There was not a single town where h

There was not a single town where historic monuments were not being destroyed either by the authorities or by individual citizens. Loudest against this destruction was the voice of Victor Hugo (1802-85), who became the father of the historic novel in France - following the example of Sir Walter Scott in England. In 1831, Hugo published Notre-Dame de Paris, where he glorified this
'old queen of the French cathedrals', and made her alive to the great public, showing
how the gigantic masses formed 'a vast symphony in stone'. He pointed out that these buildings of transition from the Romanesque to the Gothic were no less valuable than a pure product of a style; they expressed a gradation of the art which would be lost without them, and he continued:

They also make us understand that the greatest productions of architecture are not so much the work of individuals as of society - the offspring rather of national efforts than of the conceptions of particular minds - a deposit left by a whole people - the accumulation of ages . . . Great edifices, like great mountains, are the work of ages. Often the art undergoes a transformation while they are yet pending - pendent opera interruptia - they go on again quietly, in accor• dance with the change in the art. The altered art takes up the fabric, encrusts itself upon it, assimilates it to itself, develops it after its own fashion, and finishes it if it can. (Hugo, 1953:1010

Hugo, who here drafted a basis for modern evaluation, did not see the cathedral as an isolated monument, but most importantly as a part of the historic town of Paris, and he continues with 'a bird's-eye view of Paris' as it would have been in the fifteenth century, describing also the changes that had occurred since. Paris, to him, had become a collection of specimens of several different ages of architecture. The finest had already disappeared; modern ugly dwellings were only too rapidly replacing historic fabric, and also the historical meaning of its architecture was daily wearing away. In 1825, he wrote an appeal, Guerre aux Demolisseurs, ('war against destroyers'), which was expanded in the Revue des Deux Mandes in 1832. He attacked the stupidity and ignorance of the French who neglected their mediaeval heritage, let it fall down stone by