The Untold Truth Of Victor Hugo's Hunchback Of Notre-Dame

May 2024 ยท 2 minute read

Victor Hugo's novel is overrun with minor characters and subplots that got condensed for its adaptations. Said adaptations, as a result, are all somewhat different from one another. For example, for those who've seen the Disney animation adaptation, Frollo is not a judge, but a priest in the book. According to The Mary Sue, Frollo is not immediately a villain in the novel, but finds Quasimodo abandoned by a well and takes the baby in. He also cares for his younger brother Jehan, an indolent university student.

The novel's de facto protagonist is a poet, Pierre Gringoire, who is completely excised in most adaptations. Esmeralda's only defiant action in the novel is to save Gringoire from death by marrying him. Esmeralda is also revealed to actually be French instead of Romani, a casual bit of harmful racism also dropped from most adaptations.

The novel is so broad in scope that screenwriters struggled to fit its entirety into a film's runtime. Hugo also had a tendency to go on tangents about philosophy, the landscape, and history, which are all nebulous topics that are incredibly difficult to pin down on screen. As a result, adaptations focus on the plot, when for Hugo, that was the least important part of his novel, since his focus was more on style, descriptions, and his message.

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