markruffalwhoa:

My favorite thing about Victor Hugo is that the Notre Dame Cathedral was a huge eyesore on the verge of collapsing and was planned to be demolished but Victor Hugo was like “hey 😦 I like that building” and wrote The Hunchback of Notre Dame to save it. and it worked

In the book he described the cathedral in the state it was in but also in comparison to what it looked like in the 15th century before it got all fucked up in the French Revolution. His book got translated into a fuck ton of languages and was distributed all around Europe. Tourists who were fans of him would go to see it while in Paris and were appalled to see just how bad of shape it was in and it started to become stain on paris’ reputation.

So finally the king funded the Hella expensive restoration which I imagine was one really fucking gnarly project, the structure it’s self being the tip of the ice burg because of how many religious artifacts and statutes and junk that had been ruined.

So thanks Vicky that’s one hell of a beautiful tower.

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