Notre-Dame has survived as one of the great monuments of Paris, and Hugo's novel is a fitting celebration of it, a popular classic that is proving to be just as enduring. The inscription had been eradicated by the time the book was published, and Hugo feared that Notre-Dame's Gothic splendor might soon be lost to the contemporary fad for tearing down old buildings. Hugo wrote that his inspiration came from a carving of the word 'fatality' in Greek that he had found in the cathedral. (It received its popular English title at the time of its second translation in 1833.) Buy from our bookstore and 25 of the cover price will be given to a school of your choice to buy more books. He made the cathedral the centerpiece of the novel and called it Notre-Dame de Paris. Written at a time of perennial political upheaval in France, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame is the product of an emerging democratic sensibility and prefigures the teeming masterpiece Les Misérables, which Hugo would write thirty years later.

Hugo set his epic tale in the Paris of 1482 under Louis XI and meticulously re-created the day-to-day life of its highest and lowest inhabitants. It has tempted filmmakers, and most recently animators, who have exploited its dramatic content to good effect but have inevitably lost some of the grays that make the original text so compelling.įrom Victor Hugo's flamboyant imagination came Quasimodo, the grotesque bell ringer La Esmeralda, the sensuous gypsy dancer and the haunted archdeacon Claude Frollo.

The story and characters in Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre-Dame have resonated with succeeding generations since its publication in 1831.

The hunchback of notre dame book cover