Notre-Dame de Paris

Paris, 1482. During the Feast of Fools, the crowd crowns as king of fools the most hideous man in the city, Quasimodo, the deaf, hunchbacked bell-ringer of Notre-Dame. Three men become obsessed with Esmeralda, a young dancer who performs in the square with her goat: Quasimodo, the handsome captain Phoebus, and the archdeacon Claude Frollo, whose desire turns to destructive madness.

Victor Hugo published the novel in 1831 partly to save the cathedral and Paris's Gothic buildings, which were then neglected, and its success led to the restoration of Notre-Dame. After the fire of 2019 the book returned to bestseller lists. Hugo's later masterpiece is Les Misérables.

Victor Hugo (1802–1885), leading voice of French Romanticism, wrote The Hunchback of Notre-Dame and spent nearly twenty years in exile in the Channel Islands for opposing Napoleon III.

There he finished Les Misérables, the story of the convict Jean Valjean, and Toilers of the Sea; the poet Hafez Ibrahim's Arabic version of Les Misérables made it a favourite of Arab readers.