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

Thus the present casts long shadows over history. Yet at the same time the medieval
world is further away in Notre Dame than it is in Ivanhoe, irretrievable, murdered by the printed
word, cut off forever on the far side of the Revolution it is never to return. For Hugo as for many
of his contemporaries the Revolution was ‘a telluric event’. 144 There was to be no comparable
Gothic Revival in French architecture, no substantial attempt to rebuild the present in the
physical image of the past. Hugo’s account of the architecture of Notre Dame in his novel
typifies the way in which the French, once they had managed to save their medieval buildings,
would seek to understand and to restore them, as perfect models of proportion rather than
examples to be followed. Hugo played a major part in the restoration movement that will be
discussed at the end of this chapter but its principles are set out already in Notre Dame.
Following in the rationalist tradition of Laugier and Cordemoy the French looked to the
underlying structure of medieval buildings for a proportional system, rather than embracing, as
the British did, the inconsistencies and peculiarities of individual examples. 145 While Hugo
relished the grotesque in the Gothic he was equally concerned with underlying order, setting out
in Book Three of his novel the principles on which Viollet-le-Duc would later work when
restoring, or radically recasting, medieval buildings
Ce que nous disons ici de la façade, il faut le dire de l’église entière; et ce que nous disons de l’église cathédrale de
Paris, il faut le dire de toutes les églises de la chrétienté au moyen-âge. Tout se tient dans cet art venu de lui meme,
logique et bien proportionné. Mesurer l’orteil du pied, c’est mesurer le géant. [What we say here about the façade
may be said of the whole church and what we say of the cathedral church of Paris may be said of all the churches of
Christendom in the Middle Ages. Everything has its place in this self-generated art, logical and well proportioned.
To measure the big toe, is to measure the giant.] 146
The second translation of Notre Dame de Paris into English, which appeared in 1833,
changed the title to The Hunchback of Notre Dame. This is how it is still usually known despite
the fact that, as John Sturrock writes, it changes the emphasis ‘from the book’s strengths to its
weaknesses, from its ideas to its plot’. 147 The enduring popularity of the alternative title perhaps
derives from the fact that it also shifted attention from what was peculiarly French in the attitude
144
Sturrock, ‘Introduction’, p.21.
145 For the French rationalist tradition see Middleton, ‘The Abbé de Cordemoy and the Graeco-Gothic Ideal’.
146
Hugo, Notre Dame de Paris, p. 194.
147
Sturrock, ‘Introduction’, p.11.
146