The Hunchback of Notre Dame - Victor Hugo [6]
1876 Hugo is elected to the Senate.
1877 As senator, Hugo plays a leading role in preventing Marshal Marie Edmé Patrice de MacMahon, president of the Third Republic from 1873 to 1879, from becoming dictator of France. Because the monarchists have split their support among various claimants to the throne, the republicans achieve a working majority. The second volume of Hugo’s poetic history of the world, La Légende des siècles , appears.
1878 A stroke leaves Hugo incapable of composing additional lit erary works.
1880 After years of efforts, Hugo arranges amnesty for the Commu nards, popular-front rebels in the Paris of 1871 opposed to surrender to the Prussians. Some 20,000 of them, including women and children, had been slaughtered by French gov ernment troops—more than the total of those guillotined during the Reign of Terror in 1793. Guy de Maupassant’s collected Contes (Stories ) are published.
1881 On February 26, Hugo’s birthday, a national holiday is pro claimed, and 600,000 marchers pass his windows. The street where he lives is renamed L’avenue Victor-Hugo.
1882 Hugo is reelected to the Senate. His play Torquemada (1869) is performed.
1883 Juliette Drouet, Hugo’s mistress since 1833, dies after a pro longed struggle with cancer. The final volume of Hugo’s po etic history of the world, La Légende des siècles , appears.
1885 Victor Hugo dies May 22. Two million mourners pass his coffin underneath the Arc de Triomphe. Hugo is entombed in the Pantheon, the first of a series of culture heroes and great leaders to be placed there. June 1 is declared a day of national mourning. Posthumous publications will enhance his reputation for decades—notably, the verse collections La Fin de Satan (The End of Satan, 1886), Toute la lyre (1888, 1893), and Dieu (1891). His experimental plays, eventually published in a Pléïade edition as “Le Theatre en liberte,” brilliantly anticipate the Theater of the Absurd in the 1950s.
1902 On the centenary of his birth, the French government opens the Maison de Victor Hugo museum in the apartment where he once lived on the place des Vosges.
1912 1918 In collaboration with André Antoine, the director of the nat uralistic Théatre-Libre, the filmmaker Albert Capellani, with the Pathé firm, produces a series of movies based on Hugo’s works: Les Misérables (1912), Marie Tudor (1912), Quatrevingt-treize (1914), and Les Travailleurs de la mer (1918).
1923 Wallace Worsley’s silent film version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame appears, starring Lon Chaney as Quasimodo.
1926 The Buddhist sect Cao Dai originates in Vietnam. It now has about 2,000 temples and several million followers world wide. The worshipers venerate Hugo and his two sons, whom they believe return to earth, reincarnated.
1939 William Dieterle’s film version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, with Charles Laughton as Quasimodo and Maureen O‘Hara as Esmeralda, is released.
1975 François Truffaut’s film Adèle H., retelling the tragedy of Hugo’s second daughter, wins Le Grand Prix du Cinema Français.
1996 Walt Disney issues an animated, freely altered film version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, distinctive in its politi cally correct treatment of gypsies, women, and persons with disabilities.
Introduction
With the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe, the cathedral of Notre Dame figures among the most visited monuments of Paris. Famous for its Gothic facade, great portals, rose window, and looming towers, the cathedral—built principally in the twelfth century—is one of the most enduring symbols of the French capital and its medieval heritage. Aiding in the transmission of the cathedral’s symbolic importance is the novel it inspired: Victor Hugo’s 1831 Notre-Dame de Paris: 1482, better known in English as The Hunchback of Notre Dame. In it, Hugo brings to life the cathedral of Notre Dame as it existed at the end of the fifteenth century. Many critics and readers have seen the great church as the novel’s true hero, as it takes an active role in the narrative