VICTOR HUGO (1802-1885) was a French poet, playwright, novelist, essayist, artist, statesman, and human rights activist, best known for his novels Les Misérables and Nôtre-Dame de Paris (translated into English as The Hunchback of Notre-Dame).   JEAN-MARC HOVASSE is the author of a biography of Victor Hugo and Director of the Center for the Study of Correspondence and Diaries at the University of Brest, France.Introduction by Jean-Marc HovasseFrom the Introduction   True, there is something strange and marvellous in the talent of this man who sweeps the reader before him as the wind sweeps the leaf, who leads him at will through every place and era; unveils before him as if it were child’s play the heart’s innermost recesses, the most mysterious phenomena of nature and the most obscure pages of history; whose imagination dominates and embraces every other imagination, clothing itself with the same astonishing truth in the rags of the beggar and the robes of the king, taking on every attitude, adopting every garb, speaking every language; leaving to the physiognomy of the centuries whatever in their features the wisdom of God has rendered eternal and immutable and whatever the folly of humanity in its ephemeral variety has cast upon them; who does not, as some ignorant novelists do, deck the protagonists of yesteryear in our face-paint nor daub them with the gloss of today, but forces the contemporary reader, under the thrall of his magical powers, to re-assume for the space of a few hours the spirit of olden times – a spirit held in such low esteem today – like a wise and tactful adviser inviting the ingrate son to return to his father’s house.   Despite appearances, this epic sentence was not written to greet Notre-Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre-Dame) on its publication in March 1831. It formed the opening of an article written eight years earlier for the launch of La muse française, a journal founded by Hugo and his Romantic friends – a circle of sentimental young royalists infatuated with the Middle Ages. Hugo had chosen the ‘Literary Criticism’ section for his first contribution. Only twenty-one, he was already very familiar with the work of the man whose ‘magical powers’ he so splendidly evoked: Walter Scott, thirty years his elder, whose Quentin Durward had just appeared in French.   Hugo eulogized Scott. That same year, Stendhal noted ‘the French are mad about Walter Scott’. Balzac shared this enthusiasm. But Hugo alone of these admirers devoted an entire essay to Scott – he did the same for William Shakespeare forty years later. He seemed to speak most freely of himself when wearing an English mask. For Hugo, literary criticism was an essential first step in his creative life. His review of Quentin Durward laid the foundations for the notorious preface to Cromwell (yet another English mask): this was effectively the manifesto of French Romanticism (1827). Theatre then dominated the other genres as cinema does today and Hugo praised Scott for freeing his work from the trammels of the ‘narrative’ and ‘epistolary’ novel in order to create the ‘dramatic novel, in which the imaginary action unfolds in truthful and varied tableaux, just like the events of real life’. The novel, Hugo announced, should be like life: ‘And is not life a strange drama in which the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly, the sublime and the base are intermingled according to a law whose power ends only with the created world?’ This question, which challenges the separation of genres found in classical French plays and favours a more Shakespearian approach, reappears in almost identical form in the preface to Cromwell. In short, the novel must borrow its principles of composition from drama.   The Hunchback of Notre-Dame does in fact display remarkable unity of time and place, as required by the often forgotten subtitle (Notre-Dame de Paris. 1482) but is no less remarkable for its unity of action. In these respects, it faithfully followed the principles set out by Hugo in La muse française. As to the intermingling of genres – Hugo’s key demand in his manifesto – we find it everywhere in The Hunchback. Indeed some have diagnosed an obsession with antitheses. These are present from the first page, which mixes the Epiphany of the Wise Men with the Feast of the Fools, to the last, which brings together Esmeralda and Quasimodo (Beauty and the Beast) for that rather peculiar wedding night – described by Graham Robb in his superlative biography of Hugo as a ‘parody of a happy ending’. Nor should we forget the antithesis constituted by those two considerable personages, Read Less