Antiquaries in the Age of Romanticism: 1789-1851 - Queen Mary ...

1830s, however, the exploration of the past as fact, fiction and antiquarian narrative continued to
play on the same themes on both sides of the Channel, albeit with local variations. In Victor
Hugo, as author, campaigner and collector, the colossus of French romanticism, we see the
macrocosm, in Langlois, living and struggling to work in poverty in Rouen, the microcosm.
Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris, begun two days before the July Revolution and finished in
four months after it, was his own attempt to write the epic of the age. It was directly influenced
by Scott and it made Hugo’s reputation in England, but it was no mere homage to the author of
Waverley, rather, as Hugo had suggested in a long review of Quentin Durward, it was to supply
the wants in what seemed to him Scott’s too pallid, too prosaic view of the past. 133 Hugo’s novel
like Quentin Durward is set during the reign of Louis XI. It also shows, I would suggest, the
influence of Ivanhoe in the character of Esmeralda, the gipsy. Like Rebecca the Jewess in
Ivanhoe Esmeralda is a member of a despised and outcast race who falls victim to the frustrated
lust of a powerful man. Rebecca is rescued by Ivanhoe, who acts as her champion in the lists.
Esmeralda is publicly hanged in front of the cathedral, an ending that is more lurid, more likely
and in its dark view of the past much more typically French. Notre Dame was rooted in a mixture
of antiquarian research and Hugo’s personal experience. Like Michelet, who congratulated him
on creating in the novel a work as solid as the cathedral itself, Hugo had been influenced by
Lenoir’s Museum. 134 He had actually lived, as an adolescent, in the Couvent des Petits Augustins
soon after the collection was dismantled, his mother using the former chapel, where the display
so impressed Dawson Turner, as a bedroom. Although Graham Robb is wrong to suggest that
Hugo would have seen the royal tombs from his window, they had been removed soon after
1816, he is surely right to sense the influence of the Jardin Elysée in the poetry Hugo wrote at the
time with its vision of ‘entire societies disappearing into time but recoverable by the
imagination’. 135
Notre-Dame, as its first critics were quick to point out, was not scholarly in its use of
history, it was, however, both antiquarian and prescient in its use of Gothic architecture as a
symbol linking past and present. While Scott, as Eastlake had written, used medieval buildings
133
Discussed in Sturrock, ‘Introduction’, Notre Dame de Paris, p.14.
134
Sturrock, ‘Introduction’, Notre Dame de Paris, p. 8.
135
Robb, Victor Hugo, p.69.
143