How The Hunchback of Notre-Dame drew on Gargantua and Pantagruel
A documented line of influence: Victor Hugo demonstrably engaged François Rabelais’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
Gargantua and Pantagruel
François Rabelais · 1532
RenaissanceThe influenced
The Hunchback of Notre-Dame
Victor Hugo · 1831
RomanticismRelevance
6/10
On The Hunchback of Notre-Dame’s page
- The Hunchback of Notre-Dame realizes the aesthetic Hugo credited to Rabelais — the grotesque-as-fecundity he praised in his 1827 Preface to Cromwell, naming Gargantua and Pantagruel alongside Ariosto and Cervantes
- Quasimodo is that theory made flesh: the grotesque and sublime locked together, exactly the power Hugo found in Rabelais's giants
- A wink for those who know — the cathedral bells Quasimodo rings were first carried off by Gargantua himself
On Gargantua and Pantagruel’s page
- Hugo named Rabelais as one of his "three burlesque Homers" — with Ariosto and Cervantes — in the 1827 Preface to Cromwell, his Romantic manifesto on the power of the grotesque
- Four years later he poured that aesthetic into Quasimodo: the grotesque and the sublime fused in a single body
- And the Notre-Dame bells Quasimodo rings were first stolen by Rabelais's giant Gargantua — the line runs straight from the giant to the bell-ringer