download hunchback of notre dame gargoyles hugo

His writing spurred on calls for a full restoration, eventually undertaken by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, who was just 30 when he won the commission with Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Lassus in 1845.

It was Victor Hugo’s 1831 novel Notre-Dame de Paris (translated as The Hunchback of Notre Dame) that brought the cathedral’s plight to widespread attention, raising alarm about the “mutilations, amputations dislocations” of the structure, and making gothic architecture touch the popular imagination in a way it never had before. The cathedral was heavily damaged by rioting Huguenots in the 16th century, remodelled by successive kings and roundly plundered during the French Revolution, when the 28 statues of biblical figures on the west façade, mistaken for French kings, were ritually beheaded. The only solace one might take from the horrific fire is that it is merely the latest chapter in a long and violent history of destruction and repair.

Photograph: Galerie Bilderwelt/Getty Images Notre Dame c.1900 … enough to make Pugin faint.

Download hunchback of notre dame gargoyles hugo