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I can not believe. Most contributors to Book Riot can not either. On April 15, a fire devastated Notre-Dame de Paris, a historic church in Paris. The renovations resulted in an electrical fire that caused the roof to fall and several stained glbad windows to be destroyed. Fortunately, the Parisian firefighters have mastered the fire, thus saving the structure. The relics had been moved earlier because of the renovation.
It is very ironic that this church was saved by a book, but burned by a minor accident. As the video of Lindsay Ellis says, as far as The Hunchback of Notre Dame and his adaptations, Victor Hugo wrote the book to save the church. Otherwise, because of its state of disrepair, it would have been demolished and replaced.
Note that for this article, I use the term "Gypsy" in quotation marks because it is a racial insult. Romani is the appropriate term.
Notre Dame of Paris
If you are going to read the original book Notre Dame of Paris, keep in mind that Victor Hugo was a little racist. It starts with "gypsies" kidnapping a baby in perfect health and replacing him with another, abandoned to the steeple. Clopin is also a murderous leader who besieges Notre Dame to protect Esmeralda from the troops. Not the most flattering representation.
Then we have Frollo and Quasimodo. Quasimodo was born with physical malformations and the sound of the bells made him deaf. Neither are described sympathetically in the books, although Quasimodo protects Esmeralda when she is accused of murder.
Yeah. Nevertheless, the book struck the hearts of people saying that Our Lady was more than a place. There was life, as much as the people running in it testified. And it has struck a chord with people. Soon, there would also be a musical chord.
"What makes a monster and what makes a man?"
I heard about Notre Dame for the first time from Disney. The film was released when I was a kid and I asked my parents to take me there. In hindsight, that's why the creators should not have been aiming for a PG rating because I had too little to understand.
Hunchback takes a lot of freedom with the source material, but I say they improve it. Rather than having Frollo as a corrupt religious archdeacon who can not keep him in his pants, he is the Minister of Justice and embarks on a genocide that corresponds to his distorted view of the world. To emphasize this, he is pursuing a cold-blooded woman and the murderer for trying to save her baby's life. The local archdeacon must tell him that he must raise the child to atone for his sin. Frollo does it, and Quasimodo, despite this traumatic education, is kind to every living being.
Esmeralda is also Romani and not naive. Instead, it adopts the approach of repairing wrongs, even when it puts one's life in danger. Frollo hates that she challenges him, but that she is an attractive and nubile teenager. Cue one of the best songs of oddly prophetic villains on the news, about how Esmeralda will burn.
Obviously, I did not get any of that when I was a kid. Instead, I had to go back to college to understand that it was a film about the difference between lust and love: when you covet a person, you make fun of his ability to consent. You only want them and that feeling consumes you. To symbolize this, Esmeralda appears in the flames, not as a person with Frollo, but as an ephemeral "witch". Ironically, he calls the Virgin Mary, who has also been a refugee, to help her.
Frollo swears to burn all Paris to find Esmeralda. Note that he does not need to burn anyone; he makes the choice. Then he blames Quasimodo and says that Esmeralda was kind to his adopted son and that she was cunning, not nice. At this point, Quasimodo does not buy it, but his fear of Frollo is in conflict with his courage. At the apogee, all Parisians are revolted when he finally besieges Notre Dame, after Quasimodo rescued Esmeralda and claimed refuge for her. For the first time in his history, Quasimodo fights his adoptive father and defends the church with everything he has.
On the surface, it seems that Disney's fictional novel, Frollo, had the last word. Our Lady burned. More and more cruel people are using their shrine to commit genocide. And the world seems to have become more scary.
But Our Lady has already burned and it has been rebuilt. We can not replace windows or the exact arrow, but we can add something new to the old one. And we can remember why old and new versions of history work, why we remember it.
Victor Hugo once saved a church. Disney saved a story. We can save a lot more. Our Lady lives to serve Paris another day.
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