Victor Hugo et l’idéologie humaniste: le cas de Notre-Dame de Paris

Abstract

Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) lays much emphasis on the ideological foundations of the French Renaissance. An analysis of those parts of the novel that allude to religious beliefs, art and literary text production in the sixteenth century may reveal the connections that the
nineteenth-century French writer establishes between the past – the Renaissance – and his own age. Hugo’s historical novel makes direct reference to Gothic art, Jean Calvin’s doctrine of predestination, and traces even further back in time the theme of immutable fate wonderfully developed in the medieval legend of Tristan and Isolde. Thus, it may be used to successfully explore French history and artistic imagination as well as their evolution about the end of the medieval period and in the early days of the
Renaissance.