hugo asserts that all France’s Gothic buildings reveal his nation’s
history and illuminate its present, the French could claim the great buildings of
France as their own only if they understood their own past and could trace the
outlines of the intellectual and artistic development of their society as embodied
by these buildings. The novel’s central plot is a metaphor for this process. Dom
Claude, the Archdeacon, an ecclesiastical figure with an alchemist’s passion for
making gold, relentlessly pursues Esmeralda. His willingness to manipulate the
building’s complex architectural elements for material gain as he looks for the
formula to make gold conflicts with Catholic doctrine as presented on the build-

10 
“La place du Palais, encombrée de peuple, offrait aux curieux des fenêtres l’aspect
d’une mer, dans laquelle cinq ou six rues, comme autant d’embouchures de fleuves, dégor-
geaient à chaque instant de nouveaux flots de têtes” (1974b: 38).
 Forum: Bildung and the State 265

ing and sweeps aside his monastic vows of poverty and chastity. Quasimodo,
the bell-ringer, whose work is to summon the public to church, has feelings for
Esmeralda that inspire him to save her. But he is an imperfect champion because
he is, like Notre-Dame’s famous gargoyles, deaf and mute and offers her sanctu-
ary in the cathedral, the place where Dom Claude is most powerful. These two
custodians of Notre-Dame are as ill-equipped to preserve it as are the French
people they represent. Quasimodo is deaf to any assessment of circumstances
but his own. He is also mute and unable to communicate effectively; the bells
afford him an extremely narrow range of expression. He is the embodiment of
the grotesque, the earthly, the bestial that Hugo grapples with in his preface to
Cromwell and is a foil to the beauty of Esmeralda, Phoebus, and Jehan. Qua-
simodo as grotesque and human gargoyle is comic, but not funny; Hugo uses the
character to convey the notion of hybridity that applies to the cathedral, the char-
acters, and to Paris itself. The gargoyle is modern in its alliance with Christianity
but, in Hugo’s view, traces its origins to pagan antiquity. Hugo’s treatment of this
character indicates a dim view of humanity and human civilization, which inten-
sifies as we come to know his adoptive father, who is also foster father to another
foundling, his own brother Jehan. After initially appearing to transcend human
frailty as an avid student and member of the priesthood, Dom Claude wanders
into the clutches of a self-disfiguring and destructive cupidity. He is blinded by
greed and lust. Their respective disabilities, their shared passion for Esmeralda,
and the fact that they are both fixtures in the cathedral put them on an equal foot-
ing. The physical deformities of the one are mirrored in the moral deformities
of the other and underscored by the flawed and dispassionate reasoning of the
scholar, Jehan. However, in the end—and in keeping with Hugo’s ability to find
a place for the grotesque as well as for beauty in the cultural milieu of France,11
they lose the place Hugo creates for them at the beginning of the narrative be-
cause they aren’t good readers, not because they are too deformed to exist.
Dom Claude, as alchemist, reads the cathedral as a book of spells, exploiting
it in a way that will make it superfluous once the correct spell is found. He, like
the people of Hugo’s France, endangers the building’s future because he reads
it too narrowly; his only interest is in the wealth he hopes to derive from it (in
that sense, he is the Church writ large). He even betrays the science he practices
in secret, for alchemists (like churchmen) are traditionally antiquarians, and see
intrinsic value in the texts and edifices of the past. Hugo expresses uncertainty
as to the fate of an ecclesiastical building stripped of its role in the promulgation
of religious doctrine when even religious officials seem to consider it unimport-

11 
See Hugo’s Preface to Cromwell, a work that engages with revolution—in England:
“the modern muse will see things in a higher and broader light. It will realize that everything
in creation is not humanly beautiful, that the ugly exists beside the beautiful, the unshapely
beside the graceful, the grotesque on the reverse of the sublime, evil with good, darkness
with light” (362).
266 Partial Answers

ant. Dom Claude’s study in one of the cathedral towers is loaded with books
on astrology and mysticism, which circumvent Catholic doctrine and embrace
the heterodox ideas of the likes of Paracelsus. In the mind of a character con-
vinced that the right words will transform present reality, the pile of books writ-
ten in various tongues becomes the pile of gold into which he hopes to translate
their wisdom; symbol and referent merge and they become superimposed on
one another. Like the books, the cathedral is to Dom Claude just another pile of
multilingual texts, since he sees and deciphers cabalistic writings on its walls
where others do not. For him, neither the books nor the cathedral itself possesses
intrinsic value or interest. Clearly this image of Dom Claude draws attention
to popular attitudes in the author’s own day. He prefigures those who use the
palaces, forts, and churches so readily co-opted and catalogued by successive
revolutionary governments as a means of personal enrichment, or of adding to
the national treasury through sale to speculators, or of employing the destitute—
as demolition workers (1974a: 651).
While Hugo focuses on the one building that defines the landscape of
France’s most important city, rather than talk in general terms about the bleak
prospects for ancient buildings all across the landscape of France, he pushes the
idea of misreading and misusing the cathedral to some interesting and more gen-
erally applicable conclusions. In the fourth chapter of Book Seven, Hugo shows
first that Dom Claude, charged with the care of the building, is interested only
in a cabalistic “reading” of the cathedral, not in the Catholic reading. Though
entrusted with its care, Claude has no qualms about vandalizing the building
by scratching the Greek word anánke onto a wall. Unlike Martin Luther’s 95
Theses, which this gesture inevitably recalls, Dom Claude’s posting does not
signal the opening of a discussion nor does he seek reform or restoration of basic
religious principles;12 his inscription is presented as a destructive act.
By the time we encounter the inscription, Hugo’s preface has already pre-
sented it as a scar on the face of a beautiful woman—as an act of defacement—
and has made it disappear, a few lines later, by describing the wall as having been
scraped—a further injury to the “face” of the building. Paradoxically, however,
since Hugo’s novel reinstates it, forever re-inflicting the fictitious scar through
print and according it historical legitimacy, it achieves virtual reality and be-
comes part of the epic narrative of the cathedral and of the French people that

12 
Of course, Luther’s posting is one of the first controversial writings that became so
largely because of the printing press. According to Martin Brecht (204–205), the fact that it
was translated and circulated, rather than posted on the door of Castle Church is what made
it a major issue in the months and years following their original appearance in 1517. Some
doubt the authenticity of the image of Luther hammering his 95 Theses to the door of the
Castle Church in Wittenberg. See Iserloh (1968); and Wilson (96). Hugo would certainly
have been familiar with this image of a document posted on the door of the church and the
story that accompanies it.
 Forum: Bildung and the State 267

Hugo’s novel embodies. But Claude’s brother, Jehan Frollo sees the inscription
in more prosaic, academic terms. He takes Dom Claude to task for opting for
the less accessible Greek, rather than choosing fatum, which expresses the same
idea in more widely understood Latin. Jehan is concerned about the accessibility
of his brother’s message, not the message itself or the medium of transmission;
absorbed by abstraction, neither the custodian nor the scholar is concerned about
the act of vandalism itself. The impecunious Jehan Frollo, who proposes the
Latin, is about to ask Dom Claude for money and is resigned to the usual lecture
before the money changes hands: it is the imposed routine he must endure, his
lot in life, his fatum. But importantly, the Greek word anánke that Dom Claude
uses is not really the Greek equivalent of fatum. It means “necessity,” often
with a sense of inner compulsion or drive, rather than fate. It would describe the
hunger that forces Jehan to swallow his pride and ask Claude for money, not the
prescribed routine to which he must submit, which tells us of how Jehan likes to
think of his situation.
A concept of necessity similar to the idea the Greek word conveys is used
by Schiller in his essay “On the Sublime” to describe the physical, emotional,
and intellectual limitations and vulnerabilities humans must transcend to reach
enlightenment. Anánke would also describe more precisely the strong sexual
attraction to Esmeralda that Dom Claude mistakenly thinks of as love. It is a
secular and amoral concept, whereas fatum, particularly in a medieval Catholic
context, refers to an outcome that is foreordained by God and therefore unalter-
able. Why, then, does Hugo juxtapose these two words? A possible answer lies in
the other word carved into the wall just beneath anánke. That word is anagneía,
which is a partial anagram of anánke, in the manner familiar from Plato’s Cra-
tylus. Jehan rightly translates anagneía as “impureté” (1974b: 351). These two
words, very similar in Greek, characterize Dom Claude’s two “needs”: on the
one hand, power, which he hopes to attain through the ability to make gold, and
on the other, his lust for Esmeralda. Merely having these impure desires causes
him to break his vows. Furthermore, his response to necessity, as he sees it, sets
in motion a chain of events that he ultimately cannot control. His “necessity”
thereby determines his fate in the Christian sense. Esmeralda’s rejection inspires
him to denounce her for witchcraft, a charge that, once made, cannot be retract-
ed. Dom Claude’s impure desires set the creaking wheels of faulty jurisprudence
in motion and brings about the death of an innocent. They also lead him to use
the cathedral as a trap for her—rather than as a sanctuary—and as a cabalistic
text to be decoded, and ultimately discarded.
If the cathedral is the text writ large, then Esmeralda, a gypsy who does not
really belong inside a building as permanent as a cathedral, is the text writ small,
individually, and by others than herself. Together they prevent us from seeing
Notre-Dame as simply the parchment on which the novel is written; it is the
writing itself. Their presence as characters prevents us from reducing Hugo’s
novel to an intellectual allegory of the sort scholars love, based on such abstrac-
268 Partial Answers

tions as fatum, anánke, or anagneía. Dom Claude, Quasimodo, and others feel
the compulsions within them and generate the forces of their own destruction.
Hugo will not allow us to abstract words from context the way Dom Claude and
his brother, who are both scholars, do. Once Dom Claude makes this conceptual
step into abstraction, it is only a matter of time before the words he uses can be
translated and abstracted from the “paper” on which they are written. The build-
ing, which is tangible and real, then becomes unreal for him, even though he is
one of its appointed guardians. Notre-Dame, the sacred text, becomes a key to
secular things; as a means to an end, it will no longer be needed once the goal
has been reached. Dom Claude’s needs threaten the cathedral with obsolescence
since he regards it as a collection of symbols for him to decode, rather than as a
long narrative in which he himself plays only a small part. Hugo’s point seems to
be that such narrow, utilitarian views had already brought about the neglect and
deliberate demolition of many of France’s architectural treasures.
In the next chapter of his novel, Hugo further pursues the idea of fate, but in
a darkly humorous way. Dom Claude urges his visitor, Jacques Charmolue, who
wants to save a fly from a spider, “Master Jacques! let it be! it’s fatality!”(1993:
300). The original French is more revealing: “laissez faire la fatalité!” (361). He
could hardly have spoken more paradoxically since laisser-faire as an economic
concept implies freedom from outside interference, while here it is a religious
principle referring to resignation to the inevitable. Yet it is difficult to see the
fly as free in Hugo’s scenario and equally difficult to see its fate as unavoidable
while there are two people witnessing its dangerous proximity to the spider’s
web. Hugo has Claude look past the religious notion of foreordained circum-
stances to the idea that one shouldn’t assume that such absolute concepts as
predestination (or free will) are needed at all. The earlier formula: “le livre tuera
l’édifice,” and the sense of inevitability conveyed by the future tense are under-
mined as Dom Claude pities the fly being devoured by a spider but won’t allow
Charmolue to interfere:
Elle vole, elle est joyeuse, elle vient de naître; elle cherche le printemps,
le grand air, la liberté; oh! Oui, mais qu’elle se heurte à la rosace fatale,
l’araignée en sort, l’araignée hideuse! Pauvre danseuse! Pauvre mouche
predéstinée! Mâitre Jacques, laissez faire! C’est la fatalité! (1974b: 361)
[She flies, she’s happy, she’s just born; she seeks the spring, the open air,
freedom; oh! yes, but then she hits the fatal rosace. The spider emerges,
hideous spider! Poor dancer! poor foredoomed fly! Maître Jacques! let it
be! it’s fatality!” (1993: 300)]
His response to the tiny drama becomes increasingly appropriate to his private
drama with Esmeralda and to Hugo’s fears about the fate of the cathedral. We
learn later that Esmeralda, too, passes from an idyllic childhood to a search
(for love, in her case), and finally to entrapment and death within the cathedral,
for she has sought sanctuary in the most dangerous of all places for her to be.
Dom Claude can predict her fate with the same stunning clarity with which he
 Forum: Bildung and the State 269

understands the fate of the fly. For the fly, lack of interference proves fatal; in
the gypsy’s case, Dom Claude’s interference in her life brings about her arrest,
torture, and execution. And, lest we forget the focus of this and most scenes in
this novel, the word “rosace,” referring to the spider’s web, reminds us of the ca-
thedral, its physicality and fragility conveyed by the allusion to the rose window.

Conclusion: the Revolution Reconstructed

Hugo’s success in reconstructing Gothic architecture in the public consciousness
would ultimately entail convincing people that great buildings were of a kind
and on a par with other great artistic and intellectual endeavours, the “Iliades
et Romanceros” that underpin Western culture. Hugo emphasizes the idea that
ordinary people had constructed the cathedral in order to suggest that the fact
that the only power they now had was to destroy what their ancestors had built
was demeaning to them. The more constructive, useful story for his age was that
people continued to have the means and power to construct a national narrative.
Rather than comply with the politicization of buildings as initiated by the revo-
lutionaries of 1789, Hugo politicizes the masses who had been excluded from
political agency in France’s past as well as in most of the historical narratives
produced up to that time.
Hugo’s effort comes at a time when France was still reconstructing itself
in the wake of the events of 1789 and just after the restored Bourbon monarch
Louis XVIII had failed in his attempt to write the Revolution out of French his-
tory. The king understood that political battles were increasingly fought in print,
and on ideological grounds, in an age in which the ability to articulate the past
convincingly, in the service of one’s interests, conferred authority and license to
manipulate the present with greater ease and credibility. That he and his eventu-
ally deposed successor, Charles X, were ultimately unsuccessful was the result
of having created, like Hugo’s unfortunate Gringoire, the wrong narrative. In the
context of the buildings themselves, Hugo’s treatment of Notre-Dame cathedral
allows him to present it as a narrative as well—one that emerged in the Middle
Ages in response to a set of imperatives completely different from those of his
day. It therefore needed to be reconstructed in the nineteenth century because
circumstances had arisen that had fundamentally altered the world in which ca-
thedrals had once existed.
In the 1847 Preface to his Histoire de la Révolution Française, where he
also mentions the lack of a monument to the French Revolution, Michelet ex-
presses a similar idea: “Dans tout moment de défaillance où nous semblons nous
oublier, c’est là que nous devons nous chercher, nous ressaisir” (31).13 Extreme
social and political circumstances give rise to a need to reconstruct the past as

13 
“In every moment of weakness, when we seem to forget ourselves, it is then that we
must find ourselves — and reclaim ourselves” (my translation).
270 Partial Answers

a means of placing the present in some kind of perspective. The narrative that
emerges from the search for the past also becomes a means of restoring col-
lective memory and retrieving identity. Only a foundation narrative, one that
directly or indirectly describes origins of people and circumstances, can provide
these benefits. Michelet envisions this search for self in in terms of a collective
past pieced together by an entire society. It is a narrative of the past whose units,
be they stones or words, be they sung or spoken, be they spontaneously com-
posed or assembled from stories already in circulation, are uttered for the sake
of the beauty of language as much as for the sake of the communication of truth.
Indeed, their beauty lies in the fact that they strive for truth. As the product of a
particular culture, epic, romance and architecture are the
Produit prodigieux de la cotisation de toutes les forces d’une époque, où
sur chaque pierre on voit saillir en cent façons la fantaisie de l’ouvrier
disciplinée par le génie de l’artiste; sorte de création humaine, en un mot,
puissante et féconde comme la création divine dont elle semble avoir
dérobé le double caractère: variété, éternité. (1974b: 156)
[Prodigious result of contributions made from all the resources of an age,
where every stone displays in hundreds of ways the workman’s imagina-
tion disciplined by the artist’s genius; a kind of human creation, in a word,
as mighty and fruitful as the divine creation whose dual character it seems
to have abstracted: variety, eternity (1993: 120).]
Tinged as it is with revolutionary rhetoric, this is the foundation myth of the
Gothic building in the nineteenth century and of modern France. Hugo influ-
ences readers to associate the cathedral at the centre of the novel with a new
myth of the French nation and the genesis of the French citizen: “The book of
architecture belonged no more to the priesthood, religion, Rome, but to imagina-
tion, poetry, the people” (1993: 196). Hugo can re-create the people in the revo-
lutionary—and democratic—image using his chosen historical period. He can
establish a precedent for their actions in a way that could provide context and
justification for the Revolution in an environment in which its accomplishments
were being undermined or called into question. Like the story of the Revolution,
the story of the cathedral is a story of collective accomplishment, of unity under
the banner of an ideal, and of the building itself as an enduring monument to a
set of heroes never lauded in epic: French citizens, workers, and artists.

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Making Poets Serve the Established Order: Editing for Content in

Sophocles, Virgil, and W. S. Gilbert

Frederick Ahl
Cornell University

“Pray what authors should she read, who in Classics would succeed?” a female
student asks Lady Psyche, Director of Studies at an imaginary women’s uni-

* Some sections of this article are based on work previously published in my Two Faces
of Oedipus (2008). All citations of Gilbert’s libretti are from Allen 1975b.

Partial Answers 10/2: 271–301 © 2012 The Johns Hopkins University Press