Hugo et l'architecture. De la pierre à la plume

Following on from Hugo the Decorator, currently on show at the Maison de Victor Hugo, this exhibition explores the links between Victor Hugo and architecture, showing how it runs through his literary and graphic work.

Romantic writer, accomplished playwright, committed poet, visionary artist and decorator, Victor Hugo had a privileged and unavoidable relationship with architecture, which always deeply inspired him.

Churches, cathedrals and castles fill his notebooks and give 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 a fervent defender of heritage following his famous plea « Guerre aux démolisseurs  » in 1825.

His best-known work on this subject remains, 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, speaks as much to history as it does to writing.

In the famous chapter « Ceci tuera cela  », the writer draws an analogy between stones and words. Both are building materials: literature is an architecture of words, just as architecture is a writing of history.

This presence of architecture is also found in other novels, where an important place is given to the buildings that frame and punctuate the narrative. This interest in the architectural motif also runs through his entire graphic work.

Castles and keeps, ruins and causeways, churches and cathedrals, fortresses and staircases… formed very early on the main iconography of his sketchbooks and drawings.

Victor Hugo's sense of observation and imagination unfold through real or imagined monuments, famous or intimate, precise or visionary, immense and minuscule, grandiose or modest.

This approach also concerns a personal architecture at Hauteville House, his home during his exile on Guernsey, where he experimented with a three-dimensional architectural vision.