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Oral Presentations

Episode 41 - Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame - Remember When This Guy's House Burnt Down Like Two Years Ago?

Oral Presentations

Chris Wood

Science, Comedy, Education

5.0868 Ratings

🗓️ 3 August 2020

⏱️ 29 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Victor Hugo made this story up after he saw an ugly guy working on the restoration of a cathedral. That is actually cited as being his inspiration for the character. He wrote a 940 page book because of how ugly he thought a construction worker was. The book was written over 3 years and published in 1831. This means there is a chance the construction worker who inspired the book was still alive when it came out, and may have read it without knowing the whole thing was secret...

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

And the Ladies and gentlemen welcome to oral presentations episode 41 41, Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

0:26.0

Remember when this guy's house burned down like two years ago?

0:29.0

We are going to be covering the actual book written by Victor Hugo.

0:36.4

It was published in 1831 of The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

0:41.0

And the reason I picked this topic is because I found out that what the book

0:45.2

was before it was published Victor Hugo was trying to write about Gothic architecture

0:49.8

and cathedrals because here's the thing the printing press was becoming popular and

0:56.6

Victor Hugo was like oh no I feel like cathedrals are not going to be a thing anymore because the printing press they're going to print so many Bibles that they're not going to make cathedrals anymore because nobody's going to need to like go to a physical place for church.

1:10.0

So Victor Hugo was scared that cathedrals weren't going to be around anymore.

1:15.0

And so he wrote a bunch of, like a lot of the book itself, like it's a 940 page book,

1:20.0

and a ton of it is just describing the beauty of Gothic architecture.

1:25.3

But he couldn't just publish that. He needed a story, right? So the whole reason I'm doing this episode

1:30.3

is because I found out that when he needed a story to go with all of his facts about Gothic architecture

1:37.6

They were doing a restoration on the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris.

1:42.8

So Victor Hugo went down to go watch the guys work on it

1:47.3

because he needed a story.

1:48.3

He's like, what am I going to write about?

1:49.6

I need to tell a story with all these,

1:51.6

all these cathedral facts I got.

1:53.1

So he goes down to watch the construction dudes work on the cathedral.

1:57.2

And he gets the idea for the hunchback of Notre Dame

2:01.2

because he just sees the ugliest dude he's ever seen in his whole life working on the cathedral.

...

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