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Victor Hugo
Variety, Eternity, Proportion : Time was the architect - Europe was the builder

From: Victor Hugo, Notre Dame de Paris

Em. Macron, Rediscovering the Path to Europe

Page 3

To the devastations of Time and of Revolutions--carried out at least with impartiality and grandeur--have been added those of a swarm of school-trained architects, duly licensed and incorporated, degrading their art deliberately and, with all the discernment of bad taste, substituting the Louis XV fussiness for Gothic simplicity, and all to the greater glory of the Parthenon. This is the kick of the ass to the dying lion; it is the ancient oak, dead already above, gnawed at the roots by worms and vermin. [...]

For the rest, Notre Dame cannot, from the architectural point of view, be called complete, definite, classified. It is not a Roman church, neither is it a Gothic church. It is not typical of any style of architecture. Notre Dame has not, like the Abbey of Tournus, the grave and massive squareness, the round, wide, vaulted roof, the frigid nudity, the majestic simplicity of the edifices which have their origin in the Roman arch. Nor is it like the Cathedral of Bourges, the splendid, airy, multiform, foliated, pinnacled, efflorescent product of the Gothic arch. Impossible, either, to rank it among that antique family of churches--sombre, mysterious, low-pitched, cowering, as it were, under the weight of the round arch; half Egyptian, wholly hieroglyphical, wholly sacerdotal, wholly symbolical; as regards ornament, rather overloaded with lozenges and zigzags than with flowers, with flowers than animals, with animals than human figures; less the work of the architect than the Bishop, the first transformation of the art still deeply imbued with theocratic and military discipline, having its root in the Byzantine Empire, and stopping short at William the Conqueror. Nor, again, can the Cathedral be ranked with that other order of lofty, aerial churches, with their wealth of painted windows and sculptured work, with their sharp pinnacles and bold outlines; communal and citizen--regarded as political symbols; free, capricious, untrammelled--regarded as works of art. This is the second transformation of architecture--no longer cryptic, sacerdotal, inevitable, but artistic, progressive, popular--beginning with the return from the Crusades and ending with Louis XI.

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    Cf.  Pictures of Notre Dame by Kostas Katsiyiannis. Cf. by V. Hugo: In a grand parliament of intelligence, My Revenge is Fraternity! (margin: the Enlargement of Civilization) * R. Scruton, Architecture needs a Grammar * Giannopoulos, The Greek line & the Greek color

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