By then, he had already established his reputation as an expert in the restoration of medieval buildings.īut for him, restoration was about more than touching up an existing form. In 1842, the government announced a competition for Notre Dame’s restoration and the 28-year-old Viollet-le-Duc threw his hat into the ring. He opted instead to learn on the job, working for architects around Paris while studying the city’s medieval architecture in his spare time. Like Hugo, he sought to capture France’s “authentic” past and, like Hugo, was drawn to the Middle Ages.įor this reason, he refused to enroll in the École des Beaux-Arts, the main training ground for France’s architects, because of the school’s dogmatic focus on classical architecture. The book affirmed Viollet-le-Duc’s suspicion that his own age’s riot of styles and tastes reflected the unwieldy chaos of modern life. An architect reaches longingly for the pastĮugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc was a teenager when Hugo’s novel was published. One architect, attracted to the picturesque history on view in Hugo’s novel, would ultimately heed his call. Hugo hoped that his novel might spur the building’s rebirth, allowing it to renew France’s ethical core during the Industrial Revolution.
He believed that back then, the cathedral was able to inspire the masses and guide them toward a life of devotion and morality. Like other Romanticist writers and artists, Hugo imagined the Middle Ages as a simpler time, an era when society was governed by pure faith. He continues, “The book will destroy the edifice.” “Alas! This will kill that,” he laments, directing his finger to the cathedral looming magisterially outside his window. In one of the book’s most famous moments, the archdeacon Frollo points sadly to a printed book on his table. In the novel, Hugo lamented that the printing press had supplanted architecture as the primary communicator of civilization’s cherished values. Set in the 15th century, the novel alluringly evoked a different period in French history. Only the great bells avoided being melted down, and the church interior was used as a warehouse for the storage of food. During the French Revolution, many of the treasures of the cathedral were either destroyed or plundered.
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