Which French Romantic writer authored 'The Hunchback of Notre-Dame'?

Victor Hugo was the French Romantic writer who authored The Hunchback of Notre-Dame.

Hugo published the novel in French in 1831 under the title Notre-Dame de Paris, 1482. The English title The Hunchback of Notre-Dame highlights Quasimodo, the cathedral’s bell-ringer, but the original title places Notre-Dame itself at the center. The story also follows Esmeralda and the archdeacon Claude Frollo in fifteenth-century Paris.

The novel combines Romanticism’s fascination with powerful emotion, historical settings, marginalised characters, and the Gothic imagination. Hugo also used it as a passionate argument for preserving medieval architecture, which was then neglected or altered. Its attention helped strengthen Notre-Dame’s status as a national symbol of France.

Readers sometimes confuse the novel with later film adaptations, especially Disney’s 1996 animated version, which softens or changes major aspects of Hugo’s tragic story. Honoré de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, and Alexandre Dumas were also important nineteenth-century French writers, but none wrote this novel.