Notre-Dame is a thing, but it is also a thought, which is why, as soon as the fire broke out, any number of commentators began speaking about Victor Hugo, who invested the cathedral with an exceptionally large and wonderful thought, and gave it eternal life. Notre-Dame is not, after all, merely the landscape of Hugo's novel. Notre-Dame is the protagonist. In the English-speaking world, we like to call the novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame, which is a marvelous title, given how marvelous is Quasimodo the Hunchback, born of a Jew and a sow (according to a nasty old lady in Book IV), who has got to be the most heartbreaking brokenhearted lover in the history of literature—Quasimodo, whose deformed and decayed skeleton turns up on the final page, entwined in posthumous and pathetic embrace around the skeleton of the hanged “Egyptian,” La Esmerelda, the “bohemian” (who, since I have mentioned the Jews, plainly owes something, derivatively speaking, to the exotic Rebecca of Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe). But the actual title is Notre-Dame de Paris, the cathedral, and not its carillonneur.
And the cathedral goes into action, as protagonists are supposed to do. It breathes, which may not seem like much, but is rather a lot, for a building. It sings (through the bells), which is a bit more. It surveys. It presides. Public executions take place before its unblinking cyclopean rose-window eye. But mostly it emblemizes. And what does it emblemize? Hugo brought out the novel in 1831, when he was 29 years old, and the edifice-protagonist emblemized the great and thrilling philosophical idea of that particular moment. This was the idea that Hegel expressed in his lectures from 1830, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Introduction, and Tocqueville expressed in his own book from 1835, Democracy in America, Vol. I. It was a theory of history.
Hugo's way of expressing the idea was naturally a little different from Hegel's and Tocqueville's. Hugo, unlike them, was happy to contradict himself, and happy to make things up, and happier still to let words to get the better of him. Poetic caprice was his intellectual system. His version of the great idea of those years was therefore more human than anything you can find in Hegel or in Tocqueville, and more colorful—a vibrational version, aglow in turquoise, blue, magenta, and red, emitting geysers of vocabulary not just in French but in Latin, Greek, Spanish, and Italian, in a delirium of Babel. Deep down, though, Hugo's idea and theirs were the same.
It was the idea of progress. It was the idea that, in his phrase, “All of civilization begins with theocracy and ends with democracy,” which is not how Hegel would have put it (though Hegel's theory was fully compatible), but was Tocqueville's idea in a nutshell. It was the idea that mankind is universal; that what is true for one people must basically be true for all peoples; that progress, therefore, is likewise universal, or will turn out to be universal, in time; that conscious and rational self-government reflects the inner essence of man; and ultimately the inner essence will have its way. It was the idea that religion is the premonition, and democracy, the fruition.
Only, Hugo gave his own spin to that idea, and, because the spin revolved around the enormous cathedral, it added up to a theory of history in a distinctly architectural mode. It was the idea that, for 6,000 years, architecture was the great repository of the signs of human thought—religious architecture in particular, architecture that is intended to mean something. Religious architecture was the repository because giant temples were built to last, and they were accessible. Books and manuscripts were, by contrast, fragile tissues, vulnerable to every passing thing. “To destroy the written word, a torch and a Turk will suffice,” said Hugo (those being the times of Greco-Turkish war). But architecture in its massive ancient style was indestructible.
Architecture was a mountain, it was sturdy, it was visible, and it was all-encompassing. It agglomerated, organized, summarized, displayed and expressed the achievements of civilization. Theology was the master-science, and architecture was the master-art. And the master-art presided over the lesser and subordinate arts—sculpture, painting, music—that prospered within its welcoming niches and naves.
The original temple architecture, in Hugo's theory, was Egyptian, or else Hindu (meaning vaguely Asian, I guess), and was, in any case, monolithic, as was proper for conveying and preserving theology's unitary dogma, under the despotism of the guardian priests. The principle of monolithic massivity guided the architecture of Egypt's heir, as well, which was Rome. And Rome bequeathed the same principle to the Romanesque cathedrals of the early Middle Ages—an architecture intended, in each instance, to affirm and enforce the dogmatic theological truths, whatever they might happen to be.
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