We're talking, of course, about The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. That's right, we're talking about one of the most famous French novel ever written, that book by Victor Hugo that isn't Les Misérables ('Wait, you mean Les Misérables is a book?'), the story that made gargoyles and gypsies cool. Hugo’s writing spanned more than six decades, and he was given a national funeral and buried in the Pantheon after his death in 1885.Grab a baguette, put on your beret, and forget everything you know about the Disney movie, because we're about to get more French than Camembert. He returned to Paris during the Franco-Prussian War and was hailed a national hero. While in exile, he completed Les Miserables (1862), which became a hit in France and abroad. Hugo was forced to flee France when Napoleon III came to power: He did not return for 20 years. He expressed his profound grief in a poetry collection called Les Contemplations (1856). In 1841, Hugo was elected to the prestigious Acadamie Francaise, but two years later he lost his beloved daughter and her husband when they were drowned in an accident. In the 1830s, Hugo wrote numerous plays, many created as vehicles for actress Juliette Drouet, with whom Hugo was romantically connected starting in 1833. In addition to promoting a Romantic aesthetic that would tolerate the imperfect and the grotesque, the book also had a simpler agenda: to increase appreciation of old Gothic structures, which had become the object of vandalism and neglect.

In 1831, he finally finished Notre Dame de Paris. The second, Hernani, became the subject for a bitter and protracted debate between French Classicists and Romantics. The first, Marion de Lorme (1829), was censored for its candid portrayal of a courtesan. The following year, despite a contract to begin work on a novel called Notre Dame de Paris, he set to work on two plays. His 1827 play, Cromwell, embraced the tenets of Romanticism, which he laid out in the play’s preface. In 1823, Hugo published his first novel, Han d’Islande. In 1822, Hugo married his childhood sweetheart, Adele Foucher, and published his first volume of poetry, which won him a pension from Louis XVIII. Although he studied law, he also founded a literary review to which he and other emerging writers published their work.

Hugo, the son of one of Napoleon’s officers, decided while still a teenager to become a writer. Distracted by other projects, Hugo had continually postponed his deadlines for delivering the book to his publishers, but once he sat down to write it, he completed the novel in only four months. On January 15, 1831, Victor Hugo finishes writing Notre Dame de Paris, also known as The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

The hunchback victor hugo