Hugo and architecture. From stone to pen

A romantic writer, accomplished playwright, committed poet, visionary artist, and decorator, Victor Hugo maintained a privileged and essential relationship with architecture, which always deeply inspired him. Churches, cathedrals, and castles filled his notebooks and gave meaning to his stories.

Like the first half of the 19th century, when literature and architecture were closely linked and the question of heritage became central, the poet became an ardent defender of heritage following his famous plea "War on the Demolishers" in 1825. His most famous work on this subject is, of course, the novel Notre-Dame de Paris, a true aesthetic manifesto published in 1831, in which he develops his particular conception of architecture where the cathedral, a grandiose monument, refers both to history and to writing. In the famous chapter "This will kill that," the writer draws an analogy between stones and words. Both being building materials, literature is an architecture of words just as architecture is a writing of history.

This presence of architecture is found in other novels, with an important place given to the buildings that scaffold and punctuate the narrative.

This interest in the architectural motif also permeates all of his graphic work. Castles and dungeons, ruins and causeways, churches and cathedrals, fortresses and staircases... very early on formed the main iconography of his sketchbooks and drawings.

Victor Hugo's sense of observation and imagination unfold through real or dreamed monuments, famous or intimate, precise or visionary, immense and tiny, grandiose or modest. This approach also concerns a personal architecture at Hauteville House, his home during exile in Guernsey, where he experimented with a three-dimensional architectural vision.