Early in the novel Notre Dame De Paris by Victor Hugo, Claude Frollo utters this line in seeming agonized frustration, terrifying in its meaning. He directs the eyes of two visitors from a book on his desk to the massive silhouette of Notre Dame cathedral beyond his door, then announces: “This will kill that.”
“This” is the book. The arrival of printing, mass produced information and the dissemination of it to the populace, “That” is the cathedral, and all that goes along with it. “Small things overcome great ones,” Frollo laments, “the book will kill the building.”
For Hugo, the language of mankind to that point has and had been architecture. While the language of the scholar and the educated elite was Latin, the language of the common people was architecture. The grandeur of the cathedral pointed eyes to the glory of heaven, the humbleness of their common dwelling, to the state of man in the sight of his deity.
That language reaches a sort of climax in the Gothic Cathedral and, indeed, the grandeur of Notre Dame. Hugo asserts; in a sort of righteous fervor; that priests had controlled even that language for centuries. From the reflected dogmatic oppression of the squared, Romanesque cathedral, to the flying Gothic architecture that lifts men’s souls, giving wings to poetic liberation with flying buttresses, large stained glass windows, and the awe-inspiring flight of high towers and distant bells.
It is fitting then, that this behemoth of man’s invention and vision should fall to the singular smallness of something so common as movable type. A post-enlightenment sort of David and Goliath. It is fairly easy to see then if we interrogate the style and concepts of this book that Hugo felt architects had nothing left to say. All was neo-this and neo-that, and a sort of re-imagination of the past.
“This” would kill “That.”
And yet, Notre Dame De Paris includes a sort of plea within its pages to acknowledge everything the then-crumbling building represents and to save it from the future ravages of time. By Hugo’s time and the beginning of the research done for the novel, the Cathedral was over 500 years old and had become something of a ruin.
Broken and desecrated after changing governments, lack of repair, and perhaps most notably ravaged by the Huguenots for being idolatrous, AND THEN all the beheading of all the kings of Israel for supposedly being “French Aristocrats and Royalty” during the Revolution, Notre Dame was quite a mess. And, unfortunately, would remain a mess until Hugo could finish the novel; there’s some fun gossip and shade there if you look into the writing-of; and other people began to take interest. This has also been credited as beginning the concept of Historical Preservation, which really only began to take hold in America and the UK post-WW2. (Some people also blame Robert Moses. It sort of depends on your point of view.)
The general theme of the novel is that Notre Dame will and has outlived countless lives of humanity, and all their ineptitude, terrible decisions, and flaws, will pale in comparison to the edifice and it’s lifespan…. should we care to preserve it.
The grand irony, however, is that the book itself became a NEW “This” and was destroyed itself by a new “That” : the advent of movies and hollywood. The story changed, sometimes drastically, cutting and adding characters and changing their motivations, throughout each successor to the story that came before. Frollo became something other than a priest.
Esmeralda went from a white girl stolen by g*psies, to a g*psy herself.
Quasimodo went from deformed man to movie monster to anti hero to protagonist and back again.
Phoebus went from soldier to revolutionary and through some convoluted developments.
Gringoire is left out of most productions post-1930s.
Fleur De Lys often doesn’t feature….
The film has killed the book. This, has killed That. And time marches on.
From Lindsay Ellis: The Case for Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame
It was a premonition that human thought, in changing its outward form, was also about to change its outward mode of expression; that the dominant idea of each generation would, in future, be embodied in a new material, a new fashion; that the book of stone, so solid and so enduring, was to give way to the book of paper, more solid and more enduring still. In this respect the vague formula of the Archdeacon had a second meaning—that one Art would dethrone another Art: Printing will destroy Architecture. 4
In effect, from the very beginning of things down to the fifteenth century of the Christian era inclusive, architecture is the great book of the human race, man’s chief means of expressing the various stages of his development, whether physical or mental. 5
When the memory of the primitive races began to be surcharged, when the load of tradition carried about by the human family grew so heavy and disordered that the word, naked and fleeting, ran danger of being lost by the way, they transcribed it on the ground by the most visible, the most lasting, and at the same time most natural means. They enclosed each tradition in a monument. 6
The first monuments were simply squares of rock “which had not been touched by iron,” as says Moses. Architecture began like all writing. It was first an alphabet. A stone was planted upright and it was a letter, and each letter was a hieroglyph, and on every hieroglyph rested a group of ideas, like the capital on the column. Thus did the primitive races act at the same moment over the entire face of the globe. One finds the “upright stone” of the Celts in Asiatic Siberia and on the pampas of America. 7
Presently they constructed words. Stone was laid upon stone, these granite syllables were coupled together, the word essayed some combinations. The Celtic dolmen and cromlech, the Etruscan tumulus, the Hebrew galgal, are words—some of them, the tumulus in particular, are proper names. Occasionally, when there were many stones and a vast expanse of ground, they wrote a sentence. The immense mass of stones at Karnac is already a complete formula. 8
Last of all they made books. Traditions had ended by bringing forth symbols, under which they disappeared like the trunk of a tree under its foliage. These symbols, in which all humanity believed, continued to grow and multiply, becoming more and more complex; the primitive monuments—themselves scarcely expressing the original traditions, and, like them, simple, rough-hewn, and planted in the soil—no longer sufficed to contain them; they overflowed at every point. Of necessity the symbol must expand into the edifice. Architecture followed the development of human thought; it became a giant with a thousand heads, a thousand arms, and caught and concentrated in one eternal, visible, tangible form all this floating symbolism. While Dædalus, who is strength, was measuring; while Orpheus, who is intelligence, was singing—the pillar, which is a letter; the arch, which is a syllable; the pyramid, which is a word, set in motion at once by a law of geometry and a law of poetry, began to group themselves together, to combine, to blend, to sink, to rise, stood side by side on the ground, piled themselves up into the sky, till, to the dictation of the prevailing idea of the epoch, they had written these marvelous books which are equally marvellous edifices: the Pagoda of Eklinga, the Pyramids of Egypt, and the Temple of Solomon. 9
The parent idea, the Word, was not only contained in the foundation of these edifices, but in their structure. Solomon’s Temple, for example, was not simply the cover of the sacred book, it was the sacred book itself. On each of its concentric enclosures the priest might read the Word translated and made manifest to the eye, might follow its transformations from sanctuary to sanctuary, till at last he could lay hold upon it in its final tabernacle, under its most concrete form, which yet was architecture—the Ark. Thus the Word was enclosed in the edifice, but its image was visible on its outer covering, like the human figure depicted on the coffin of a mummy. 10
Again, not only the structure of the edifice but its situation revealed the idea it embodied. According as the thought to be expressed was gracious or sombre, Greece crowned her mountains with temples harmonious to the eye; India disembowelled herself to hew out those massive subterranean pagodas which are supported by rows of gigantic granite elephants. 11
Thus, during the first six thousand years of the world—from the most immemorial temple of Hindustan to the Cathedral at Cologne—architecture has been the great manuscript of the human race. And this is true to such a degree, that not only every religious symbol, but every human thought, has its page and its memorial in that vast book. 12
Every civilization begins with theocracy and ends with democracy.
House Of Crows 