Abstract
Victor Hugo, Prosper MÉrimÉe, and EugÈne Emmanuel Viollet-Le-Duc not only inspired the medieval architectural “renaissance” in France (this word used first by M. de Montalembert in a review of Hugo’s Notre-Dame of Paris, published in L’Avenir on April 11, 1831),2 but they were actively involved in both bureaucratic and fieldwork to sustain the recovery movement. In the context of the vandalism preceding the July Monarchy (1830–48) that brought Louis-Philippe to power as king of the French, and with the deliberate devastation of the Revolution in the background, together, these three figures did much to foster a modern post-revolutionary French nation that combined secularism with the archival interests of the time. In doing so they promoted an ideology of French cultural pride, an essential element in the preservation movement in the period.
Je pense cela, qu’il ne faut pas démolir la France. (I think the following, that one must not demolish France.)
—Victor Hugo, “Guerre aux Démolisseurs,” 1825
A version of this chapter appeared in Variations, the journal of comparative literature of the University of Zurich, in 2003. All translations from French, except where noted, are the author’s.
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Notes
See Edmond Bite, Victor Hugo et la restauration: etude historique et litteraire (Paris: Lecoffre, 1869), 7–8.
Victor Hugo, “1825, Guerre aux Demolisseurs,” in Oeuvres Compl’etes, vol. 5, ed. Jean Massin (Paris: Le Club Francaise du Livre, 1967), 160–62.
This is a point made in José Manuel Losada Goya, “Victor Hugo ou les paradoxes de l’architecture: du livre de pierre au livre de papier,” Travaux de Litterature: Architectes et Architecture dans la Littérature Francaise 12 (1999): 163–71.
English translations are from Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame ofParis, trans. John Sturrock (London: Penguin Books, 1978), 124 (hereafter cited in text as NDP); “Trois choses importantes manquent aujourd’hui a cette fa4ade. D’abord le degre de onze marches qui l’exhaussait jadis au-dessus du sol; ensuite Ia serie inferieure de statues qui occupait les niches des trois portails, et la serie superieure des vingt-huit plus anciens rois de France, qui garnissait la galerie du premier etage, a partir de Childebert jusqu’a Philippe Auguste, tenant en main la pomme impiriale” (Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris, 107).
See, for example, Jacques Le Goff, Saint Louis (Paris: Gallimard, 1996); Jacques Le Goff, “La genese de I’etat francais au Moyen Age,” in L’dtat et les pouvoirs, vol. 2 of Histoire de la France, ed. Andre Burguiere and Jacques Revel (Paris: Seuil, 1989), 21–180; Marie-Therese Lorcin, La France au XIIIe siecle: economie et societe (Paris: Nathan, 1975); Jean Richard, Saint Louis: Crusader King of France, ed. and abridged by Simon Lloyd, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), chap. 11.
For example, see Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris, edition illustree d’apres les dessins de MM. E de Beaumont, L. Boulanger, Daubigny, T. Johannot, de Lemud, Meissonnier, G. Roqueplan, de Rudder, Steinbeil (Paris: Perrotin, editeur, 1844); Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris, with illustrations by Brion (Paris: J. Hetzel, 1865).
See “Editor’s Introduction,” in Critique of the Power of Judgment, by Immanuel Kant, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), xiv.
See Hayden White, “The Politics of Historical Representation: Discipline and De-Sublimation,” in The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 70–71.
For an elaboration of this idea, see Susan A. Crane, Collecting and Historical Consdousness in Early Nineteenth-Century Germany (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 1–37.
For a study of Hugo’s medievalism, see Patricia A. Ward, The Medievalism of Victor Hugo (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1975).
See Joan C. Kessler, “‘Cette Babel du monde’: Visionary Architecture in the Poetry of Victor Hugo,” Nineteenth-century French Studies 19, no. 3 (1991): 417–31.
Jeanine Sauvanon, Les metiers au Moyen-Age: leurs “signatures” dam les vitraux: Cathedrale de Chartres (Chartres: Editions Houvet, 1993).
Thomas Aquinas did in fact write on aesthetics as Umberto Eco has shown in The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, trans. Hugh Bredin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). I would agree with Eco that Benedetto Croce’s dismissive remark that Thomas’s notions about aesthetics are overly general and dull was ill informed (Eco, Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, 1–19), but nonetheless, it would be difficult to maintain that the period exhibits a widespread and self-conscious “aesthetic sensibility” of the sort that has emerged since the eighteenth century. See also, Hamburger, “The Place of Theology,” in Mind’s Eye.
Abbot Suger, Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church ofSt.-Denis and Its Art Treasures, ed., trans., and annotated by Erwin Panofsky (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979; orig. 1946), xi.
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© 2008 Brenda Deen Schildgen
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Schildgen, B.D. (2008). Victor HUgo’s Notre-Dame of Paris . In: Heritage or Heresy. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230613157_8
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