Le Prêtre amoureux:

Hugo’s Claude Frollo and Sand’s Magnus

Andrea Kristin Beaghton

A dissertation submitted to the University of Bristol in accordance with the requirements for
award of the degree of Master of Philosophy in the Faculty of Arts

School of Modern Languages

University of Bristol
April 2012

Text 25,365 words

Left illustration: Claude Frollo by F. de Myrbach, in ‘Fièvre’ (Book IX, Ch. 1), Notre-Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo
(Estes and Lauriat: Boston, 1888), p. 193; Right: Magnus, detail from pastel, Lélia pleurant sur le corps de Sténio,
1839-41, by Eugène Delacroix, Musée de la Vie Romantique, Paris.
 Abstract

Le prêtre amoureux is under-researched despite its prevalence as a theme in nineteenth-century

French fiction; previous studies concentrate on its use by authors for commentary on the Catholic
Church. In this study I consider the priest-in-love’s conflict between his vow to God and his love
for a woman as a subject for psychological drama, as well as a device for religious commentary,
in Hugo’s Claude Frollo in Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) and Sand’s Magnus in Lélia (1833). I
investigate how these authors develop the dramatic potential of the priest’s battle against carnal
desire beyond Gothic and anti-celibacy stereotype to explore the Romantic tension of man’s
body/soul duality and the gap between desire and reality during the 1830s July Monarchy. Hugo
uses the theme of unrequited love to enlarge his treatment of enforced celibacy, exploring the
interplay between innate and social constraint and bringing a universal dimension to Frollo’s
downfall. Alternately, Sand incorporates a protest against gender inequality, rare in priest-in-love
portrayals by men, by reversing the dynamics between priest and woman and emphasising the
unconventional heroine’s challenge to Magnus’s faith and the patriarchal Church. Each narrative
nuances the priest character as both representative and victim of Church repression, tellingly
leaving the interpretation of the transgressing priests open to the reader. Moreover, I argue that
the heightened dramatic depth of the priests’ characterization, raising them above pure
anticlerical symbol, is used by the authors to construct a subtle yet powerful critique of the 1830s
institutional Church. As socially-minded Romantics championing liberty of the individual, the
authors embody in the priests’ conflict a challenge to Tridentine dogma as well as the Church’s
spiritual authority. I propose that for Hugo and Sand, le prêtre amoureux reflects the tension of
reconciling spirit and body, desire and constraint, past and future after the July Revolution.

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 Acknowledgements and Dedication

Firstly, I would like to thank Bradley Stephens, as both an academic advisor whose spirited
approach to research I admire and as a fellow Hugophile and friend. Not only was it a
conversation with him that crystallised my intention to write this thesis, but it would never have
been completed without his invaluable advice, insightful commentary, and much-needed
encouragement throughout. I am also greatly indebted to Danièle Gasiglia-Laster and Arnaud
Laster for generously sharing with me their inspiring wealth of knowledge and insight on Victor
Hugo, as well as their appreciation of his work. Special thanks also to Isabel Roche for our
stimulating and highly enjoyable discussions on my path to the writing of this thesis. I have
additionally benefitted from interactions with many academic colleagues such as Anne Green and
Susan Harrow. Finally, I wish to thank my family and friends for their patience and
encouragement during my writing of the thesis. I dedicate this thesis to my husband Pantelis for
his enthusiastic interest in my work and unwavering support throughout.

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 Author’s declaration

I declare that the work in this dissertation was carried out in accordance with the requirements of
the University’s Regulations and Code of Practice for Research Degree Programmes and that it
has not been submitted for any other academic award. Except where indicated by specific
reference in the text, the work is the candidate’s own work. Work done in collaboration with, or
with the assistance of, others, is indicated as such. Any views expressed in the dissertation are
those of the author.

Signed: .......................................................................... Date: .............................................

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 Abbreviations

References to works by Victor Hugo and George Sand are abbreviated as follows (please refer to
bibliography for complete details).

Works by Victor Hugo:

Laffont Œuvres complètes (Éditions Robert Laffont). References appear as

Laffont followed by the individual volume name and page number, for
example: Laffont, Roman I, p. 750.

CFL Œuvres complètes (Club Français du Livre, ed. by Massin). References

appear as CFL followed by the volume number, the year(s) associated
with the volume, and page number, for example: CFL, IV (1831-33)
1003.

Works by George Sand:

LR Lélia (Édition Garnier, ed. by Reboul)

HV Histoire de ma vie (in Œuvres autobiographiques). References appear

as HV followed by the volume number and page number, for example:
HV, I, 316.

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 Contents

Introduction................................................................................................................................ 1

Hugo, Sand, and the Early July Monarchy .............................................................................. 11

Hugo’s Claude Frollo .............................................................................................................. 22

Enforced celibacy and unrequited love: a double anankè.................................................... 22

The spiritual failings of the institutional Church ................................................................. 31

Priest as victim and villain: narrative framing ..................................................................... 35

Sand’s Magnus......................................................................................................................... 41

Romantic concerns and criticism of the institutional Church .............................................. 41

The challenge of an unconventional woman ....................................................................... 45

Priest as representative and victim of the Church: reader reaction ...................................... 51

Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 58

Bibliography ............................................................................................................................ 65

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 Introduction

The situation of the priest who falls in love provides a singularly fascinating and powerful source
of drama for an author. As Zola observed in a review of Ernest Daudet’s Le Missionnaire (1869):

Le prêtre amoureux de la créature, se débattant dans les fièvres chaudes de la passion, sentant
son cœur se gonfler et faire éclater les vœux qui le lient, est un héros dont les luttes
poignantes et profondément humaines ont tenté bien des romanciers contemporains. 1

The Catholic priest’s conflict stems from his mandatory vow of celibacy, which requires him
to suppress natural physical desires as well as renounce the emotional intimacy and support
offered by a relationship with a partner.2 The priest who succumbs to his forbidden desires not
only faces the censure of the Church and society if he transgresses, but also betrays his vows to
God and risks eternal damnation. The priest believes that he is sacrificing his immortal soul in
exchange for earthly love; for the curé in Joseph Doucet’s Les Tentations d’un curé de campagne
(1863) this is even a perverse source of pride:

D’autres peuvent sacrifier le repos de leur vie; moi, j’avais une éternité à donner […], cette
grâce dont j’abuse a mis dans mon attachement l’élément de l’infini. Je ne suis pas un simple
mortel obéissant aveuglement au penchant de sa nature; je suis un ange révolté…3

Thus the author who chooses a priest character as a participant in a love affair has at his creative
disposal not just the standard emotional conflicts inherent in romantic drama but also man’s
universal struggle between the earthly and the spiritual.4 The priest in love experiences this
fundamental human conflict in its purest form since he is expected to continually deny his
corporeal side from the moment of his ordination until death.
In his role as representative of the Catholic Church, the priest-in-love character also provides
an opportunity for an author to express his views on Catholicism. Throughout the nineteenth
century, the Catholic Church played a central role in French society, political life and education.
However, it was continually struggling to restore and maintain the influence and position that it
had lost during the French Revolution, and its links to reactionary regimes put it in conflict with
the turbulent but inexorable movement of the nation towards republicanism during the 1800s.

1
Émile Zola, Le Gaulois, 3 Feb. 1869, p. 3.
2
Yves Rauguin, a Catholic priest, offers insights on the experience and challenge of celibacy in Celibacy
for our Times, trans. by Mary Humbert Kennedy (Wheathampstead, Hertfordshire: Anthony Clarke, 1990);
for a short history of priestly celibacy see Thomas O’Loughlin, ‘Celibacy in the Catholic Church: A Brief
History’, History Ireland 41 (Winter 1995), 41-46.
3
Joseph Doucet, Les Tentations d’un curé de campagne, 2nd edn (Paris: Ballay, 1864), p. 261.
4
Here and throughout the text, the use of masculine personal pronouns to refer to the author or reader is
designed to avoid cumbersome use of expressions such as ‘his/her’ and denotes both male and female
authors/readers.

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This conflict was replicated within the Church itself where conservative elements clashed with
reformers such as Abbé Félicité de Lamennais who wanted to reconcile Catholicism with a
contemporary spirit of social change and liberty. The spiritual and moral authority of the
institutional Catholic Church was undoubtedly under question. In such a charged atmosphere, an
author’s portrayal of the priest-in-love’s dilemma could not fail to be interpreted as carrying a
message for or against the Church. In his analysis of works by authors from Stendhal to Anatole
France, Joseph N. Moody demonstrates that the priest character became an almost mythic
anticlerical symbol in nineteenth-century political battles fought over the Church’s role in public
and private life.5 Jean-Marie Vianney (1786-1859), the Curé d’Ars and patron saint of parish
priests, is said to have observed: ‘Quand on veut détruire la religion, on commence par attaquer
les prêtres’.6 Indeed this was the approach taken by authors of anti-Catholic literature throughout
the century that portrayed priests engaging in sexual behaviour.7 But even when no anticlerical
propaganda was intended, a writer offered a challenge to the Church and its celibacy rule simply
by portraying a priest in love with a woman, often resulting in censure or even placement of his
work on the Catholic Church’s index of forbidden books. Such was the significance of the priest
character as religious and political commentary that Lamartine felt it necessary to state explicitly
in prefaces to Jocelyn (1836) that he did not intentionally incorporate any anti-celibacy or anti-
religious message into his ‘ouvrage de poésie pure’ (Jocelyn was nonetheless placed on the Index
Librorum Prohibitorum).8 The figure of le prêtre amoureux in nineteenth-century French
literature was thus inextricably linked to larger religious and political controversies in the minds
of both authors and readers, and any consideration of this figure should in turn involve both the
character’s dramatic role and his symbolic value.
Almost all French writers of note of the century, as well as numerous authors of minor or
‘popular’ fiction, have produced a work that incorporates a religious figure in an amorous

5
Joseph N. Moody, The Church as Enemy: Anticlericalism in Nineteenth Century French Literature
(Washington, DC: Corpus Books, 1968).
6
Albert Monnin, Esprit du curé d’Ars, 4th edn (Paris: C. Douniol, 1864), p. 119.
7
For an overview of anticlerical fictional portrayals of transgressing priests in early part of century, see
Henri Guillemin, Le Jocelyn de Lamartine (Geneva: Slatkine, 1967), pp. 495-97; for portrayals in the
1870s to 1880s, see Pierre Ouvard, Zola et le prêtre (Paris: Beauchesne, 1986), p. 181, note 97. For details
of anticlerical depictions of confessors as seducers in the second half of the century, see Alain Corbin,
‘Backstage’, in A History of Private Life: From the Fires of Revolution to the Great War, ed. by Michelle
Perrot and trans. by Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1990), pp. 457-668 (pp. 556-
558).
8
Alphonse de Lamartine, ‘Postscriptum’ in Jocelyn. Épisode: journal trouvé chez un curé de village, 4th
edn (Paris: Charles Gosselyn and Furne, 1836), p. 22. See also ‘Avertissement’, pp. 17-18.

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encounter, whether a priest in love or a priest as the object of love.9 One is struck by not only the
frequency with which le prêtre amoureux appears throughout nineteenth-century French
literature, but also the sheer diversity of his representation. Portrayed are a fascinating array of
priest types: for example, the repressed priest (or monk) struggling with forbidden desire such as
Hugo’s Claude Frollo (Notre-Dame de Paris, 1831), Sand’s Magnus (Lélia, 1833), Gautier’s
Romuald (La Morte amoureuse, 1836), and Anatole France’s Paphnuce (Thaïs, 1890); the self-
sacrificing priest who manages to renounce his desires, featured in Sainte-Beuve’s Volupté
(1835) and Nodier’s Franciscus Columna (1844); the priest who enters the priesthood out of a
disappointment in love as in Mérimée’s L’Abbé Aubain (1846); and the unattainable priest who is
a focus of obsessive love on the part of the woman as in Renan’s Broyeur de lin (1884) or Barbey
d’Aurevilly’s L’Ensorcelée (1854).10 All of these works are linked by the intensity of the
portrayal of the situation and its tragic consequences. There are very few scenarios in which the
woman and priest end up united in nineteenth-century French literature.11 Almost invariably, the
outcome of the priest’s situation is death or destruction for the priest, the love object, or both. 12
The irresolvable conflict expressed by these intense representations and their violent or fatal
outcomes has its roots in the social, sexual, religious and political tensions of the nineteenth
century in France and offers great richness for analysis. The public’s enduring fascination with

9
For an overview of priest characters in French literature of the nineteenth century and beyond, and a list
of authors who have treated the subject, see J.-L. Prévost, Le Prêtre, ce héros de roman (d’Atala aux
Thibault), 2nd edn, (Paris: Téqui, 1953); however, I note that his overview does not focus on the priest-in-
love and is far from exhaustive in this regard.
10
While the situation of the priest in love with a man is not yet as directly portrayed in nineteenth-century
texts as in modern novels or films, Didier Godard suggests that this theme can be discerned in Zola’s La
Conquête de Plassans (albeit mainly as anticlerical commentary): ‘Emile Zola et la sexualité des prêtres:
l’homosexualité du clergé dans La Conquête de Plassans’, 11 March 2010, Suite101.fr
<http://19esiecle.suite101.fr/article.cfm/emile-zola-et-la-sexualite-des-pretres#ixzz18Bm1RsUj> [accessed
19 April 2012].
11
In Balzac’s Le Vicaire des Ardennes (1822), the priest manages to obtain a dispensation to leave the
priesthood after he has secretly married, but his beloved dies soon after; in a few other works such as
Jocelyn and Nodier’s Franciscus Columna, it is suggested that the lovers will be reunited after death.
12
The priest’s emotional conflict is often portrayed as inducing such violent physical symptoms that it may
even lead to death. But even for literary priests who do not reciprocate the passionate love that they inspire
in women (Barbey d’Aurevilly’s Croix-Jugan in L’Ensorcelée and Zola’s Faujas in La Conquête de
Plassans), or for those who ‘sin’ with a woman without feeling internal spiritual conflict (Stendhal’s
seminarist Julien Sorel in Le Rouge et le Noir and Barbey d’Aurevilly’s Sombreval in Un prêtre marié), it
is their interactions with the women who love them that are ultimately the cause of the characters’ downfall
and destruction.

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this figure, both in France and internationally, illustrates the timelessness of the priest-in-love’s
conflict as an exploration of the tension between man and his desires.13
However, considering the recurrence of le prêtre amoureux as a theme in nineteenth-century
French literature, and its continuing relevance today as a source of inspiration for authors, it is
surprising that previous studies on the priest character in the French novel do not focus on a priest
who is torn between his vows and love (or desire). There are several early studies from the first
part of the twentieth century that document and discuss priest characters in nineteenth-century
French literature, and the priest who is in love or loved appears in these studies as a subset of the
priest type.14 These studies are mainly overviews in which the authors identify trends in literary
portrayals of the clergy during the period, categorize types which may include the tempted priest,
and cite nineteenth-century works in which priest characters appear. The study that treats the
priest-in-love topic most specifically is Abbé Sevin’s Le Célibat du prêtre dans la poésie et le
roman; however, the author’s main intention is to present a vigorous defence of priestly celibacy.
A similar pro-Catholic focus colours the critical analyses of most of these early studies, some
written by priests (Paul Franche and Théodore Delmont) or for Catholic publications (J.-L.
Prévost). The studies are concerned mainly with whether or not the author has captured the true
ecclesiastical spirit; Franche speaks for many of these critics when he argues that Realist,
Naturalist and free-thinking (‘libre penseur’) writers fail in their depiction of a priest character
because they lack the faith to comprehend the priest’s divine nature.15 Portrayals of a
transgressing priest in love that emphasize human weakness are by and large dismissed by these
studies as an attempt by anticlerical writers to sully the image of the priest, thus limiting the
studies’ usefulness as in-depth and impartial explorations of literary representations of this
character. In his 1922 study, Ray P. Bowen stands out in attempting to avoid religious bias, and
states his intention of approaching the priest solely as a theme in literature. His overview is brief
but perceptive, and he concludes that of all the priest characters such as the ‘wicked priest’ of the

13
Twentieth-century French and English portrayals include Béatrix Beck’s Prix Goncourt winner Léon
Morin, prêtre (1952), Paul Reid’s Monk Dawson (1969), priest author Andrew Greeley’s Cardinal Sins
(1981), and most famously, Colleen McCullough’s international 1977 success, The Thorn Birds. Modern
screen treatments of the priest in love include original films such as Priest (Dir. Antonia Bird, 1994) as
well as adaptations of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels such as Carlos Carrera’s El Crimen del
Padre Amaro (2002) and Dominik Moll’s Le Moine (2010).
14
Paul Franche, Le Prêtre dans le roman français (Paris: Perrin, 1902); (Abbé) Théodore Delmont, ‘Le
Prêtre dans la littérature du XIXe siècle’, La Revue de Lille, 9 (Nov. 1904): 44-82, (Jan. 1905): 227-66,
(Feb. 1905): 324-42, (March 1905): 431-65, (April 1905): 481-534; E. Charles-Brun, ‘Le Prêtre dans le
roman contemporain’, in Le Roman social en France au XIX e siècle (Paris: V. Giard & E. Brière, 1910),
pp. 189-224; Ray P. Bowen, ‘An Analysis of the Priest Genre in the Modern French Novel’, PMLA 37: 4
(Dec. 1922): 722-34; (Abbé) André Sevin, Le Célibat du prêtre dans la poésie et le roman (Paris: Enault,
1937); J.-L. Prévost (1953).
15
Franche, pp. 13-16.

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Romantic period or the ‘good and devout priest’ of the second half of the century, those of ‘prime
importance’ and interest from a dramatic standpoint are priests who are unsuited to the priesthood
and undergo an agonizing soul struggle.16 He discusses several texts in which this struggle is
expressed in forbidden desire for a woman (Jocelyn, Zola’s La Faute de l’abbé Mouret, and
Marcel Prévost’s Le Scorpion).
More recent critical attention to the figure of the priest in French literature has been extremely
limited, concentrating on literature of the latter part of the 1800s and beyond, and we still find no
studies that focus exclusively on the priest in love.17 Other researchers have centred on the
general figure of the priest character in works of individual authors. In his study of Lamartine’s
Jocelyn, Henri Guillemin considers the character of Jocelyn as part of a tradition of literary
priests in love, and includes a detailed listing of works featuring a prêtre amoureux for the period
1800-1836 by popular and noted authors.18 He identifies two types of treatments of the priest in
love during this period, one emphasizing carnal desire and the other elevating the portrayal by
focussing on the priest’s emotional and spiritual conflict. Studies have also been carried out on
the priest character in Balzac, Barbey d’Aurevilly and Zola,19 but only Zola’s La Faute de l’abbé
Mouret portrays a priest who is experiencing conflict due to his love for a woman, and is
analysed in this context by Ouvrard.20 Recent studies by Roger Bellet and Jean Ygaunin
investigate encounters between le prêtre and la femme in literature of the nineteenth century.
However, these do not focus specifically on interactions forbidden by the celibacy vow and are
more general in their range across all types of relationships (such as, for example,

16
Bowen, pp. 723-24.
17
Cécile Cartier, ‘Le Prêtre dans le roman naturaliste’ (unpublished thesis, Dijon, France, 1988); ‘Thème
2008-2009: Le Prêtre dans la littérature’, Les Conférences du roseau d’or, Nov. 2008 - June 2009, Paris
<http://roseaudor.free.fr/rubrique.php3?id_rubrique=21> [accessed 19 April 2012].
18
Guillemin, pp. 494-502.
19
Edmond Biré, ‘Le Prêtre dans les romans de Balzac’, in Chateaubriand, Victor Hugo, H. de
Balzac (Lyon: Vitte, 1907), pp. 261-73; R.-L. Doyon, ‘Les Prêtres mariés ou non dans le roman et dans
l’histoire: les antécédents du Prêtre marié de Barbey d’Aurevilly, Les Livrets du Mandarin, 1 (May 1936),
1-26; Philippe Berthier, ‘Théologie et poétique: le prêtre dans les romans de Barbey d’Aurevilly’, in
Romantisme et religion: théologie des théologiens et théologie des écrivains (Paris: Presses Universitaires
de France, 1980), pp. 427-37; Josette Soutet, La Figure du prêtre dans l’œuvre romanesque de Barbey
d’Aurevilly (Bern: P. Lang, 2004); Anny Detalle, ‘La Problématique du défroqué’, Revue des lettres
modernes, 726-30 (1985), 105-109 (on Barbey d’Aurevilly’s Un prêtre marié); Pierre Ouvrard, Zola et le
prêtre (Paris: Beauchesne, 1986); Maria Watroba, ‘Le Prêtre, la Femme, la Famille: La Conquête de
Plassans’, in L’Écriture du féminin chez Zola et dans la fiction naturaliste, ed. by Anna Gural-Migdal
(Bern: Peter Lang, 2000), pp. 185-204.
20
Ouvrard, pp. 64-82.

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confessor/penitent).21 Ygaunin’s La Femme et Le Prêtre, while sound in the descriptions of the
novels’ plots which constitute the bulk of his study, devotes little attention to the first half of the
century, and offers classification and overview of types of priest/woman encounters rather than
in-depth analysis with critical references.
The lack of critical attention to the priest in love as a literary character suggests that this
figure’s function as a symbol for religious commentary has perhaps overshadowed its dramatic
role and its importance as a device for authors to explore universal human struggles.
Consequently, this study will focus on both of these aspects in two works from the July
Monarchy of the early 1830s: Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) and George Sand’s
Lélia (1833).22 Hugo’s Claude Frollo and Sand’s Magnus are both Catholic priests whose
physical desires drive them to madness and destruction of the woman they love. There are several
reasons why I have chosen these two novels as a first step in filling the gap in scholarship on le
prêtre amoureux. Firstly, Frollo and Magnus in particular merit closer study because the 1830s
have received far less attention in critical analyses and overviews of priest characters than the
latter part of the century. It is Jocelyn that is the main focus in studies of the priest character in
Romantic literature; Claude Frollo and Magnus are dismissed or passed over as over-heated, one-
dimensional figments of the Romantic imagination or reflections of the authors’ anticlericalism. 23
In Yguanin’s 1993 study, Frollo and Magnus are not even mentioned – a surprising oversight,
considering these characters’ importance as part of a popular Gothic tradition of priest characters
in the early 1800s and beyond, and the influence that their depictions had on those of later
writers. Even Zola, who considered le prêtre amoureux to be ‘un fort beau sujet de drame’ that
inspired his La Faute de l’abbé Mouret and other novels by his contemporaries in the 1860s to
1880s, seems to have overlooked the relevance of this character as a source of human interest to
previous generations of writers: ‘À vrai dire, cette grande figure de la chair révoltée et combattue
a été jusqu’ici pauvrement traitée.’24

21
Roger Bellet, ‘La Femme et le Prêtre dans la littérature de la deuxième moitié du XIX e siècle’, in Le
Populaire à l’ombre des clochers, ed. by Antoine Court (Saint-Etienne, France: Publications de
l’Université de Saint-Etienne, 1997), pp. 11-18, and ‘Le Confesseur, la Pénitente, le Confessionnal’, in
Écrits et expression populaires, ed. by Mireille Piarotas (Saint-Etienne, France: Publications de l’Université
de Saint-Etienne, 1998), pp. 77-82; Jean Ygaunin, La Femme et le Prêtre: thème littéraire
(Paris: A.-G. Nizet, 1993).
22
Sand published a second version of Lélia in 1839, amending the novel to reflect changes in her outlook
subsequent to the first 1833 publication. However, since the revised novel downplays Magnus’s role, and
no longer reflects Sand’s perspective at the time of writing in 1833, I will focus on the original.
23
Bowen, p. 722; Delmont, pp. 59-61; Franche, pp. 50-52; Moody, pp. 95, 105; Prévost, p. 15.
24
Zola continues: ‘Les écrivains qui l’ont mise en œuvre en ont fait une arme pour ou contre le
catholicisme: selon moi, il faudrait l’étudier, l’analyser sans parti pris, comme un cas humain d’un curieux

6
 Yet we could expect that the priest-in-love characters of such noted authors as Hugo and Sand
would be fruitful subjects for analysis. Indeed, in the case of Claude Frollo, modern critical
studies of Notre-Dame de Paris, which approach the novel from different perspectives, reveal
complexity and depth in his character.25 Magnus as a literary character has received less critical
attention than Frollo, no doubt partially because he has a more minor role in Lélia and because
the novel itself is now largely unknown to the general public (although it caused a sensation
when published).26 But more recently, renewed interest by critics in Sand has included Magnus
on its periphery, revealing the character’s importance as an embodiment of Sand’s criticism of
the Catholic Church and what she saw as its objectification of women.27 However, a thorough
study evaluating Magnus as a character suffering a human dilemma rather than as an agent in
Lélia’s story is still lacking. Thus there is much scope for a focus on these two Romantic texts in
their representations of the priest in love, particularly an analysis that considers the authors’ use
of this character for his dramatic potential as well as his role as a vehicle for criticism of the
Church. This investigation will demonstrate le prêtre amoureux’s utility and versatility in both of
these closely-entwined roles.
Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, these novels are chosen since it was in the Romantic
period that the priest-in-love’s potential as a dramatic character was first fully recognized and
exploited in fiction, particularly in the emerging form of the novel.28 The Romantics’
development of the priest-in-love’s dramatic function reflected a sharpening focus on the part of
novelists on the role of character, particularly as a site of conflict where ethical and moral issues

intérêt’ (p. 3). In 1869, Zola also writes: ‘Le prêtre amoureux n’a jamais, selon moi, été étudié
humainement’ (cited in Ouvrard, p. 65).
25
See Richard Grant, The Perilous Quest: Image, Myth and Prophecy in the Narratives of Victor Hugo
(Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 1968), pp. 46-72; Victor Brombert, Victor Hugo and the Visionary
Novel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), pp. 49-85; Kathryn M. Grossman, The Early
Novels of Victor Hugo: Towards a Poetic of Harmony (Geneva: Droz, 1986), pp. 159-208; Rachel Killick,
Victor Hugo: Notre-Dame de Paris (Glasgow: University of Glasgow French and German Publications,
1994), pp. 33-34, 52-57; Pierre Laforgue, Hugo more erotico: l’amour, le sexe, le désir (Saint-Pierre-du-
Mont: Eurédit, 2002) pp. 83-103; Isabel Roche, Character and Meaning in the Novels of Victor Hugo
(West Lafayette, IN: Purdue UP, 2007), pp. 83-91; Bradley Stephens, Victor Hugo, Jean-Paul Sartre, and
the Liability of Liberty (Oxford: Legenda, 2011), pp. 121-53.
26
See Pierre Reboul, ‘Accueil de Lélia en 1833’, in LR, pp. 585-96.
27
Eileen Boyd Sivert, ‘Lélia and Feminism’, Yale French Studies, 62 (1981), 45-66 (p. 51); Kristina
Wingård Vareille, Socialité, sexualité et les impasses de l’histoire: l’évolution de la thématique sandienne
d’Indiana (1832) à Mauprat (1837) (Uppsala: Almquist & Wiksell, 1987), pp. 159-62.
28
Franche, pp. 1-23; Ygaunin, p. 29. See also Caroline Juillot, who argues that Fra Antonio in Mérimée’s
drama Une femme est un diable (1825) represents a more modern, complex sensibility emerging from
Gothic and Enlightenment stereotypes of priest characterization (‘un héros romantique égaré dans une
comédie légère’), in ‘L’Inquisiteur nouveau est arrivé: Mérimée à la croisée des influences’, Cahiers
Mérimée, 3 (2011), 65-80 (p. 74).

7
could be explored as in the roman de l’individu.29 Romantics such as Hugo and Sand conceived
of man as a dual yet integrated ensemble of body and soul, earth-bound yet endowed by God with
a longing for an unattainable infinite. In his Préface de Cromwell (1827), Hugo expresses these
two sides of man, stemming from Christianity, as: ‘l’un périssable, l’autre immortel, l’un charnel,
l’autre éthéré, l’un enchaîné par les appétits, les besoins et les passions, l’autre emporté sur les
ailes de l’enthousiasme et de la rêverie’, and he asserts that the conflict between them is the basis
of all drama.30 The celibate Catholic priest in love, torn between the opposing forces of the carnal
and the spiritual, was an ideal site for these Romantic authors to explore the dual nature of man.
The priest’s struggle with enforced celibacy and the dogmatic aspects of Catholicism had
particular resonance for politically-engaged Romantic authors such as Hugo and Sand, who
championed the liberty of the individual to engage with these internal tensions rather than be
constrained by repressive institutions. Additionally, the extreme psychological intensity of the
priest-in-love’s situation, from which not even a Wertherian ‘noble’ escape through suicide is
possible due to the priest’s belief in damnation, was well-suited to Romantic writers who
preferred to explore emotion, passion and the unconscious over Enlightenment reason,
moderation and logic. Authors were moving away from the static, stereotypical types of classical
eighteenth-century literature towards a more modern and nuanced type of hero (or anti-hero) in
their works, and were attracted by the oppositions and complexities inherent in the situation of le
prêtre amoureux.
Finally, the two priest-in-love portraits by Hugo and Sand, published respectively in 1831 and
1833, are particularly suitable to be paired together in a study because they can be compared and
contrasted within the context of a particular historical period, the early July Monarchy. Hugo and
Sand were writers of the same generation (each twenty-nine in the year their novel was
published), both living in turbulent Paris in the aftermath of the July Revolution of 1830 and
reacting to the same socio-political events.31 Even more importantly, there are strong ideological
links between the two authors that call for their juxtaposition in this study. Both Hugo and Sand
are associated with a type of ‘social Romanticism’ that was characterized by a vigorous

29
D. G. Charlton, ‘Prose Fiction’, in The French Romantics I, ed. by D. G. Charlton (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 167-80.
30
Laffont, Critique, p. 16.
31
Although Hugo and Sand never met in person, they corresponded later in their lives. For details of their
epistolary relationship, see George Sand and Victor Hugo, Correspondance croisée, ed. by Danielle
Bahiaoui (Nîmes: HB Éditions, Arrêts sur lecture, 2004); see also Danièle Gasiglia-Laster, ‘George Sand et
Victor Hugo: Une amitié tardive’, presented at the Bibliothèque de Saint-Amand-Montrond, 16 March
2010, to appear in L’Écho Hugo, 11 (2012).

8
commitment to social and humanitarian issues in their works and lives.32 Compared to other
Romantics such as Lamartine, Musset and Gautier, it was these two writers who most strongly
assumed the responsibility of guiding society towards the accomplishment of ‘la révolution
humaine’ through their writings.33 Their sense of a social mission was accompanied by a shared
disillusionment with the Catholic Church. In addition to parallels arising from their similar ethos,
interesting contrasts are also provided by Hugo’s and Sand’s different treatment of gender and
dissimilar personal concerns at the time of writing. The different facets of the priest’s
psychological conflict that each author chooses to emphasize reflect an individual response to a
time of both personal and societal crisis in the aftermath of the July revolution of 1830.
Additionally, considered within the context of the priest-in-love as a literary device, portrayals of
both Frollo and Magnus feature distinctive aspects compared to other nineteenth-century
treatments that make them particularly intriguing to study. Unusually, Hugo enlarges and
complicates Frollo’s conflict with the theme of unrequited love, and Sand brings the rare
perspective of a woman writer to the priest character during a century that was strongly male-
dominated. However, while my main focus is on Notre-Dame de Paris and Lélia, narratives by
other authors and from other periods will continue to remain visible on the margins of my
discussion, given the potential insight and broader context that they provide into the priest-in-
love figure.34
I will frame my investigation of these priest-in-love characters in a background chapter that
briefly considers the factors that influenced their portrayals. These include relevant aspects of the
author’s personal situation and concerns at the time of writing, their religious beliefs and views
on the Catholic Church, and the literary, social, and political scene in the early 1830s. Evaluating
this context has particular urgency in this study, since the early July Monarchy was an extremely
turbulent period, not only for Hugo and Sand personally due to their evolving beliefs and difficult
personal circumstances, but also in society in the wake of the July Revolution. The influence of

32
See David Owen Evans, Social Romanticism in France: 1830-1848 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951) for
a consideration of Hugo’s and Sand’s important roles in the movement.
33
Hugo, cited in Karlheinrich Biermann, ‘George Sand et Victor Hugo: deux visions “parallèles” de la
Révolution’, in Le Siècle de George Sand, ed. by David A. Powell (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998), pp. 29-34
(p. 29).
34
A word is perhaps useful here to indicate why Frollo and particularly Magnus were chosen for study
over Julien Sorel in Stendhal’s well-known Le Rouge et le Noir or Jocelyn in Lamartine’s popular poem of
the period. Firstly, Sorel never formally takes a vow of celibacy, but more importantly, his choice of the
priesthood arises through his desire to rise in society rather than through any religious belief; thus he
experiences no conflict between body and soul and is not a true prêtre amoureux of the type I wish to
study. Jocelyn features a strong priest-in-love conflict, but as a poem, it is not easily compared with prose
works; I prefer to focus on the representation of the priest in the novel in light of the emergence of the
novel as the pre-eminent form of literature in nineteenth-century France.

9
the relatively orderly 1830 Revolution, whose replacement of Charles X’s regime with a
constitutional monarchy brought less change than anticipated, is perhaps less generally
recognized than the effects of the more bloody insurrections of 1789, 1848 and 1870/1, which led
to republics of varying duration.35 Yet such an landmark event would be expected to have marked
Hugo’s and Sand’s priest portrayals, even if the authors made political or social commentary only
indirectly by setting their novels in past eras (the medieval Paris of Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris)
or in an unspecified time and place (Sand’s Lélia).
The socio-historical and biographical context given in the introduction will be used to guide
my analysis of Hugo’s and Sand’s priest figures as I investigate both their dramatic role and their
role as religious commentary. Because these two literary functions of the priest in love are so
closely intertwined, each constantly touching upon and amplifying the other, it would not be
suitable to divide them into separate subjects for analysis of each in isolation. Rather, this study
will be grouped by author in two separate chapters that will follow the background chapter,
treating first Hugo’s Frollo (1831) and then Sand’s Magnus (1833). For each author, I will
analyse how the psychological portrait of le prêtre amoureux is raised from Gothic stereotype to
embody Romantic concerns and personal experience, as well as how it expresses the author’s
criticisms of the Catholic Church and their responses to 1830. Contrasts and parallels between the
two portrayals will emerge and be highlighted most strongly in the chapter on Magnus, revealing
the versatility of the priest-in-love character as a device for authors. In my conclusion, I step back
to view Hugo’s and Sand’s dark and intense depictions of the priest in love from a political and
historical perspective, evaluating how Frollo and Magnus reflect the authors’ responses to the
early July Monarchy. Finally, I consider how the insights gained from my approach urgently call
for a broadening of the scope of research on le prêtre amoureux to include works throughout the
nineteenth century.

35
Pamela M. Pilbeam notes that the 1830 revolution has been largely overlooked by academics and social
commentators (The 1830 French Revolution in France (London: Macmillan, 1991), p.1); as recently as
2011, Gabriel de Broglie observes that the July Days are still a neglected topic in comparison to other more
turbulent revolutions (La Monarchie de Juillet: 1830-1848 (Paris: Fayard, 2011), p. 9). James Smith Allen
similarly observes that the July Revolution’s impact on the Romantic movement is less recognised than
that of the 1789 Revolution, in Popular French Romanticism: Authors, Readers, and Books in the 19th
Century (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1981), p. 179.

10
 Hugo, Sand, and the Early July Monarchy

Although the novel was still a developing form in the 1830s, there was already a literary tradition
Hugo and Sand could draw upon.1 Both authors take as their starting point a repressed Catholic
priest driven to madness and murder by thwarted sexual desire in the Gothic vein of Ann
Radcliffe’s, E.T.A. Hoffmann’s and Matthew Lewis’ monks, and indeed the parallels between
Lewis’ Ambrosio (The Monk, 1796) and Hugo’s and Sand’s priests have been studied in detail.2
During the 1820s and 30s, readers’ and authors’ fascination with the Gothic ‘mad monk’ figure
was further intensified by a rising undercurrent of anticlericalism. Stifled under the political
repression of the Bourbon regime, it burst out in an excess of anticlerical attacks and riots in the
aftermath of the 1830 July Revolution.3 The initial laissez-faire attitude of Louis-Philippe’s new
government towards attacks on the Church, as well as governmental relaxation of literary
censorship, fostered a more permissive atmosphere for publication of portrayals of a criminal
priest (although both authors’ works would later be put on the index by the Church).4 Lurid
depictions of sex-crazed, demonic priests were very popular with readers, as shown by the
plethora of works on this theme during the 1820s to 1830s.5 Hugo and Sand were surely well
aware of the scandalous attraction of a transgressing priest-in-love character to the reading public,
particularly as they were writing these works at a time of their lives when they were under
considerable financial pressure.6 Other well-known writers of the Bourbon Restoration and early
July Monarchy such as Balzac, Merimée, and Gautier also capitalized on readers’ interest in such
characters, incorporating elements of the Gothic or criminal priest stereotype to create their own
variation of le prêtre amoureux. Thus Claude Frollo and Magnus formed part of a strong literary

1
Charlton, pp. 164-67.
2
Fernand Baldensperger, ‘Le Moine de Lewis dans la littérature française,’ Journal of Comparative
Literature 1 (1903): 201-219; for comparison of Ambrosio with Frollo only, see Isabelle Durand-Le Guern,
‘Notre-Dame de Paris ou l’intériorisation du gothique,’ Revue de littérature comparée, 334 (2010), 165-79
and Myriam Roman, Victor Hugo et le roman philosophique: du ‘drame dans les faits’ au ‘drame dans les
idées’ (Paris: Champion, 1999), p. 246.
3
Pilbeam, pp. 105-106. For discussion of the anticlerical view that priestly celibacy is contrary to nature
and thus inevitably results in violence and sexual crimes, see René Rémond, in L’Anticléricalisme en
France de 1815 à nos jours (Paris: Fayard, 1999), pp. 29-30.
4
David Coward, ‘Popular Fiction in the Nineteenth Century’, in The Cambridge Companion to the French
Novel: From 1800 to the Present, ed. by Timothy Unwin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997),
pp. 73-92 (p.77).
5
Guillemin, pp. 495-97.
6
Although in 1831 Sand referred disparagingly to contemporary novelist Kératry’s sensationalist depiction
of a priest who rapes a woman that he believes to be dead as ‘une donnée révoltante’ (HV, II, 149), she
nonetheless, like Hugo, caters to the popular taste for Gothic horror and the frénétique in her depiction of
priest-in-love Magnus.
11
tradition of priest characters driven mad by lust. This ran alongside, and in contrast to, a parallel
Romantic movement exemplified by Lamartine’s Jocelyn which emphasized self-sacrifice over
criminal passion.7
While not distancing themselves entirely from sensationalism and anticlericalism, both Hugo
and Sand use the convention of the Gothic priest/monk as a springboard for exploring Romantic
concerns. The character of the priest in love, torn between opposing forces of body and soul,
attracted these Romantic authors who saw the tension engendered by man’s duality as
fundamental to the human condition. In his Préface de Cromwell, Hugo articulated his belief that
man is double and that in life as in art, the whole is formed by the ensemble of the sublime with
the grotesque and the earthly with the spiritual. He asserted that all human drama was in essence
the constant battle between these opposing forces, ‘qui sont toujours en présence dans la vie, et
qui se disputent l’homme depuis le berceau jusqu’à la tombe’.8 Sand was no less interested in the
contradictions inherent in the human condition. She shared Hugo’s Romantic belief in man’s
duality, and in Lélia, the heroine expresses Sand’s conviction that unlike earth’s other creatures,
God has endowed man with a spiritual longing for an unattainable infinite. According to Lélia,
God’s message is one that emphasizes man’s inherent duality: ‘au-dessus de votre Éden terrestre,
vous chercherez toujours la flottante promesse d’un séjour meilleur. Allez, vous vous partagerez
la terre, mais vous désirerez le ciel’.9 The celibate priest who renounces the physical in order to
attempt a wholly spiritual existence (‘être ange’, as Sand’s Magnus characterizes the priestly state
[86]), was a fruitful site for these two Romantic authors to explore the tensions of man’s dual
nature, for they both believed that neither the body nor soul should be elevated over the other.
Hugo and Sand intensify their priests’ plights by characterizing them as sensual and passionate
men who are not naturally suited to the priesthood, and who rebel instinctively rather than
consciously against enforced celibacy. However, Frollo’s desire for Esmeralda and Magnus’s for
Lélia go beyond the lust of the Gothic monk of melodrama: it expresses their need for spiritual as
well as physical fulfilment, even if it never translates into an unselfish love for the woman. For,
in counterpart to their strong physical passions, Hugo and Sand infuse their priests-in-love with
an acute Romantic yearning for an impossible ideal that can never be realized. Sand would in fact

7
In Jocelyn-style priest-in-love portrayals, the intense suffering of the priest through renunciation of his
own desires often leads to his and the woman’s spiritual salvation (although the priest and/or woman may
still perish). For example, in Sainte-Beuve’s Volupté, Amaury, like Jocelyn, offers last rites to the woman
he loves; the monk in Nodier’s Franciscus Columna renounces profane for platonic love so that he can be
spiritually reunited with his lover after death; later in the century, the tradition of self-sacrificing love
continues as exemplified by Daudet’s Le Missionnaire, in which the priest manages to convert the woman
he loves to Catholicism. See also Guillemin, p. 497.
8
Laffont, Critique, p. 16.
9
George Sand, LR, p. 168; subsequent parenthetical references are to the 1833 version of Lélia in this
edition.
12
refer to Magnus’s ‘éternel appétit de l’impossible’ as a quality that she shared with her
character,10 while Frollo’s hopeless dreams of forming a happy couple with Esmeralda in an
orange grove lend an anguished poignancy to his situation.11 I will thus investigate how the
authors develop the psychological and dramatic potential of the priest’s battle against his carnal
desire, enlarging a tale of forbidden lust into a more universal consideration of what it is to be
human.
Although these priest-in-love characters have been dismissed as one-dimensional or as
anticlerical propaganda, their portrayals reveal surprisingly modern insight by these authors into
the effects of repression on the human psyche. Durand-Le Guern, in her comparison of Lewis’
Ambrosio with Frollo, considers how Hugo complicates Gothic stereotype by interiorising the
exaggerated Gothic horror aspects of Lewis’ novel into Frollo’s mental suffering.12 It is thus
crucial to analyse Hugo’s and Sand’s treatments of the psychological conflict caused by the
priests’ divided selves, which include feelings of alienation from humanity and from themselves,
contradictory impulses or views of the woman, violence against others as well as against their
own bodies, and madness.13 In particular, both authors use the cliché of the ‘mad monk’ for a
much deeper exploration of the loss of reason resulting from the priests’ emotional duress. Their
madness is manifested in striking and often elaborate visual hallucinations that I will explore on
two levels, both as a symptom of emotional disturbance and as translating a loss of spiritual
vision. Within the Romantic tradition of the period which privileged the expression of extreme
passion,14 the authors depict the priests’ conflict as inducing not only mental but also physical
manifestations. However, compared to representations of tormented Romantic heroes of the
period, Hugo’s and Sand’s priest portrayals overall possess a striking negativity with their
depictions of physical degeneration and bloody imagery.
For Hugo and Sand, fundamental to their Romantic ethos was the concept of freedom of the
individual, which included the liberty of a person to engage with the tension inherent in man’s
dual nature. This put them in opposition to dogmatic aspects of the Catholic Church such as
enforced celibacy. Furthermore, their representations of Magnus and Frollo challenged not only
Church dogma but an entire Catholic nineteenth-century mind-set. The Catholic Church of the
1830s, perhaps as a reactionary response to the anti-Church attacks and massacres of the French

10
Sketches and Hints, in Œuvres autobiographiques, II, 615.
11
Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris, in Laffont, Roman I, p. 750; subsequent parenthetical references are to
Notre-Dame de Paris in this edition of Hugo’s complete works.
12
Durand-Le Guern, pp. 165-79.
13
It is illustrative of these authors’ psychological insight that, as noted by Tony James in Dreams,
Creativity and Madness in Nineteenth Century France (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 69, they were
among the first authors to use the word ‘hallucination’ in French fiction when they employed it in Notre-
Dame de Paris and Lélia to characterize their priests.
14
Max Milner, Le Romantisme I: 1820-1843 (Paris: Arthaud, 1973), pp. 126-27.
13
Revolution and through hostility to a rising tide of modernisation, in general practised a harsh
school of Tridentine Catholicism. Indeed, Ralph Gibson calls the early nineteenth century in
France the ‘apotheosis’ of Counter-Reformation Catholicism.15 It was characterized by a rejection
of the material world and carried on a powerful Christian tradition of condemnation of
sexuality.16 Fundamentally hostile to the human body, the Church saw it as an enemy to be tamed
by mortification. In contrast, Hugo’s and Sand’s priests embody a challenge to the Tridentine
Catholic ethos of body-as-evil: is it impossible and false to renounce one’s physical side? Linked
to nineteenth-century Catholicism’s devaluation of the body was the traditional demonization of
woman as temptress, culminating in an exaggerated gynophobia among many members of the
priesthood.17 This attitude, which is incorporated into Magnus’s and Frollo’s mind-set, is attacked
by Hugo and Sand through portrayals of Esmeralda and Lélia that refute the seductress
stereotype. Both authors avoid the female characterizations of temptress or virginal victim of
Gothic melodrama, thus complicating the traditional tale of a tempted priest – although, as I will
discuss, it is Sand who most confounds expectation in her unusual portrayal of her autonomous
and intellectual heroine Lélia. Although my focus is primarily on the priest in love and his
conflict, the representation of the woman he desires has strong implications for how we view him
and his plight, and should be evaluated in this context.
Notwithstanding how Hugo’s and Sand’s enlargement of the psychological dimension of their
priest character arises from their similar Romantic outlooks, there are important differences in the
way each author develops the priest’s internal conflict and his dramatic role which are rooted in
their different personal perspectives at the time of writing. Both Hugo and Sand depict the love of
the priest as unrequited as well as forbidden; this is unusual in priest portrayals of noted
nineteenth-century authors and its larger significance will emerge in the conclusion of my study.
However, it was for Hugo that this theme had particular resonance. During the autumn of 1830,
while writing the novel, Hugo was undergoing a presumably frustrating period of enforced sexual
abstinence: his wife Adèle, having delivered their fifth child, made herself unavailable to her
husband, an ‘unusually vigorous young man of twenty-eight’, by banning him from the marital
bed.18 To add to the young writer’s emotional turmoil, in the autumn of 1830 his best friend
Sainte-Beuve confessed to Hugo that he was in love with Adèle. Jean-Marc Hovasse, Hugo’s
recent biographer, notes that Hugo would later describe Sainte-Beuve’s revelation as the most
painful of his life, and soon after, Hugo wrote one of his most powerful passages on Frollo’s

15
Ralph Gibson, A Social History of French Catholicism (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 15. For an analysis
of Tridentine Catholicism in France, see pp. 94-100; for the effect of the French Revolution on the
Church’s Tridentine outlook, see pp. 51-55.
16
Ibid., pp. 90-94.
17
Ibid., pp. 93, 102.
18
Brombert, p. 66.
14
emotional agony, the hallucinatory episode in Fièvre.19 Biographical readings of the novel by
Hovasse and others have established that Hugo drew on personal experience at the time of
writing for the characterization of Claude Frollo, particularly the strength of his emotional
portrayal.20 Hovasse claims that Hugo felt a special identification with this character: ‘c’est bien à
Claude Frollo que l’auteur donne le plus de lui-même ou de ce qu’il était’ and lists examples of
parallels and associations between character and author.21 In his treatment of le prêtre amoureux,
Hugo uses his personal experience of unrequited love and jealousy to amplify the dramatic
intensity and to enlarge the portrayal beyond an anti-celibacy message.
In Hugo’s life at the time of writing in 1830, it was not only his family circumstances and
friendships that were unsettled. His religious and political beliefs were in transition as well. His
early Catholic faith had almost faded; as he said himself in September 1830 in his Journal des
idées et des opinions d’un révolutionnaire de 1830: ‘Mon ancienne conviction royaliste-
catholique de 1820 s’est écroulée pièce à pièce depuis dix ans devant l’âge et l’expérience. Il en
reste pourtant encore quelque chose dans mon esprit, mais ce n’est qu’une religieuse et poétique
ruine’.22 Having rejected organized Catholic religion, his own personal faith in a God that would
be reached through poetry and love was however perhaps not yet fully formulated during the
writing of Notre-Dame de Paris. Certainly painful events in his personal life might have tested
Hugo’s belief in His benevolence during a time that he was rejecting established religion to form
his own concept of a divine power, and Hugo’s October 1830 entry in his journal conveys the
elusiveness of religious certainties: ‘L’église affirme, la raison nie. Entre le oui du prêtre et le non
de l’homme, il n’y a plus que Dieu qui puisse placer son mot’.23 On the political front, Hugo was
also evolving, like many Romantics, from early royalist to more liberal and leftward political
views. By the spring of 1830, Hugo was regularly linking Romanticism with such views by
defining it as ‘le libéralisme en littérature’ in his preface to Hernani.24 Thus, Hugo initially
welcomed the July Revolution, although it disrupted his writing of the novel only two days after
he had begun, causing him to move his family from Paris to a place of safety and delaying the
resumption of writing to September. He lauded the July Days in his Ode à la jeune France,25 and
in September 1830 referred to ‘notre belle révolution d’ordre et de liberté’ as embodying his own

19
Jean-Marc Hovasse, Victor Hugo avant l’exil: 1802-51 (Paris: Fayard, 2001), p. 492.
20
Killick, p. 56; Brombert, p. 66,
21
Hovasse, pp. 485-86. See also Brombert, pp. 62-63.
22
Laffont, Critique, p. 122.
23
Ibid., p. 126.
24
Laffont, Théâtre I, p. 538.
25
Arnaud Laster, Pleins feux sur Victor Hugo (Paris: Comédie-française, 1981), p. 137. For a summary of
the evolution of Hugo’s political beliefs throughout the July Monarchy, see pp. 137-140.
15
and other Romantics’ belief in freedom of the individual.26 But within a few months, one can
discern signs of disillusionment with the new July Monarchy in Hugo, who soon felt that the
government was not proceeding boldly enough on the path to liberty.27 Indeed, it would soon
become clear that the new government was not in tune with the spirit of liberty and socially-
minded Romanticism, and in Les Misérables, Hugo would look back upon the July Days as ‘une
révolution avortée’.28 However, it is important to recognize that although Hugo’s beliefs were
evolving from royalist to republican, there still remained hesitations that kept him from a
wholehearted embrace of revolution and the people’s readiness to assume power (‘Ne demandez
pas de droits pour le peuple tant que le peuple demandera des têtes’).29 These are reflected in the
nuances and indeed occasional ambivalences in Notre-Dame de Paris’s representation of
revolution and its agents that would become characteristic throughout his life’s works.30 These
religious uncertainties and political concerns are arguably reflected in Claude Frollo, who often
seems to the reader almost gratuitously crushed, not just by inescapable social constraint but, as
we will see, by the unfairness of fate and the apparent absence of a fair or loving God.
While Hugo’s personal anguish led him to explore unrequited love and the concept of the
tragic anti-hero, the early 1830s were an extremely unsettled time in Sand’s life as well. Her
romantic life was in turmoil: she had left her husband to live with Jules Sandeau in Paris in
January 1831; by late spring of 1833 she had broken with Sandeau, experienced a disastrous and
humiliating affair with Mérimée, and had not yet fallen in love with Musset. It is not
unreasonable to imagine that such turbulence in her emotional life would have coloured her
portrayal of Magnus’s desire as impossibly unrequited. Disillusioned with love (‘Mon cœur a
vieilli de vingt ans et rien dans la vie ne me sourit plus’),31 Sand was unable to find any comfort
in Catholicism. After an intense Catholic phase in her early youth, already at seventeen she had
rejected institutional Catholicism: ‘j’avais brisé à mon insu, mais irrévocablement, avec toutes ses

26
CFL, IV (1831-33) 1003. Letter to Lamennais, 7 Sept. 1830.
27
Hugo wrote in a letter to Adolphe Saint-Valry on 8 September 1830: ‘Je me tiens, mon cher ami, fort à
l’écart du ministère dont la marche me paraît molle et que je voudrais plus hardi dans la voie de la liberté’
(CFL, IV (1831-33) 1005). Hugo also disapprovingly noted the rush to secure places in the new government
(Journal des idées et des opinions d’un révolutionnaire de 1830, in Laffont, Critique, p. 120).
28
Laffont, Roman II, p. 756. Hugo also concludes that the forward progress represented by the July Days
was halted by bourgeois interests: ‘1830 est une révolution arrêtée à mi-côte. Moitié de progrès; quasi-
droit. […] Qui arrête les révolutions à mi-côte? La bourgeoisie’, p. 656.
29
Hugo, Journal […] d’un révolutionnaire de 1830, in Laffont, Critique, p. 131.
30
Jeffrey Spires, ‘Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris: The Politics and Poetics of Transition,’ Dalhousie
French Studies, 61 (Winter 2002), 39-48 (p. 47); Laurence M. Porter, Victor Hugo (New York: Twayne,
1999), pp. 70-71.
31
Sand, Correspondance, ed. by Georges Lubin, 25 vols (Paris: Garnier, 1964-91), II (1832-1835) 313.
Letter to François Rollinat, 20 May 1833.
16
conséquences sociales et politiques. L’esprit de l’Église n’était plus en moi’.32 Like Hugo, she felt
that its doctrines restricted man’s ability to find God. There was disillusionment in her reaction to
the political scene as well. By July 1830, with political views already far more liberal than Hugo
(she declared herself ‘républicaine’ in September of 1830), Sand enthusiastically welcomed the
Revolution from afar at the family home in Nohant.33 In Paris in 1831, however, Sand would
soon be disappointed by the failure of the new government to live up to its promises; she later
spoke of it as: ‘La révolution de juillet tombée dans le ruisseau’.34 Disillusionment with the
government led her to become disgusted with all political parties, as she jotted down in a letter in
July 1831: ‘Moi je hais tous les hommes, rois et républicains, absolutistes, prétendus modérés je
les confonds tous dans mon mépris et dans mon aversion’.35 Her despair extended to include all
of humanity, and she temporarily lost her faith in progress: ‘Vous croyez au progrès. […] Moi je
n’espère plus’.36 In her Histoire de ma vie, Sand describes her reaction to the events she
experienced in Paris in the early 1830s:

La République rêvée en juillet aboutissait aux massacres de Varsovie et à l’holocauste du

cloître Saint-Merry. Le choléra venait de décimer le monde. Le saint-simonisme, qui avait
donné aux imaginations un moment d’élan, était frappé de persécution et avortait, sans avoir
tranché la grande question de l’amour. […] Je restais donc seule avec mon rêve de la Divinité
toute-puissante, mais non plus tout amour, puisqu’elle abandonnait la race humaine à sa
propre perversité ou à sa propre démence. 37

Sand’s profound crisis of uncertainty on all fronts – political and religious, love, friendship, even
self-esteem – reached its summit in spring of 1833, during her editing of Lélia.38 The following
year, Sand would describe her 1833 Lélia as ‘un cri de douleur, un mauvais rêve’39, and spoke of
how it reflected her spiritual doubts and despair.40 Like Hugo, she used her personal emotion and
experience in her creation of her priest-in-love character, infusing Magnus’s painful crisis of
belief with the intensity of her own soul struggles. In this interpretation, I am guided by her later
assertion that Magnus’s powerful conflict between religious belief and desire had parallels with

32
HV, I, 1053.
33
Cited in Wingård, p. 14. For a discussion of Sand’s reaction to political events during 1830-32, see pp.
14-20.
34
Correspondance, II (1832-1835) 15. Letter to Charles Meure, 27 January 1832.
35
Ibid., I (1812-1831) 917. Letter to Jules Boucoiran, 17 July 1831.
36
Ibid., II (1832-1835) 157. Letter to Émile Paultre, 3 September 1832.
37
HV, II, 195-96.
38
See Wingård, pp. 124-39, for an analysis of the factors contributing to Sand’s crisis; see also Bernard
Hamon, George Sand face aux églises (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2005), p. 24.
39
Correspondance, II (1832-1835) 741. Letter to Marie Talon, 10 November 1834.
40
HV, II, 196-203; see also Sand’s ‘Préface de 1839’, in LR, pp. 351-55.
17
her past and present experiences: ‘J’ai eu aussi des jours de dévotion peureuse, de désir
passionné, de combat violent et d’austérité timorée où j’ai été Magnus […].’41
Magnus is further enlarged as a character in a significant and fascinating way by Sand that
reflects her situation as a woman writer struggling against social constraints in the 1830s. While
both these young Romantic writers were trying to establish new voices for a changing society in a
challenge to the old authority of the Church, Sand experienced the additional difficulty of making
her female voice heard in a society where women did not occupy an equal place.42 As Hugo was
triumphing with Hernani and Notre-Dame de Paris, in 1831 Sand was told by a potential editor
‘ne faites pas de livres, faites des enfants’, an attitude characteristic of the male-dominated
society of the period.43 By the time she was writing Lélia in 1833, Sand had already addressed
‘female’ societal issues such as forced marriages in Indiana and Valentine, and in Lélia, Sand
continued to express her concerns through her portrayal of Lélia as an autonomous, challenging
woman who resists a subservient role. Already as a very young woman, Sand showed signs of
refusal to accept the male authority of the Catholic clergy. At seventeen, young Aurore Dupin
(not yet George Sand) clashed with the patriarchal Church when she boldly entered into an
argument with an archbishop about contradictions in Catholic doctrine; the bishop reacted by
burning and mutilating books in her family library to stop the young girl from reading them.44
Sand then challenged a confessor who took it upon himself to ask prurient questions about her
relationship with a young man,45 resisting the priest’s attempt to exert a moral authority over
her.46 It is thus imperative to explore how these urgent concerns are expressed through Sand’s

41
Sketches and Hints, in Œuvres autobiographiques, II, 615.
42
For Sand’s experience of narrative creation in nineteenth-century France as a male preserve, see Nigel
Harkness, in Men of Their Words: The Poetics of Masculinity in George Sand’s Fiction (London: Legenda,
2007), pp. 1-14 and pp. 40-42.
43
HV, II, p. 150. The following year, Sand’s entrance onto the literary scene with Indiana did not go
unnoticed by Hugo, according to Sand’s humorous, second-hand account of Hugo’s professional rivalry:
‘Jules Janin dit […] qu’Indiana est le plus beau livre de mœurs de notre époque. Le lendemain Victor Hugo
arrive chez lui bouffi de colère. “Comment, polisson, dit-il, tu prétends qu’Indiana est le meilleur des
livres? Et le mien donc? Prends-tu Notre-Dame de Paris pour une p…?”’ (Correspondance, II (1832-35)
119-20).
44
Sand, HV, I, pp. 1070-72 .
45
Ibid., pp. 1072-74. Sand describes her outrage at her confessor’s presumption: ‘Toute la pureté de mon
être se révoltait contre une question indiscrète, imprudente, et selon moi, étrangère à la religion’ (p. 1073).
46
Soon after writing Lélia, Sand’s interest in female equality would bring her into conflict with another
priest, Lamennais. When he forbade her to write about divorce in her Lettres à Marcie (1837), Sand was
confronted with the misogyny of this social reformer who was nonetheless a traditionalist on a woman’s
role in society. Harkness, in his analysis ‘Sand, Lamennais et le féminisme: le cas des Lettres à Marcie’, in
Le Siècle de George Sand, ed. by David Powell (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998), pp. 185-92, cites from a letter
Sand wrote that shows how she suffered from Lamennais’s attitude: ‘[Lamennais] me demandait de la
18
portrayal of Magnus. Her depiction of the priest and his relationship with Lélia presents a
challenge not only to the spiritual authority of the institutional Church, but also to the patriarchal
culture on which the Catholic Church of the 1830s rested.
In their role as representatives of the Catholic Church, Frollo and Magnus embody
commentary on the Church as a social institution in addition to their dramatic role. Indeed, Sand
refers to her priest-in-love character as ‘le débris d’un clergé corrompu ou abruti’,47 and Hugo
portrays Frollo as the archdeacon of the Notre-Dame cathedral, a high-ranking figure in the
power structure of the medieval Church and linked to the corrupt and repressive government of
Louis XI. The year 1830 was a transition point for young, increasingly politically-leftist
Romantics such as Hugo and Sand, who had to decide where the Church, linked to repressive
regimes, stood in relation to the growing trend towards democracy. They concluded that it placed
a restricting force on the autonomy of the human spirit, and was in opposition to republican ideals
of liberté, égalité and fraternité that Hugo and Sand were increasingly embracing. 48 In a letter to
Lamennais in September 1830, Hugo identifies the reason for the Catholic Church’s downfall as
its abandonment of spiritual power in favour of the temporal: ‘ce pouvoir spirituel dont la
direction appartient à l’Eglise, elle l’avait follement lâché pour prendre du pouvoir temporel: de
là ses fautes, de là sa chute’.49 Sand also judged at an early age that the Catholic Church, by
sacrificing religious ideals to reactionary political interests, was on a false path: ‘Mes sympathies
politiques, ou plutôt mes aspirations fraternelles, me firent admettre […] que l’esprit de l’Église
était dévié de la bonne route et que je ne devais pas le suivre sur la mauvaise’.50 Although both
Hugo and Sand admired the reforming priest Lamennais for his republican ideals and the spiritual
purity of his humanitarian aims, they rejected any idea that spiritual renewal could be found
within the Catholic Church. In Le Sacre de l’écrivain, Paul Bénichou describes the rise of an
urgent sense of mission among Romantic poets and writers to provide a new spiritual leadership
that would replace the old established dogma of the Church.51 Hugo and Sand in particular
answered their century’s call, both believing that their artistic visions should serve to guide
humanity towards social progress. The character of a Catholic priest in love was thus a potent
symbol for these two Romantics to challenge the Church’s claim to spiritual authority.

littérature sans idées, de la philosophie sans conclusion. Envoyez-moi des fleurs, me disait-il, et ne me
compromettez pas’ (p. 190).
47
‘Préface de 1839’, in LR, p. 350.
48
See Moody, p.18.
49
CFL, IV (1831-1833) 1003-1004.
50
HV, I, 1075.
51
Paul Bénichou, Le Sacre de l’écrivain, 1750-1830: Essai sur l’avènement d’un pouvoir spirituel laïque
dans la France moderne (Paris: Gallimard, 1996). See also Maurice Z. Shroder, Icarus: the Image of the
Artist in French Romanticism (Harvard University Press, 1961), pp. 60-92, for a discussion of Hugo as a
poet with an Orphic mission.
19
 In their dual and contradictory roles as priests representing a repressive Church and as men
struggling under its constraints, Frollo and Magnus elicit a potentially complex response from the
reader. Therefore it will also be essential to consider the literary techniques that Hugo and Sand
use to influence reader reaction to the priest-in-love character and to subtly evoke understanding
or pity in addition to censure. To set my analysis of the literary techniques used by these authors
in their priest-in-love portrayals in context, it is important to note that in Notre-Dame de Paris
and Lélia, both authors were consciously breaking with old forms to experiment with new types
of writing in their novels. In 1823, in a review of Walter Scott, Hugo proposed an enlarged and
hybrid idea of the novel: ‘à la fois drame et épopée, pittoresque, mais poétique, réel mais idéal,
vrai mais grand’,52 and in his Préface de Cromwell he advocated a mix of genres as well as the
grotesque and the sublime in drama. Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston argues that in Notre-Dame de
Paris Hugo intentionally mixes and grafts different forms to create a hybrid style, intended for a
new type of reader who could, as Hugo put it in his later 1832 preface to Notre-Dame de Paris,
appreciate ‘la pensée d’esthétique et de philosophie cachée dans ce livre’ as well as the plot.53
Elsewhere, Bradley Stephens analyses how Hugo’s narrative style in Notre-Dame de Paris also
represents a shift away from tradition, in the way it complicates an authoritative narrator
viewpoint.54 Hugo’s narrator, while ostensibly omniscient and directing, nonetheless presents
Frollo through a series of shifting perspectives that introduces ambiguity by revealing a distinctly
subjective voice, sometimes viewing the priest from the outside and professing ignorance of his
thoughts, and at other times plunging into his psyche.
Sand was also aiming to create a new type of fiction in her novel Lélia, a hybrid novel-poem
with a structure that combines letters, monologue, dialogue, and third-person narrative, in
contrast to her earlier, more realist style in Indiana. Isabelle Hoog Naginski analyses how, in
Lélia, Sand was consciously rupturing with the mimetic structure of the novel in an attempt to
create a new type of philosophical novel, and indeed Sand’s text was seen by some of her
contemporaries as an important manifesto in the evolution of the novel towards a more abstract
form.55 From another angle, critics such Nigel Harkness and Naomi Schor consider how Lélia’s
fragmented text is a reaction to, or rejection of, a masculine mode of realist representation; as
Harkness argues, Sand’s unorthodox style expresses the ‘failure of realist aesthetics to contain the

52
Laffont, Critique, p. 149.
53
Cited in Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston, To Kill a Text: the Dialogic Fiction of Hugo, Dickens, and Zola
(Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1995), p. 49.
54
Bradley Stephens, Victor Hugo, Jean-Paul Sartre, and the Liability of Liberty, pp. 140-51.
55
Isabelle Hoog Naginski, George Sand: Writing for her Life (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press,
1991), pp. 105-14. See also Wingård, pp. 147-48.
20
powerful, desiring, and autonomous heroine.’56 Sand’s polyphonic text allows the different voices
of the five main characters to speak without ever giving full authority to any one of them, and the
lack of a unifying third-person narrator complicates the reader’s interpretation of the characters. I
will consider how Hugo and Sand use these innovative narrative techniques to nuance our
perception of the complex figure of the priest in love.
It was thus during a period of transition and crisis that Hugo’s Claude Frollo and Sand’s
Magnus were created: a time when these Romantic authors were challenging not only literary
norms but social traditions, beliefs, and institutions. In the next two chapters I will examine how,
out of their urgent concerns, the authors develop and intensify their priest-in-love’s dramatic
conflict between body and soul, thereby transcending both Gothic stereotype and simplistic
religious satire.

56
Harkness, p. 132; Naomi Schor, George Sand and Idealism (New York: Columbia University Press,
1993), pp. 122-40.

21
 Hugo’s Claude Frollo

Enforced celibacy and unrequited love: a double anankè

In Hugo’s portrayal of tormented archdeacon Claude Frollo, the priest’s battle with his repressed
carnal desires is developed into a study of unexpected psychological depth, complexity, and
dramatic intensity, countering those critics who dismiss Frollo as one-dimensional in their
analyses of priest characters.1 Most strikingly, Hugo enlarges and amplifies Frollo’s struggle with
enforced celibacy by adding the pain of unrequited love and jealousy to the priest’s conflict,
which is unusual in nineteenth-century priest portrayals by noted authors. Although Sand also
represents Magnus’s love as unreturned, it is important to note that she chooses not to develop it
as a crucial and fundamental aspect of the priest’s portrayal, unlike Hugo.
Hugo takes the theme of repressed sexual passion and through colourful, Gothic-inspired
imagery develops it into a key source of dramatic tension in the first half of the novel, creating
suspense as to when, and how, this force of dangerous power will break out. In a back-story,
Hugo shows Frollo being raised for the priesthood, sent away to study, and becoming ordained at
an unusually young age, thus encouraging his natural inclination towards scholarly pursuits and
asceticism. However Hugo also characterizes young Frollo’s nature as being ‘d’un caractère déjà
profond, ardent, concentré’ (598), thus hinting at the physical passion and obsession that will
eventually overwhelm the priest. After many years as a celibate Catholic priest, Frollo’s physical
desires can no longer be contained, his emotions having accumulated over the years and ready to
burst their cover; Frollo notes that he was a ‘fol adolescent’ to think he could stifle his desires for
life (728). To express the force of Frollo’s carnal desires, Hugo uses imagery of fluidity and
anaphora, creating a rhythm that suggests the relentless assault of suppressed emotions:

[…] avec quelle furie cette mer des passions humaines fermente et bouillonne lorsqu’on lui
refuse toute issue, comme elle s’amasse, comme elle s’enfle, comme elle déborde, comme
elle creuse le cœur, comme elle éclate en sanglots intérieurs et en sourdes convulsions,
jusqu’à ce qu’elle ait déchiré ses digues et crevé son lit (687). 2

1
In his study of priest characters, Franche states that comparing Frollo to Jocelyn is like comparing ‘la
caricature au portrait’, p. 46; Prévost claims Frollo is not to be taken seriously, as he is merely an
‘élucubration romantique’ created for the express purpose of expounding a ‘théorie pseudo-scientifique’
against celibacy, pp. 14-15; most importantly, Bowen, who focuses on the priest as literary character,
simply passes over Frollo as a ‘wicked priest’ type, p. 722.
2
This metaphor of overflow, with its sexual overtones, is particularly suited to describing the repression of
celibacy and would inspire other authors depicting a priest battling with physical desire, such as Théophile
Gautier in La Morte amoureuse (in Romans, contes et nouvelles, ed. by Pierre Laubriet (Paris: Gallimard,
Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 2002), I, 531) and Jules Verne in his unfinished novel, Un prêtre en 1839
(Paris: Le Cherche Midi, 1992), pp. 47-48.

22
Frollo’s glacial outward appearance, like the snowy peaks of Mt. Etna, hides the boiling lava of
his emotions (687). Hugo portrays ‘cette force du sexe et du sang de l’homme’ (728) as so
powerful that it escapes in outward signs and physical symptoms despite Frollo’s attempts to
stifle it: heaving sighs, paling face alternating with blushes like volcanic puffs of smoke (688),
streaming sweat (731-32), and blood throbbing in temples and arteries (704-705). Frollo’s lust is
described in suitably burning and hellish images of fire (609, 704, 709) and molten lead (708),
and he implores Esmeralda to put out the flame: ‘un peu de cendre sur cette braise!’ (731). The
archdeacon’s grey hair, wrinkles and baldness, seemingly marks of patriarchal authority and with
the latter described by Hugo as a holy sign of ecclesiastical vocation, ‘une tonsure éternelle’
(684), are in fact symptoms of premature aging due to Frollo’s inner turmoil (609). In counterpart
to Frollo’s scholarly asceticism, Hugo highlights the priest’s latent physicality by referring to ‘ce
prêtre à peau brune et à larges épaules’ (708).3 But most of all, in an otherwise lifeless or austere
exterior, it is Frollo’s eyes that are the indicators of the sexual passion boiling inside him: they
express ‘une jeunesse extraordinaire, une vie ardente, une passion profonde’ (538). His
marmoreal body with its petrified smile is animated only by his eyes: ‘on eût dit qu’il n’y avait
plus dans Claude Frollo que les yeux de vivant’ (674). The burning lust that ravages his body
escapes through them in flashes: Hugo refers to Frollo’s fiery eyes (676, 694, 727, 770) that glow
like a candle (708) or like holes in a furnace (609). Hugo underlines the priest’s innately
passionate nature when Frollo looks into his heart and realizes ‘quelle large place la nature y avait
préparée aux passions’ (750). The simmering tension associated with the suppression of Frollo’s
desires finally erupts physically in his stabbing of his rival Phoebus and verbally in his explosive
confession to Esmeralda: ‘Je t’aime!’ (727).
Claude Frollo’s battle with his repressed sexual desire for Esmeralda is inextricably tied to his
view of the body and woman as enemy within the traditional Christian culture of renunciation of
the flesh. Frollo’s warning to Gringoire, although hypocritical, sums up his view of the dangers of
the carnal: ‘Vous savez que c’est toujours le corps qui perd l’âme’ (679). In the conflict between
body and spirit, Frollo sees the spirit as pure, winged and light, whereas man’s corporeal side,
particularly sexual desire, is impure and heavy, dragging down the spirit (727-30). As the enemy
of spirituality, the body and its desires must be denied and suppressed. Frollo struggles to make
‘l’âme maîtresse du corps’ through ascetic practices of prayer, fasting, study and mortifications of
the body (728-29). Here, Hugo is not only portraying the Catholicism of the Middle Ages –
steeped in an ascetic culture of contemptus mundi and denial of the body – but a mind-set that

3
Hugo also portrays Claude Frollo as possessing remarkable physical fitness, at times almost superhuman,
through desperation: the scholarly archdeacon is able to dive off a bridge into the Seine and swim to shore
(presumably in a restricting cassock), row three people and a goat against the current, and undertake a
marathon trek to the outskirts of Paris and back again.

23
would have been recognized by a contemporary reader, that of the Tridentine Catholic Church of
the 1830s.
The archdeacon believes that a woman’s body is to be shunned as source of temptation. He
sees Esmeralda and women in general as Satanic snares (728-29), and views his attraction to
Esmeralda not as natural desire, but believes he has been charmed or possessed (730). In his
defense against the attractions of women, Frollo first tries hiding himself away from the world (as
Jehan observes with unwitting acuity: ‘ce doit être chose curieuse que cette cellule que mon
révérend frère cache comme son pudendum!’ [683]). Frollo fears temptation entering through his
eyes, a common theme that we also find in Sand’s treatment of the priest in love.4 He pulls his
hood over his eyes at the rustle of a petticoat (609) and tries to remove the object of his desires
from his sight by banning the King’s daughter from visiting the cloister and Esmeralda from
dancing in the square. Frollo attempts to kidnap Esmeralda with the vague idea that a trial might
deliver him from her spell: ‘une sorcière avait enchanté Bruno d’Ast, il la fit brûler et fut guéri’
(730). Although Frollo’s belief in witchcraft would seem to be a relic of medieval superstition,
the gynophobia and fear of sexuality exhibited by the fifteenth-century archdeacon was a
common attitude in the priesthood of the early 1800s.5 Certainly, Frollo’s horror at the erotic
charms of Esmeralda’s dance (‘Sacrilège! profanation!’ [539]) prefigures that of many
nineteenth-century Catholic country priests, whose greatest outrage was reserved for the
dangerous sensuality of dancing couples.6
While Frollo accuses the gypsy girl of being an instrument of satanic temptation, Hugo rejects
this demonization of woman through his characterization of Esmeralda, a challenge that Sand will
develop even more strongly and in more complex terms in Lélia. In late eighteenth-century tales
such as The Monk and Cavotte’s Le Diable amoureux (non-priest protagonist), the femme fatale is
indeed the devil in disguise. Hugo departs from Lewis’ tale of temptation since the young girl
Esmeralda’s devilish seductiveness is all in Frollo’s imagination. Frollo is also associated with
Faust by Hugo, but the archdeacon makes no pact with the Devil; thus Hugo eliminates the
supernatural element of both Goethe’s and Lewis’ tales. The demonic in Hugo’s novel comes not
from the existence of the Devil, but is rather internalized in Frollo as the result of the repression
of the institutional Catholic Church; Myriam Roman observes that it is often society itself,
through institutions such as its penal systems, that becomes a source of Gothic horror in Hugo’s
novels.7 Hugo turns around the story of seduction by opposing the lustfulness of the so-called

4
The eyes or gaze as conduits of temptation are also featured in the priest-in-love treatments of Merimée in
Une Femme est un diable and Gautier in La Morte amoureuse.
5
Gibson notes that the Curé d’Ars confessed that he sometimes hesitated to embrace even his own mother,
p. 102.
6
Ibid., pp. 93-94.
7
Roman, p. 248.

24
‘monsieur l’archidiacre de Josas, un saint homme’ (735) with the inner purity and innocence of
Esmeralda. The archdeacon’s crimes contrast with the gypsy’s kindness saving Gringoire’s life
and giving Quasimodo water. Furthermore, it is Esmeralda, not the priest, whom Hugo associates
with the divine by repeated references linking her character with the Virgin Mary, Christ and an
angel. In contrast, as Frollo loses himself in his obsession, Hugo describes him with increasingly
negative and satanic adjectives. Already referred to as ‘sombre’ and with ‘une voix sinistre’ (538)
when the reader first encounters him, Frollo is later associated with images of hell (753, 755) or
Satan (750-51), is characterized as damned and demonic (709, 750), and as possessing a
deformed or corrupt soul (610, 782). However, Hugo’s departure from Catholic stereotype (holy
man seduced by temptress from the devil) does not lead him simply to an anti-Catholic one
(lustful priest persecutor of helpless victim). Frollo is himself both victim and persecutor; his
downfall from young, charitable priest to demon is a complex and tragic trajectory. Equally,
Esmeralda, while more shallowly characterized than Frollo, is neither Lewis’s victim Antonia nor
temptress Mathilde. Rachel Killick observes that Hugo moves Esmeralda ‘beyond the debased
stereotype of the “maiden in distress” to an expanded role as archetypal representation of spiritual
comfort and hope’,8 yet the gypsy girl’s moral stature is complicated by her depiction as the
daughter of a prostitute who makes herself sexually available to Phoebus.
In addition to characterising the priest’s repression with colourful Gothic-inspired symptoms
of fiery eyes and pounding arteries, Hugo shows psychological insight when exploring the more
complex consequences of Claude Frollo’s perception of the body as sinful. Unquestioning in his
belief in Catholic dogma, Frollo cannot see the object of his desire as she really is, but only
through the veil of his belief that a woman is a temptress, and much of the tragedy of the novel
stems from this failing. Frollo cannot feel compassion for Esmeralda because he views her as
stronger than she is, almost as his enemy: ‘Jeune fille, grâce! trêve un moment!’ (731). But as the
same time as viewing physical desire as the enemy of spirituality, Frollo has an instinctive sense
of the happiness or pleasure that can be found in love, both sensual and romantic. A glimpse of
her body in the darkness would be for him ‘le bonheur suprême’ (750). While Pierre Laforgue
sees Frollo’s declaration of love to Esmeralda as lust given a voice: ‘c’est un corps qui se met à
parler, et presque un sexe’, such a reading overlooks the priest’s impossible dreams of romantic
as well as sexual union.9 Frollo longingly proposes to Esmeralda that they flee to a sunny, tree-
filled place where they could pour their souls out into each other: ‘Oh! que nous pourrions être
heureux!’ (732). Hugo instills in Frollo a Romantic yearning for an unattainable ideal of love.
When the priest imagines the blessed life he could have had with Esmeralda if God had willed it,
‘son cœur se fondait en tendresse et en désespoir!’ (750). Indeed, it is arguably Frollo’s need for

8
Killick, pp. 50.
9
Laforgue, p. 93.

25
more than just physical possession that raises the priest’s desire above the lust of a Gothic monk
character, and certainly Frollo declares that his love transcends the carnal to involve his heart and
soul.10 Beyond his view of Esmeralda as a seductive ‘enchanteresse’, Frollo seems at times to be
capable of appreciating qualities beyond her physical beauty, namely her sublime inner nature
(836) and her natural purity (‘ce lys vierge’ [750]). Frollo tries to reconcile his opposing views of
her as an evil temptress yet a paragon of virtue and beauty by concluding she must be an angel,
but of darkness (728-27). Significantly, Frollo’s outlook on women does not allow him to see her
simply as a young girl, but rather he views her as a supernatural creature, whether a satanic
seductress or a deity to be elevated above God.11 This male stereotype of woman is also
characteristic of Magnus’s view of Lélia, and even more strongly challenged by Sand than by
Hugo, as we shall see in the next chapter.
Since Frollo desires Esmeralda, yet believes his desire to be evil, pleasure is mixed with pain
in his feelings. His ambivalence is expressed the very first time he is introduced to the reader: ‘De
temps en temps un sourire et un soupir se rencontraient sur ses lèvres, mais le sourire était plus
douloureux que le soupir’ (538). He implores Esmeralda to ‘torture-moi d’une main, mais
caresse-moi de l’autre’ (732) and even says that he would delight in her foot crushing his head
(771). Frollo believes that he can find delight in the depths of evil: ‘l’extrémité du crime a des
délires de joie’ (730). When Frollo recalls visions of Esmeralda bloody or half-naked during her
torture and attempted hanging and finds them sexually provocative (770), or when he tells how he
mutilated himself with a knife during her ordeal at the hands of the torturer (731), it might
suggest an almost sadomasochistic pleasure in the gratuitous suffering of himself and the
victim.12 But Hugo goes beyond Sade, for Frollo gains no satisfaction in his power to make
Esmeralda suffer, and his self-mutilation and voyeuristic contemplation of her ordeal at the hands
of the torturer only serves to increase his own suffering.13 By portraying Frollo as identifying
with Esmeralda’s suffering in the torture scene, Hugo blurs the priest’s role, for Frollo has made
himself victim as well as persecutor.
Frollo’s inability to reconcile what he has been taught to believe with what he actually feels is
shown by Hugo to cause another psychological side-effect, self-alienation. When Frollo first sets

10
Frollo expresses his love to Esmeralda: ‘Oh! aimer une femme ! […] l’aimer de toutes les fureurs de son
âme’ (731) and ‘Si vous saviez combien je vous aime! Quel cœur c’est que mon cœur!’ (837).
11
Esmeralda is raised above God or the Virgin by Frollo: ‘Ta vue est plus charmante que celle de Dieu!’
(732); ‘Cette créature, belle, douce, adorable, nécessaire à la lumière du monde, plus divine que Dieu!’
(780); ‘Une créature si belle que Dieu l’eût préférée à la Vierge, et l’eût choisie pour sa mère, et eût voulu
naître d’elle si elle eût existé quand il se fit homme!’(738).
12
Mario Praz classifies Esmeralda as a type of persecuted, victimized female who is persistently
represented in Romantic and Gothic literature, suffering outrages and terror in the vein of Sade’s Justine.
The Romantic Agony, trans. by Angus Davidson (New York: Meridian, 1956), pp. 110-12.
13
As noted by Durand-Le Guern, p. 171 and Porter, p. 24.

26
eyes upon Esmeralda, he feels as though there is a stranger within him, and he loses his sense of
mastery over himself (‘alors, je ne m’appartins plus’) (729). The sight of the dazzlingly beautiful
gypsy girl, which forces the priest to confront his repressed sexual desires, causes him to lose
physical control over himself: when gazing upon her, he feels weak or immobilized (674, 729) or
even loses consciousness altogether (704). Durand-Le Guern, in her comparison of Notre-Dame
de Paris with Lewis’ The Monk, argues that Frollo’s battle with his sexual desires results in a
sense of interior doubling: she describes Frollo as ‘scindé en deux’ (171).14 After carrying out
increasingly criminal actions, Frollo confesses to Esmeralda that he has become ‘horrible à moi-
même’ (836). In the final confrontation between him and Esmeralda at the Grève, Frollo’s
internal conflict between two opposing selves becomes fully apparent to the reader. As Frollo is
vowing his love to Esmeralda and his wish to save her, his other self, the sexual aggressor,
abruptly takes control: Frollo cuts himself off violently, and, suddenly implacable, makes her
choose between him and the gibbet (836).15
Hugo gives Frollo a moment of self-clarity when the priest realizes how much enforced
celibacy is to blame for the corruption of his capacity for love into fatal passion: ‘Que cette haine,
que cette méchanceté n’étaient que de l’amour vicié; que l’amour, cette source de toute vertu
chez l’homme, tournait en choses horribles dans un cœur de prêtre’ (750).16 Hugo’s
condemnation of the idea that one integral part of the self, the carnal, can be denied stems from
his fundamental conception of man’s nature. Hugo rejects the traditional Christian devaluation
and renunciation of the earthbound side, because for him, the tension caused by man’s duality –
body and soul, grotesque and sublime, real and ideal – is the fundamental basis for not only the
new type of drama that he advocates in his Préface de Cromwell, but of life and creativity itself.
Man’s lifelong struggle between his two opposing poles of carnal and spiritual is a dynamic
process that can be neither resolved nor denied, since this duality is inherent in the human
condition. Isabel Roche uses the concept of man’s struggle with an inner duality (man as homo
duplex) as the basis for her analyses of character in Hugo’s novels, and concludes that Frollo,
confined rigidly within his internal oppositions, dies trapped in a state between priest and
demon.17 From the perspective of priest-in-love characters, Frollo (like many after him such as
Sand’s Magnus and Gautier’s Romuald) indeed never overcomes the destructive effects on his

14
Durand-Le Guern, p. 171.
15
The theme of the alienated self is strongly developed in Gautier’s La Morte amoureuse. Conflicted priest
Romuald suffers from a complete split in his personality: a priest by day and a lover by night.
16
Hugo will again emphasize the dangers of enforced celibacy through ex-priest Cimourdain in
Quatrevingt-treize: ‘cet homme étudiait sans cesse, ce qui l’aidait à porter sa chasteté, mais rien de plus
dangereux qu’un tel refoulement’, and ‘défense lui étant faite d’aimer, il s’était mis à haïr’ (Laffont, Roman
III, p. 864).
17
Roche, p. 84.

27
psyche of a dogma of repression that he both fights yet believes in accordance with religious
training. He cannot accept his carnal side as an integral part of himself, and we can read this as a
direct criticism by Hugo of the dogma of the institutional Catholic church of the 1830s. Both
Moody and Roman observe that Notre-Dame de Paris marks a turning point in Hugo’s works in
that in this novel his outlook is firmly anticlerical.18 One can understand those of Hugo’s
contemporaries who interpreted it as such,19 and in fact, later, John Sturrock suggested that the
sole source of the conflict of Frollo, in fact of the entire book, is the celibacy vow:

Its disasters can be traced to a single flaw, which is the celibacy of the priest, Claude Frollo.
Had Frollo been in a position to act instinctively and satisfy his lust on the gypsy, all would
have been well; there is nothing pessimistic ultimately about what transpires in the novel,
since the trouble is brought on by observance of the rules of a specific society, and is not
endemic in the structure of the universe. 20

However, to suggest, as Sturrock does, that rules of society are the only constraint to Frollo’s
happiness in Notre-Dame de Paris is to miss how Hugo has enlarged his portrait of a repressed
priest by confronting Frollo’s desires with another fundamental obstacle. This is unrequited love,
which Frollo expresses as: ‘Oh! aimer une femme! être prêtre! être haï!’ (731). When Frollo
imagines what happiness could have been possible for him, ‘si elle n’eût pas été bohémienne et
s’il n’eût pas été prêtre […] et si elle l’eût aimé’ (750), we see that it is not just their contrasting
social status and his priesthood that are the barriers to Frollo’s fulfilment, but it is also that his
love is not, and will never be, requited by Esmeralda. For even had he not been a priest, Frollo’s
appearance would disqualify him from Esmeralda’s love as surely as it does Quasimodo. Blinded
by Phoebus’s good looks and soldier’s trappings, the gypsy girl could never love a man with
Frollo’s appearance: ‘…c’est Phoebus qui est beau! Toi, prêtre, tu es vieux! tu es laid!’ (838). Of
course, the female victims loved or lusted after by Gothic villains or by the stereotypical priests
of anti-Catholic propaganda are always unwilling, and indeed some elements of that
melodramatic cliché are embodied in pronouncements of the priest such as ‘Il faut mourir, la
belle, ou être à moi!’ (838). But from the perspective of nineteenth-century priest-in-love
portrayals, a priest whose love is not returned by the woman is rare. Hugo’s interweaving of
unrequited love as a key aspect of Frollo’s conflict can be considered partially to reflect his
personal problems with his wife Adèle. However, Hugo uses the theme of unrequited love and its
attendant aspects of jealousy and sexual frustration to reflect not only his personal
preoccupations, but to expand and intensify his portrait of the priest in love.

18
Moody, p. 94; Roman, p. 250.
19
Killick, p. 34.
20
John Sturrock, ‘Introduction’, in Notre-Dame de Paris, ed. and trans. by John Sturrock, 2nd edn (London:
Penguin, 2004), pp. 7-24 (p. 23).

28
 Although Frollo blames the celibacy law as corrupting love and leading to death for
Esmeralda and damnation for him (750), ultimately it is her rejection of him that he will identify
as the root cause of his downfall: ‘Vous me haïrez toujours! […] C’est là ce qui me rend mauvais,
voyez-vous, et horrible à moi-même!’ (836). This ‘fatality’ of unrequited love of which Frollo
despairs is identified by Hugo in his 1866 preface to Les Travailleurs de la mer as ‘l’anankè
suprême, le cœur humain’, an additional fatality that envelops man in addition to the externally-
imposed anankès of dogma (Notre-Dame de Paris), laws (Les Misérables) and nature (Les
Travailleurs de la mer).21 Frollo thus suffers from a double anankè, both innate and societal.
Later, Hugo will express his view that there is only so much suffering that can be ameliorated by
improving society before man encounters the reality of ‘la loi terrestre’: ‘La quantité de fatalité
qui dépend de l’homme s’appelle Misère et peut être abolie; la quantité de fatalité qui dépend de
l’inconnu s’appelle Douleur et doit être contemplée et sondée avec tremblement’.22 He lists the
hopeless passions and tragic attachments to which we are subject as human beings, including
unrequited love. It is this aspect of the human condition that Roman finds truly tragic in Hugo’s
novels compared to other ‘rassurant’ external anankès, which are subject to man’s capacity for
action.23 It may seem like a pessimistic message, but in his novels, not least in Notre-Dame de
Paris through the opposing examples of Frollo and Quasimodo, we see that although Hugo
proposes no solution, he is clear that man must accept and engage with the reality of his physical
side (as he puts it, ‘Améliorons tout ce qui peut être amélioré, acceptons le reste’).24 Comparing
Quasimodo in this context to Frollo, Hugo shows that despite his deformities Quasimodo is
capable of experiencing sexual desire (766). And yet, his thoughts are not of himself but of
Esmeralda and how he could protect her from the pain of Phoebus’s infidelity. Thus his generous
spirit is able to transcend the suffering caused by the limitations of his physical shell.
In addition, Hugo’s portrayal of Frollo as both repressed priest and unrequited lover not only
enlarges the anti-celibacy theme to a more universal consideration of the human condition and
man’s inability to transcend it, but allows Hugo to complicate further Frollo’s psychological
portrayal. For most fictional priests in love, there is at least a possible outlet for their agony of
forbidden desire since their love is returned, but for Frollo, Esmeralda’s rejection means that
there is no escape for him to another life outside the Church. Frollo’s frustration and anger at
Esmeralda’s refusal complicates his feelings of desire, and leads to an alternating attitude of

21
Laffont, Roman III, p. 45. The term anankè, which Hugo associates closely with Frollo throughout the
novel, has several meanings in the dictionary Hugo used while writing, but can best be understood as
fatality or constraint. For a discussion of the term and its resonance in the novel with respect to Frollo, see
Laforgue, pp. 86-91.
22
Proses Philosophiques de 1860-65, in Laffont, Critique, p. 552.
23
Roman, p. 459.
24
Laffont, Critique, p. 552.

29
supplication and cruelty towards her. With an inconsistency that seems all too human, Frollo is
on the one hand respectful of Esmeralda, claiming that he would only approach her trembling
(750) and would kiss the ground under her feet [836]) and on the other hand, he is a sexual
aggressor who, when refused, overpowers and attacks her. He alternately wants to save her from
death (‘Oh! moi je ne veux pas te voir mourir!’ [837]) and to kill her (‘Eh bien! meurs, toi!’
[745]). Frollo’s reaction when he then discovers that Quasimodo has rescued Esmeralda is telling:
the archdeacon is weary that his suffering must start again (769).
Frollo’s pain of rejection is intensified by jealousy, since Esmeralda loves the soldier Phoebus.
Esmeralda’s repetition of the words ‘mon Phoebus’ to almost everything Frollo says to her are a
special torture to the priest (‘Quand tu dis ce nom, malheureuse, c’est comme si tu broyais entre
tes dents toutes les fibres de mon cœur!’ [732]), as is the spectacle of her writhing on Phoebus’s
lap: ‘Voir ce corps dont la forme vous brûle, ce sein qui a tant de douceur, cette chair palpiter et
rougir sous les baisers d’un autre’ (731).25 Frollo’s violent jealousy not only of Phoebus but of
Quasimodo and Gringoire forms a very large part of his torments, and is described by Hugo with
a vivid intensity which reaches heights that recall Racine’s Phèdre, as Killick observes.26 Perhaps
Hugo already felt an impending sense of unease about his best friend’s betrayal when he was
writing the scene in which Claude Frollo stabs his rival Phoebus. Certainly, Sainte-Beuve’s
admission to Hugo in December 1830 that, in love with Adèle, he often dreamed of killing his
rival was a feeling that Hugo may have understood only too well.27 Despite his attempts to keep
up the friendship with Sainte-Beuve, Hugo’s portrayal of Frollo’s jealousy points to less
forgiving feelings lying underneath the surface.
Hugo depicts the potent mix of unrequited physical desire and jealousy as elevating Frollo’s
mental suffering to physical torture. Frollo describes his pain as greater than being sawn between
two planks, torn in pieces by four horses or being turned on a grid-iron (731). The emotional
suffering also causes extreme physical manifestations. His blood boils, he hammers his head on
the floor, he describes his heart bursting and head breaking (731-32), he grinds his teeth (706,
771, 838), and even foams at the mouth (838). In the chapter ‘Fièvre’, when he thinks he has
finally destroyed Esmeralda, Frollo’s suffering reaches its apogee, affecting his mind and reason.
His emotional suffering is so acute that ‘il prenait sa tête à deux mains et tâchait de l’arracher de
ses épaules pour la briser sur le pavé’ (751). Like his extremes of mental suffering, his jealousy
becomes so intense that it includes not only Phoebus, Gringoire and Quasimodo but the entire

25
See Masha Belenky, The Anxiety of Dispossession: Jealousy in Nineteenth-Century French Culture
(Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Press, 2008), pp. 57-65, for a reading of Frollo’s jealousy in the
context of father-son generational conflict that reflects underlying tensions in the aftermath of the July
Revolution.
26
Killick, p. 56.
27
CFL, IV (1831-1833) 1010-11. Letter from Saint-Beuve to Hugo.

30
crowd who has seen Esmeralda in her chemise at her amende honorable. In the height of his
emotional agitation, Frollo enters a stupor of phantasmagorical hallucination for which Hugo
gives a physiological explanation: ‘Il n’est pas rare que la fatigue d’une grande douleur produise
cet effet sur l’esprit’ (752). By describing madness as a physical symptom caused by extreme
emotional disorder, Hugo, like later authors of similar priest portrayals such as Sand and Verne in
his unfinished Un prêtre en 1839, presents Frollo to the reader as perhaps not fully culpable for
his evil actions (at the close of the novel, Frollo pleads with Esmeralda to save them both from
his failing hold on sanity [837]). However, as well as being symptomatic of emotional disorder,
Hugo imbues Frollo’s mad visions, in particular his internalized Gothic vision of hell, with an
underlying spiritual significance which demands further consideration.

The spiritual failings of the institutional Church

Paul Savey-Casard discusses how Claude Frollo is part of a Romantic tradition of characters who
suffer from a fatal passion leading to murder, criminality or suicide, and notes that the Romantics
expressed indulgence for those suffering from such passions, championing the liberty to love
despite social constraints, be it a forced marriage or the celibacy law (162).28 But for most
Romantic heroes, love contains divine elements of unselfish love, while Frollo’s love is mainly
the desire to possess. His suffering is not purifying or redeeming but rather leads to negative
aspects of pain, cruelty, torture, madness and death. Even allowing for the medieval colour of the
Gothic ‘mad monk’ characterization, and its utility as a means of exploring the darker regions of
the unconscious, it is striking that Hugo has chosen to portray Claude Frollo’s attraction to
Esmeralda as incorporating such a destructive carnal element and so lacking in any element of
self-sacrificing love.
Rather than simply a personal failing in Frollo, Hugo shows that it is the priest’s repression
by, and association with, the institutional Church that is at the root of his failure to live up to his
promising spiritual potential. The medieval Church that Hugo depicts, and by analogy that of
1830s France – ridden with superstition and dogma, linked with the aristocracy and deaf to the
plight of the downtrodden – is not one where true faith and spiritual strength can be found.29
Already in 1828, in Le Dernier Jour d’un condamné, Hugo expressed his concern that the
priesthood was becoming a spiritually empty profession. The condemned man cannot find
consolation in the mechanically-recited Latin phrases of the old, blasé prison priest assigned to

28
Paul Savey-Casard, Le Crime et la peine dans l’œuvre de Victor Hugo, (Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France, 1956), p. 162.
29
The unflattering portrayal did not escape the Catholic Church which put Notre-Dame de Paris on their
Index in 1834 (Laster, p.151).

31
him, and yearns for an empathetic priest who would be able to touch his heart and soul.30 The
priesthood as a post-Napoleonic career path in 1820s and 1830s France, and the associated theme
of forced vocation – which is touched upon only briefly by Hugo in his portrayal of Frollo as
entering the priesthood to provide for his brother – is a theme that appears in Stendhal’s portrait
of Julien Sorel and Verne’s of Pierre Hervé in Un prêtre en 1839.
Although Hugo esteemed Catholic priest and reformer Lamennais for his championing of
liberty and as being uncorrupted by temporal ambitions, he believed that spiritual power could no
longer be found or created within the Catholic Church, but rather was invested in the poet and
writer. In September 1830, Hugo encourages the abbé to practise his spiritual mission through his
writings: ‘au temps où nous vivons, le génie est une papauté’.31 Although Hugo’s conviction of
the spiritual mission of the poet was not completely crystallized during the writing of Notre-
Dame de Paris, in 1833 he would affirm that ‘le poète aussi a charge d’âmes’.32 For a young man
boldly claiming spiritual leadership as his prerogative, portraying a representative of the Catholic
Church, ‘un chargé d’âmes’ (605), was an opportunity to challenge a rival claimant to spiritual
power.33 Through Frollo’s interaction with Esmeralda, Hugo attacks what he sees as the
institutional Church’s failure to provide this leadership. Frollo feels no priestly responsibility for
the welfare of Esmeralda’s soul, since he believes her to be sent by the Devil, and instead of
leading her to salvation, Frollo’s love for Esmeralda is a path leading her to hell: ‘ma chute
poursuivra la tienne durant l’éternité’ (837). He perverts his holy duties with regard to Esmeralda
on several occasions. In the dungeon, where he is supposed to give priestly comfort to the
condemned prisoner, he confesses his lust; at her amende honorable, instead of taking her
confession as is thought by the crowd, he is eying her partial nakedness and threatening her; and
finally, within the sacred confines of the Notre-Dame cathedral itself, of which he is archdeacon,

30
Le Dernier Jour d’un condamné, in Laffont, Roman I, pp. 465-67. In the 1832 preface to this novel,
Hugo states clearly his conviction that institutional religion’s authority as a spiritual guide is over: ‘Toutes
les religions sont attaquées du dry-rot, comme ces vieux vaisseaux qui pourrissent dans nos ports, et qui
jadis peut-être ont découvert des mondes’ (p. 414).
31
CFL, IV (1831-33) 1003-4.
32
Preface to Lucrèce Borgia, in Laffont, Théâtre I, p. 973.
33
Shroder, pp. 60-92, analyses Hugo as a poet on an Orphic mission, and discusses how in Hugo’s view,
the Catholic priest claiming to interpret God’s word was an imposter, for the poet was the true priest (p.
84). With this in mind, it may seem contradictory that the seemingly anticlerical Hugo would choose a
priest character, Bishop Myriel, as the spiritual force who guides Valjean on the right path in Les
Misérables – and in fact, Hugo’s son Charles took his father to task for portraying this enlightened
character as a priest rather a man of another profession. However, Hugo responded that he had to be true to
the historical moment that he was depicting (1815), but furthermore that his ideal priest Myriel, a man of
ethical conscience, actually represented a savage satire of the Catholic Church. Cited in Bernard Leuillot,
‘Philosophie(s): commencement d’un livre’, in Lire les Misérables, ed. by Anne Ubersfeld and Guy Rosa
(Paris: José Corti, 1985), pp. 59-75 (p. 61).

32
Frollo attempts to rape her. Frollo’s failure in his spiritual and humanitarian responsibilities also
extends towards others such as Quasimodo on the pillory and his own brother Jehan, whose death
is indirectly caused through Frollo’s obsession with Esmeralda. In his one direct address to God,
Frollo reproaches himself for his role in his young brother Jehan’s death: ‘Caïn, qu’as-tu fait de
ton frère?’ (837). Hugo’s condemnation of Frollo and thus of the Catholic Church as failing to
show or promote concern for one’s fellow man had a strong political dimension, for fraternité,
along with liberté and égalité, were central to the revolutionary consciousness of young
Romantics such as Hugo and Sand in the early 1830s. After early royalist leanings, Hugo was
aligning himself politically with the liberal spirit of the 1830 Revolution in his novel. In Notre-
Dame de Paris, Hugo depicts archdeacon Frollo as closely linked with repressive monarch Louis
XI and crown prosecutor Charmolue, an association that had contemporary resonance in 1830-
1831 due to the strong political alliance of throne and altar that had occurred during the Bourbon
Restoration. Frollo’s abuse of his institutional power to imprison and torture Esmeralda thus
forms part of Hugo’s overall criticism in his novel of the Church and traditional monarchy as
reactionary, corrupt structures in opposition to the revolutionary ideals of ‘les Trois Glorieuses’.
However, Frollo is not only an oppositional figure symbolising the old political and religious
order. As I expand upon in the conclusion, Frollo’s internal conflict, as well as that of Sand’s
Magnus, also expresses the disappointment and anxiety felt by Hugo and Sand after the July
Revolution as it swiftly became clear that Louis-Philippe’s new government would fail to
embody these authors’ progressive political and social ideals.
Hugo underlines the message that the institutional Church and its repressive dogma are
opposed to man’s development of his humanity by associating blood and animal imagery with
Frollo. Esmeralda observes that Frollo has blood under his fingernails (732); while caused by his
self-mutilation, it has symbolic value as metaphorical ‘blood on his hands’ for stabbing Phoebus.
Once compassionate and full of fraternal feeling, the archdeacon Frollo is gradually reduced
almost to a beast, as noted by Roche: he bites his own lips, hands and bedclothes (689, 731, 770)
and tears at his priest’s garments (609), his gaze is likened to a tiger’s (708), and he says that he
will drag Esmeralda to his lair (838).34 The gypsy girl views the priest, whose only goal is to
possess her, as a sort of devouring ogre: ‘Ne me mords pas, monstre!’ she says when Frollo
kisses her (838). In the final scene, Frollo is referred to as something that is no longer even
human (856).
Striking by their absence are any active calls or prayers by Frollo to God for emotional and
spiritual strength in the battle against the senses – particularly when compared to other priest-in-
love characters who find the strength in their religious beliefs to combat their desires. Frollo’s
faith is based on a God of damnation and the Devil, rather than in a God of love to whom he

34
Roche, p. 85.

33
could turn for support. Even before his obsession with Esmeralda, Frollo has seemingly already
turned to other routes to spiritual enlightenment. Instead of communion with God, he seeks truth
in science in a Faustian lust for knowledge and pursues the false promise of gold through
alchemy; but science ultimately fails him, repaying him in hollow coin (606). When Frollo’s
passion for learning is transferred to passion for Esmeralda, it is she whom he worships, seeing
her as all-powerful temptress and more divine than God (780). The priest’s search for divine
knowledge through alchemy and his deification of Esmeralda can be read, in the context of
Hugo’s views on the institutional Catholic Church’s spiritual inadequacy, as the inability of a
dogmatic religion to offer an intelligent, passionate man such as Claude Frollo spiritual
fulfilment. Indeed, in the one episode when the despairing priest turns actively to the Church for
spiritual comfort, it fails him: Frollo, believing Esmeralda to be dead, rushes to the glow of a
lamp inside the Notre-Dame cathedral and throws himself on the Bible ‘dans l’espoir d’y trouver
quelque consolation ou quelque encouragement’ (755), but he finds only a disquieting passage on
ghosts. Hugo likens the priest’s disappointment at his failure to find comfort there to what the
blind man feels when he pricks himself on the stick he has picked up; Frollo collapses in a daze,
‘abîmé et passif sous la main du démon’ (755).
As a counterpart to his concept of the poet-writer who will intuit the spiritual truths that will
guide society, Hugo portrays Frollo’s visions as spiritually empty, negative or even hellish; sight
does not lead to insight. Laurence M. Porter refers to Frollo’s lack of spiritual insight as
blindness,35 and Frollo refers to himself in his thwarted search for enlightenment as a ‘mouche
aveugle’ (694). For all his voyeurism, devouring gaze and spying on Esmeralda, Frollo cannot
see clearly. Frollo inverts the dazzling image of Esmeralda dancing in the sunshine into a dark,
funereal shadow in his mind’s eye (729), and contrasts her light with his darkness: ‘peut-être as-
tu encore quelque lumière au fond de toi […]; j’ai la nuit dans l’âme’ (730-31). In Frollo’s
terrifying hallucination in ‘Fièvre’, the dark houses and towers that he sees reflected in the Seine
at sunset form for him a nightmarish vision of the towers of Hell extending into an abyss, causing
him to flee in horror; but the vision is within him. Preceding this hallucination is a flash of self-
analysis, if not quite conscience. Frollo is able to examine his soul and see the causes of his
treatment of Esmeralda and despair of the consequences, but he is too far on his downward path
to be able to translate this crisis and moment of self-insight into an ethical conscience towards his
fellow man; he feels no regret or remorse (750). Unlike Jean Valjean’s ‘tempête sous un crâne’,36
Frollo’s inner ‘tempête’ is wholly destructive, a hurricane tearing and breaking everything in his
soul (751). Valjean’s crisis enables him to reach out to save a ‘brother’, but Frollo’s mental
suffering leaves him further isolated and separated from humanity.

35
Porter, pp. 24-25.
36
Les Misérables, in Laffont, Roman II, pp. 174-87.

34
Priest as victim and villain: narrative framing

As a literary character who also serves as a vehicle to criticize the shortcomings of the Catholic
Church of the 1830s, Claude Frollo blends elements of victim as well as villain, rebel as well as
oppressor. Therefore it is crucial to consider the narrative techniques that Hugo uses to create
nuances in his portrayal of a criminal priest. Firstly, Hugo elicits sympathy from the reader by
presenting extenuating circumstances in Frollo’s situation that are both social and innate: Frollo’s
restricted upbringing, his enforced celibacy, disappointment in his relationship with his brother,
and a passionate nature unsuited to the priesthood. Secondly, as we have seen, Hugo provides
vivid descriptions of the priest’s mental, emotional and physical suffering of an intensity that on
occasion defies description altogether (‘une angoisse inexprimable’ [837]), and that is surely
designed to make a strong impression on the reader.
Hugo shows Frollo to have been in his youth capable of deep compassion (‘une miséricorde
infinie’ [598]) as well as of transformation by love. Hugo emphasizes the revelatory nature of his
first attachment to his brother Jehan (it made of him ‘un homme nouveau’ [598]), and which is in
such stark contrast to the negative revelation of his first vision of Esmeralda (‘il y avait en moi
quelque chose de tombé qui ne pouvait se relever’ [729]). Hugo highlights the rarity and value of
Frollo’s protective gesture of adopting Quasimodo by contrasting it with the eagerness of the
supposedly religious Haudriette widows to burn the deformed child. While critics such as Jacques
Seebacher and Killick see his charitable act as motivated by a degree of calculation or a fear of
sin,37 such a negative reading overlooks how Hugo emphasizes Frollo’s action as being born of
his unselfish love for his brother. Hugo further strengthens our perception of Frollo as capable of
compassion and love by describing how the young priest became the hunchback’s adoptive
father, teaching him to speak, read and write, protecting him from taunts, and even giving him
charge of the Notre-Dame bells. The narrator reinforces the reader’s emotional intimacy with the
character in these passages detailing Frollo’s youth and in his interactions with his brother Jehan
by referring to the priest by his first name, Claude.38 The kindness that young Claude Frollo
exhibits to Quasimodo awakens the latter’s capacity for selfless love and devotion, even if it
results in an unequal relationship (‘le chien et son maître’ [604]), and it surely contributes to
Quasimodo’s later ability to offer self-sacrificing love to Esmeralda. Admittedly, Hugo sounds
some warning signals about young Claude’s obsessive, intense nature, and suggests that entering
the priesthood in order to devote his life to his brother may have been a youthful, misguided
choice (598). Overall, however, the flashback enables the reader’s understanding of the tragedy

37
Seebacher, in Notre Dame de Paris; Les Travailleurs de la mer, ed. by Jacques Seebacher and Yves
Gohin (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1975), p. 1141, note 1 to p. 147; Killick, pp. 33-34.
38
Hugo never actually refers to his priest character as ‘Frollo’ as do the vast majority of critics; he is
variously Claude Frollo, Dom Claude, or Claude when referred to by name.

35
of Frollo’s subsequent degeneration into a man unable to show self-sacrificing love. This
understanding is heightened by the access we are given later to Frollo’s innermost thoughts
during his episode of madness.
Hugo’s emotional investment in Claude Frollo may contribute to how he complicates a
blanket condemnatory response to the priest’s actions from the reader through an occasional bias
that invites us to judge him less harshly. One may note that Hugo on many occasions refers to
Frollo as ‘le malheureux’ or ‘le misérable archidiacre’, even when he is in the midst of criminal
behaviour: he indulgently refers to Frollo as ‘le pauvre prêtre’ (771) even at the very moment
when the priest is attempting to rape Esmeralda. At other times, the narrator seems to excuse
Frollo’s actions (‘Il lui eût été par trop dur de donner à la femme qu’il aimait de bonnes nouvelles
de son rival. Tout homme à sa place en eût fait autant’ [736]), or describes Frollo’s situation with
a sympathetic slant (Frollo is ‘condamné’ to the virginity of the cloister [708]; he is tormented by
his desires ‘si cruellement’ [770] and even as Frollo is threatening Esmeralda with death, we are
invited to pity him: ‘Ainsi debout et secoué par les sanglots, il était plus misérable et plus
suppliant qu’à genoux’ [836]). Even during Frollo’s death scene on the tower, for which the
reader, like Quasimodo, would be expected to feel unmoved by the priest’s suffering, Hugo
allows the reader to share Frollo’s agony by detailing his desperation and terror (‘l’archidiacre
[…] agonisait de cette horrible façon’ [856]), with further references to the struggling archdeacon
as ‘le misérable’ and ‘l’infortuné’ (856-57).
Hugo’s self-identification, witting or unwitting, with aspects of the character of Frollo may
also explain how, unexpectedly, the most beautiful declarations of passionate love in the novel
come from Frollo, the ‘villain’. For example, his ‘Si tu viens de l’enfer, j’y vais avec toi’ (732) or
‘L’enfer où tu seras, c’est mon paradis’ (732) were later to be incorporated into opera and
musical lyrics of adaptations of the novel,39 and Frollo’s impassioned avowals that he would trade
everything for a smile or a kiss, even if it were an empire or a position as king or God, closely
parallel a poem written by Hugo in the same period, ‘À une femme’.40 The poetic beauty and
intensity of certain parts of Frollo’s declarations are highlighted further by Hugo through their
contrast with the empty, mechanical, rehearsed nature of Phoebus’s declarations to Esmeralda
and Hugo’s description of Phoebus’s and Esmeralda’s love talk as banal and insipid (705).

39
Hugo adapts these expressions in his libretto for Louise Bertin’s 1836 opera La Esmeralda as ‘L’enfer
avec elle/C’est mon ciel à moi’ (Laffont, Théâtre I, p. 1328); Luc Plamondon and Richard Cocciante, in
their musical Notre-Dame de Paris, incorporate Frollo’s declarations as: ‘L’enfer où tu iras, j’irai aussi/ Et
ce sera mon paradis’ (in ‘Être prêtre et aimer une femme’, Palais des congrès, Paris, 18 September 1998).
See Gasiglia-Laster’s ‘Métamophoses de Claude Frollo: étude des avatars du personnage à travers des
livrets d’opéra tirés de Notre-Dame de Paris’, in Le Livret d’opéra (Paris: Publications de l’Université de
Bourgogne, Phénix éditions, 2002) for a detailed comparison of Frollo’s role in the novel with musical
adaptations.
40
Les Feuilles d’automne, in Laffont, Poésie I, p. 619.

36
Additionally, Frollo’s impassioned articulation of his desires is imbued with a raw intensity that
not only rises far above the titillating descriptions of the wrongdoings of, for example, the
misbehaving monks or priests of Diderot or of Balzac in Les Contes drolatiques (1832-37), but
surpasses almost everything in Hugo’s other works; Laforgue observes: ‘Il est peu de pages chez
Hugo aussi ardentes et brûlantes’.41 Victor Brombert goes so far as to say of Adèle’s cessation of
marital relations with Hugo that ‘of this sexual repression and of its psychic dangers, Frollo
became the fictional projection’.42 Certainly the sheer strength of Frollo’s obsession has a certain
magnificence; as Gasiglia-Laster has written: ‘Même son désir fou pour Esmeralda, qui en fait un
monstre, a des côtés sublimes’.43 In Frollo’s almost lyrical and impassioned declarations, in his
determination to sacrifice all for love, and in the strength of his sexual and jealous passion, Hugo
has incorporated an element of the Romantic lover into his priest in love that is notably missing
in Sand’s Magnus. The transgressing priest Frollo’s perverse, unexpected magnetism, as well as
his attraction to readers as a complex, tragic character, is evidenced by the current and continuing
reader interest in Frollo as a romantic anti-hero on dedicated internet sites and forums, where
‘Frollophiles’ discuss the character’s appeal and offer their own fan fiction.44
Thus, Hugo complicates our perception of Claude Frollo as the villain of the novel with
mitigating circumstances and flashes of sympathy that lead to our understanding of him as more
nuanced, and more tragic, character. Here, Hugo’s treatment of the priest in love is part of a
general narrative approach in the novel that resists straightforward interpretation and steps back
to allow space for the reader to decide for himself. The narrator’s insights into Frollo’s psyche are
countered with a destabilising external focalisation that engages the reader in his own
interpretation of the character.45 Stephens shows that Hugo’s seemingly authoritative and

41
Laforgue, p. 93.
42
Brombert, p. 66.
43
Gasiglia-Laster, ‘L’Actualisation de l’intrigue à travers trois adaptations de Notre-Dame de Paris’,
Symposium International Victor Hugo - Génie sans Frontières, 23-26 July 2002, Universidade Federal de
Minas Gerais, Brazil <http://www.letras.ufmg.br/victorhugo/f_simposio_paginas/simposio_frameset.htm>
[accessed 19 April 2012] (p. 4).
44
Lorinda Prignot, ‘Le Forum Frollo’, L’Écho Hugo, 9 (2010), 178-80, evaluates the character’s popularity
on the website The Frollo Forum (<http://frollo.conforums.com/>). On the literary website Dialogus, we
find letters from Frollo-admirers such as ‘jeune femme passionnée’ that are answered by ‘Frollo’ in the
spirit of the novel (see ‘Claude Frollo’, Dialogus (<http://www.dialogus2.org/frollo.html>); websites such
as Litteranet (<http://litteranet.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=frollo>) and FanFiction.net
(<http://www.fanfiction.net>) feature fiction and commentary evidencing the character’s appeal [all sites
accessed 19 April 2012].
45
Bradley Stephens, ‘Reading Walter Benjamin’s Concept of the Ruin in Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de
Paris’, French Studies, 61: 2 (2007), 155-66 (p. 165). Elsewhere, Roche argues that Hugo’s financial
success and security allowed him the freedom to experiment with such narrative techniques in order to

37
omnipresent narrator in Notre-Dame de Paris avoids an unambiguous stance by continually
highlighting his own subjective viewpoint as an observer and interpreter.46 Stephens outlines the
ways in which Hugo achieves this effect of narrator subjectivity: an external emphasis on seeing
and perspective; bringing characters, such as Frollo’s hooded figure, onto the scene without
identifying them in order to stimulate the reader’s ability to decode events; and most strikingly,
blind-spots in the narrator’s omniscience with regard to the characters’ thoughts (‘Que se passait-
il en ce moment dans l’âme obscure de l’archidiacre? Lui et Dieu seul l’ont pu savoir’ [704]). As
Stephens discusses, by granting the reader the freedom and responsibility of interpreting the text
and by not providing definitive answers, Hugo actively puts into narrative practice his Romantic
belief in the importance of individual choice and sovereignty.47 Hugo develops his destabilizing
narrative techniques particularly strongly for his priest in love. Not only does Hugo’s narrator
profess that he cannot always guess what Frollo is thinking or planning, but during Esmeralda’s
torture, the narrator claims to be unsure even of Frollo’s whereabouts (‘Si l’archidiacre eût été
présent…’ [720]), leaving the reader to find out later from Frollo himself that he was there. Hugo
increases the use of expressions that generate uncertainty such as ‘il paraît’, ‘il semble’ or ‘peut-
être’ in association with Frollo; shows Frollo through the uncomprehending eyes of other
characters and reports hearsay surrounding him; and as Frollo falls deeper into his obsession,
further emphasizes an external perspective by referring to him as simply ‘le prêtre’ or
‘l’archidiacre’.
The freedom of interpretation given to the reader by Hugo’s narrator has important
implications for the complex and divided figure of the priest in love. Hugo leaves it up to the
reader to interpret possibly conflicting signals on how to judge Frollo: as villainous, corrupt
representative of the church or tragic, fallen anti-hero or both.48 This ambiguity is symbolized by
Frollo’s seeming identification of himself with both the spider and the fly in a cobweb in his

reach his ideal reader. ‘Inscribing his Ideal Reader(ship): Victor Hugo and the Shaping of le lecteur pensif’,
French Forum 28: 2 (Spring 2003), 21-34.
46
Stephens, Victor Hugo, Jean-Paul Sartre, and the Liability of Liberty (Oxford: Legenda, 2011), pp. 140-
51.
47
Ibid., p. 121-26.
48
It is curious that the numerous modern film and musical adaptations inspired by Notre-Dame de Paris
have seldom examined the text carefully enough to exploit the dramatic potential and the emotional depth
embodied in Claude Frollo, preferring to denude him of priestly status and thus his situation of its tension,
or else reduce him to a one-dimensional screen or stage villain (see Gasiglia-Laster, ‘L’actualisation de
l’intrigue à travers trois adaptations de Notre-Dame de Paris’, p. 4). It is perhaps only in Cocciante’s
musical Notre-Dame de Paris that Frollo’s intense suffering comes close to being expressed through the
musical solos, and paradoxically, it is only in the comic film version Quasimodo d’El Paris (1999) that
some of the perverse magnetism of the character in the novel is found in Richard Berry’s Frollo.

38
cell,49 and translates into questions about Frollo’s culpability in his downfall.50 Hugo does not
give the reader a strong sense that the priest could ever transcend his situation; Frollo himself
variously blames Esmeralda, the Devil, God, and even human nature (‘Enfin, un homme qui aime
une femme, ce n’est pas sa faute’ [836]) for his actions, believing he has been overtaken by
merciless anankè, and so it often seems to the reader. In his preface to the novel, Hugo claims to
have based Notre-Dame de Paris on the word ‘anankè’ engraved on the Notre-Dame cathedral by
an ‘âme en peine’ who turns out to be Frollo (491). Indeed, the pitilessness of fate dominates
Notre-Dame de Paris. Certainly numerous contemporaries of Hugo’s, such as Lamartine,
remarked on the dark lack of divine Providence in the novel.51 The cards are stacked against
Frollo from the beginning, for he is presented to the reader as already aged, having become ‘de
plus en plus rigide comme prêtre, de plus en plus triste comme homme’ (606) after years in the
priesthood, half-destroyed by disappointment in love. In his confession to Esmeralda, he tells her
how he hesitated and might not have carried out his evil plan against her; recoiling from its worst
aspects, he assumes it was up to him to act or not. But anankè takes over: ‘là où je me croyais
tout-puissant, la fatalité était plus puissante que moi’ (730). Yet, there are times when Frollo
seems to actively embrace his downward path. ‘Quand on fait le mal, il faut faire tout le mal.
Démence de s’arrêter à un milieu dans le monstrueux!’ (730), and later he tells Esmeralda all that
he has done to try to be with her: ‘je crache au visage de mon Dieu!’ (837).52 Also, the pre-
meditated calculation of Frollo’s complicated plots to trap Esmeralda, while mitigated by his
growing insanity, suggest a personal accountability. It is never entirely clear how much Frollo’s
downfall is due to his own choices and how much to external fate; as Stephens argues, Hugo is
‘constantly involved in paradoxes of free will and providence that he neither ties up neatly nor
unravels for the reader’.53
Hugo’s inventive use of the priest-in-love’s internal conflict attests to the urgency of
extending research on this character to works of other authors, examining its oft-neglected
dramatic dimension alongside its religious significance. For it is precisely because Hugo
develops the literary, dramatic aspect of the priest in love beyond purely religious symbol that he
is also able to create effective religious commentary: a nuanced and profound critique that

49
Grant, in The Perilous Quest, analyses this image as a unifying motif of the novel.
50
Stephens, Victor Hugo, Jean-Paul Sartre, and the Liability of Liberty, p. 142.
51
Roche, p. 38; Brombert, p. 64.
52
Laforgue sees in Frollo’s trajectory an active choice ‘d’aller au bout du mal et du crime’, a metaphysical
choice that makes him a precursor of Genet’s ‘héros noirs et ténébreux’ (pp. 97-98).
53
Stephens, ‘Victor Hugo, Charles Renouvier, and the Empowerment of the Poet-Philosopher’, Dix-Neuf, 9
(October 2007), 1-16 (p. 5). See also his Victor Hugo, Jean-Paul Sartre, and the Liability of Liberty,
pp. 135-40, for an analysis of Claude Frollo in the context of the dialectics of free will and constraint.

39
condemns organised religion while sensitive to the human yearning for the spiritual. Continuing
with my approach that considers both functions of this literary figure, I now shift the spotlight to
Sand’s Magnus in Lélia, a less-studied character for which this fresh perspective is particularly
vital. Additionally, by analysing Magnus and Frollo in close juxtaposition, I will highlight the
versatility of the priest-in-love character through my comparison of the portrayals of these two
writers.

40
 Sand’s Magnus

In his introduction to an edition of Lélia, Sand’s biographer André Maurois observes that Magnus
is a ‘sorte de Claude Frollo’,1 similarly led to madness and murder by carnal desires; and indeed,
Sand would certainly have read Hugo’s novel.2 However, even beyond any inspiration that
Hugo’s character might have provided, parallels in Hugo’s and Sand’s treatments of the priest in
love would be expected from their similar stances as Romantics challenging repressive
institutions as well as social and literary traditions during early 1830s. Beyond the similarities,
there are also substantial differences in the portrayals of Frollo and Magnus, for Sand’s personal
situation at the time of writing of her novel diverged from Hugo’s: as a woman writer struggling
to make her mark (and her living) in a patriarchal society, she was strongly affected by and
questioning gender inequality. However, such is the versatility of the priest-in-love character that
Sand as a woman writer was equally attracted to it as a literary device for embodying her own
conflicts and concerns. Below, I will firstly move fairly quickly through those aspects of
Magnus’s characterization as a repressed priest which echo Frollo’s and which reflect similarities
in Hugo’s and Sand’s outlooks as fellow Romantics. The primary focus of my analysis will rather
be on the alternate and original direction that Sand takes her portrayal of le prêtre amoureux,
which emphasizes Magnus’s desperate battle to hold onto his faith in the face of the devastating
challenge that Sand’s unconventional heroine Lélia poses to his beliefs.

Romantic concerns and criticism of the institutional Church

In her representation of Magnus as the embodiment of a battle between the conflicting poles of
sexual desire and love for God, Sand shares Hugo’s Romantic conception of man as both a carnal
and spiritual being. Magnus characterizes his own dual condition this way when he talks about
his spiritual yearning ‘qui m’a séparé de la terre pour me faire conquérir le ciel’ (278). Indeed, for
some critics, the Romantic duality of man as both earthly and spiritual is the novel’s main
unifying theme, and thus Magnus’s struggle can be viewed as one facet of Sand’s exploration of
this human condition in all her characters in Lélia, each engaging in their own way with the
tension that this duality engenders.3 However, Sand, like Hugo, warns against privileging the

1
Andre Maurois, ‘Préface’ to George Sand, Lélia (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1958), p. 18.
2
Although Sand had reservations about what she considered to be Hugo’s harshness and boldness of style
and tone in Notre-Dame de Paris, she admired the novel’s poetic evocation of medieval Paris (Horace
(Paris: Hetzel, 1842), pp. 29-30; see also HV, II, 114).
3
See Grant, ‘George Sand’s Lélia and the Tragedy of Dualism’, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 19: 4
(Summer 1991), 499-516; also Wendy Ann Ryden, ‘The Divided Self in Lélia: The Effects of Dualism on
the Feminine Psyche’, The World of George Sand. Proceedings of the 7th George Sand Conference, Oct.

41
spiritual at the expense of the physical. Lélia voices Sand’s condemnation of the celibacy law
when she tells Magnus that his Catholic conditioning, which casts down ‘les joies légitimes’ in
the name of sin, has ruined his potential to love: ‘tu ne pourrais pas connaître l’amour, tu le
prendrais toujours pour le crime’ (323). Sand underlines the importance of man’s embrace of his
physical dimension along with the spiritual with her positive portrayal of the prostitute Pulchérie,
Lélia’s sister, whose life of healthy, sensual enjoyment and contentment contrast with Magnus’s
fruitless asceticism and agonies of self-denial. Whether denial of the body is actually God’s will
is questioned by other characters in Lélia. When Magnus claims that God will surely favour those
who have mortified the flesh and prayed in tears rather than lived a sensual life of sin (276),
Sténio challenges him: ‘Qu’en savez-vous, mon père? […] Tout ce qui est contraire aux lois de la
nature est peut-être abominable devant le Seigneur’ (276)4 and Lélia questions the validity of the
ideal of Christian asceticism that she tries to follow in a ruined monastery.5
Similarly to Hugo, and using the Gothic tradition as a starting point, Sand characterizes
Magnus’s emotional conflict with negative psychological and physical manifestations that result
from his enforced celibacy. Magnus describes his situation with a metaphor of imprisonment
borrowed from Hugo’s Frollo: ‘j’étais enchaîné au pied de l’autel’ (83). Like Frollo, Magnus is
an unusually passionate man, with a force of youth that is concentrated into irrepressible physical
desires: ‘cette dévorante énergie du sang, qui colore le visage et qui brûle le crâne’ (272). The
priest’s internal life of emotion is lived at an accelerated rate (274) and expresses itself in
physical signs of premature decay. At the start of the novel Magnus is presented as ‘le grand et
beau prêtre irlandais’ (64), but as Magnus’s suffering due to his forbidden passion for Lélia
develops, there are frequent references to symptoms of aging: withered cheeks (67), baldness and
wrinkled face (272), and feeble figure and frail arms (277). Near the end of the novel, Magnus is
so changed that Lélia does not recognize in the bald, stooped monk the young, proud priest of
only a few years before (322). His degeneration recalls Frollo’s baldness and wasting away as
well as the archdeacon’s sensation that he has aged a century in waiting for Esmeralda to appear
at La Falourdel’s (704). Like Hugo, Sand further emphasizes the destructive effects of Catholic
denial of the body by associating Magnus’s conflict with bestial, bloody and demonic images.
Magnus’s torment manifests itself in an animal ferocity: he tears at the lace of his clerical robes
(84), and the poet Sténio speaks of Magnus gnashing his teeth (286), biting his bed sheets and
devouring his entrails (289). Like Frollo who hammers his head against stone steps (732),

16-18, 1986, Hofstra University. Ed. Natalie Datlof, Jeanne Fuchs and David A. Powell. New York:
Greenwood (1991), 193-97.
4
In reference to Magnus and Sténio, Ryden explains this difficulty as follows: ‘to be asexual is to be
spiritual and thus closer to God, yet to be asexual is to be inhuman and to challenge God’ (p. 194).
5
‘Cette prétendue élévation de l’esprit humain, peut-être que Dieu la réprouve et, au jour de la justice,
peut-être qu’il la couvrira de son mépris?’(194).

42
Magnus’s suffering is so extreme that he pounds his head on the paving stones of the church until
blood runs down his cheeks (307). By the end of the novel, Magnus’s bestial characteristics
overshadow his spiritual side: ‘L’âme était engourdie, morte peut-être’ (312). Suffering has
reduced Magnus to a hellish animal that reacts instinctively on baser impulses of jealousy, desire
or violence: ‘L’animal chagrin […] son fauve appétit de plaisir’ (312). Sand’s final mention of
Magnus emphasizes his deterioration into a bestial state, howling as one whose entrails are being
devoured by wolves (324).
Magnus also suffers vivid mental hallucinations as a result of his internal conflict. Their
stylized, biblical quality recalls tales such as the temptation of St. Anthony, and they reflect his
traditional Catholic outlook of the body as evil and its corollary, woman as temptress. As critic
Gustave Planche noted, Magnus’s character represents ‘la superstition’ as well as ‘le désir
comprimé’: for Magnus, as for Frollo, the struggle of the spirit over physical desire is a battle
between God and the devil, the latter embodied in Lélia (77, 80).6 Haunted by the phantom Lélia
who violates the sanctity of the altar with her ‘infernales caresses’ (80), Magnus feels that his
soul is ‘enchaînée par un pouvoir infernal’ and that Lélia is a trap set for him by the devil (86).
Magnus’s conviction that Lélia is a demonic seductress leads to conflicting feelings towards her:
‘je suis aussi près de la haine que de l’amour’ (322). Like Hugo, Sand explores how Magnus’s
demonization of women intensifies his divided psyche. Most frequently, Magnus’s visual
distortions embody a seductive spectre of Lélia, her ‘double’. Richard Grant suggests that
Magnus’s perception of two Lélias reflects the priest’s psychic split into the spiritual and the
sensual.7 Due to Magnus’s fear of his sexual self, his visions of ‘l’autre Lélia’ appear in negative
guise as an evil seductress: ‘c’était un monstre hideux, une harpie, un spectre; et pourtant c’était
bien la même Lélia; c’était seulement son autre moitié!’ (83). Magnus describes how he sees
Lélia’s phantom everywhere and in different guises: as a floating shadow come to seize him; a
spectre hiding in the carpet of his prie-dieu, his hourglass, his window; or even a voluptuous
courtesan lying on his bed (85).
As with Frollo’s mad visions, Magnus’s hallucinations are an expression of a spiritual as well
as psychological anguish, reflecting the hell that Magnus feels inside him. At Lélia’s deathbed,
the scene turns into one of Gothic horror in Magnus’s mind: roses change into writhing snakes,
walls are stained in blood, vases of perfume fill with tears, lamps vomit flames, and Lélia’s
deathbed turns into a burning stove (79). Magnus believes that his delusions are deeper insights
and revelations that are hidden to the ordinary man; as a priest he is acquainted with ‘les choses
du ciel et de la terre’ (81). Thus when Magnus’s mind substitutes the reality of the white, rose-
filled room where Lélia is dying with hellish hallucinations, he believes that he is suddenly seeing

6
Cited in LR, p. xxv.
7
Grant, ‘George Sand’s Lélia and the Tragedy of Dualism’, p. 507.

43
clearly (79).8 However, similarly to Frollo’s fevered visions, Magnus’s hallucinations of hell and
a demonic Lélia represent a false sight that leads to destruction, not transcendence. Magnus’s
final insane vision of Lélia as a satanic temptress, when he thinks he is seeing her truly, has tragic
consequences: having completely lost his grip on reality, he strangles her.
Sand’s depiction of Magnus’s physical degeneration and his negative hallucinations is part of
her overall condemnation, like Hugo’s, of what she saw as the spiritual bankruptcy of the
institutional Catholic Church. Sand felt the Church, with its political connections to repressive
government, was not championing ideals of freedom and fraternity that for her were, already at
an early age, so strongly associated with religious belief: ‘l’esprit libéral devenait pour moi
synonyme de sentiment religieux’.9 Sand’s criticism of the Church is summed up by Kristina
Wingård Vareille when she notes that Magnus represents ‘le catholicisme irrémédiablement
mort’: a religion ‘réduite à des formules sans vie et sans sens, incapables de consoler les hommes
qui souffrent’.10 In Lélia’s ‘deathbed’ scene, Sand symbolically enacts the search of Romantics
such as Hugo and herself for a new spiritual power that would replace the dying religion and
guide France toward its future of liberty, equality and fraternity. Here, Sand assembles her
characters, each representing a different outlook, so that Lélia may consider various alternatives
for spiritual support.11 Magnus, as the Church’s representative, ends up by damning Lélia on her
deathbed.12 Magnus’s spiritual inadequacy is further underlined by Sand later, when the priest
fails to save Sténio from suicide because he fears breaking a petty monastery rule (79). Echoing
Claude Frollo’s self-reproach for the death of his brother Jehan, Magnus is told that God will
accuse him: ‘Caïn, qu’as-tu fait de ton frère?’ (306). Similarly to Hugo’s, Sand’s underlying
criticism of the Church’s failure to preach a brotherhood of humanity reflects political concerns
of the early 1830s. At an early age, Sand already associated ideals of brotherhood and freedom
with religious belief: ‘l’esprit libéral devenait pour moi synonyme de sentiment religieux’.13 Like
Hugo during the early July Monarchy, she viewed the institutional Church, with its connections
to reactionary monarchy fortified during Charles X’s regime, as failing to promote revolutionary
values of fraternité, liberté and égalité. By 1833, the disconnect between the fraternal spirit of
the July Revolution and the reality of Louis-Philippe’s increasingly conservative government had
become acute, further heightening the political resonance of Sand’s criticism through Magnus of

8
Certainly, as Reboul has noted (LR, p. 81, note 2) Sand has incorporated a germ of insight into Magnus’s
hallucinatory perceptions that Lélia is double, since Lélia says herself that her spirit has been completely
divorced from her body (67).
9
HV, I, 1053.
10
Wingård, pp. 159-60.
11
Wingård, pp. 162-63; Naginski, George Sand: Writing for her Life, pp. 123-24.
12
His actions are in stark contrast to the ability of the priests-in-love of Lamartine or Sainte-Beuve to give
the women they love last rites.
13
HV, I, 1053.

44
the Church’s spiritual and humanitarian shortcomings. After Magnus’s failure to offer her priestly
comfort, Lélia rejects Catholicism as well as dismissing the doctor’s science and Trenmor’s
discouraging reason, and then turns to the poet Sténio to invest him with the new sacerdoce: ‘Où
en est le siècle? Le savant nie, le prêtre doute. Voyons si le poète existe encore.’14 Ultimately,
however, Sténio will not prove equal to the task, indicating that the evolution of Sand’s ideas
about the new type of poet needed to lead society were still developing, and perhaps even stalled,
in this dark and turbulent period in her life; but what is certain is that in their depictions of Frollo
and Magnus, both Sand and Hugo thoroughly reject any possibility that such guidance will come
from the Church.

The challenge of an unconventional woman

Beyond the similarities in the two authors’ portrayals, Sand makes a marked departure from
Hugo’s approach in her treatment of le prêtre amoureux by using this figure as a device to
explore the treatment of, and opportunities afforded to, women during the early July Monarchy.
She incorporates into Magnus’s conflict and his interaction with Lélia a protest against gender
inequality that is notably missing from other treatments of the priest-in-love of the period, not
least Hugo’s. Sand’s protest originates in her unusual heroine Lélia, the woman Magnus loves,
who resists her role as desired object: she is a powerful presence to which Magnus and the other
male characters react. This is in notable contrast to almost all priest-in-love portrayals of the
nineteenth century by male authors, in which the woman’s literary function in the novel is as an
object of male desire that does not challenge stereotypes of women: Lamartine’s Laurence,
Gautier’s Clarimonde, Zola’s Albine, and Marcel Prévost’s Jeanne are either naïve victims or
temptresses.15 Although Hugo’s portrayal of Frollo includes implicit criticism of Frollo’s
demonization of Esmeralda and provides important commentary on social inequality,
Esmeralda’s main role in the text is, like the others above, also as the object of various men’s
desires. She offers no intellectual or conscious challenge to Frollo’s beliefs or view of women,
and her resistance to the priest’s demonization of her is instinctive rather than reasoned. Lélia, on
the other hand, is an exceptionally intelligent, free-thinking woman as well as physically
attractive, and who actively questions the world and her place in it. A writer and poet, Lélia is

14
Wingård suggests that Lélia’s reproach to Magnus on her sickbed stems from her belief that the Catholic
priesthood had become a mere profession, empty of spiritual conviction (p. 163). This view, similar to
Hugo’s, echoes Stendhal’s treatment of the theme in Le Rouge et le Noir: Stendhal portrays the priesthood
as a career path that those from lower levels of society saw as one of their only options for advancement.
15
Simone de Beauvoir, in her study of the myth of woman in works by male authors in Le Deuxième Sexe,
2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), I, 321-94, concludes that even for a writer such as Stendhal who portrays
the woman as an equal to man, it is only in her relation to man and his search for fulfilment that the female
character exists. She can appear only as ‘l’Autre’ through which the male subject fulfils himself, and
woman’s sole earthly destiny is to love man ( I, 393-94).

45
able to express herself articulately, and it is her thoughts, desires, and spiritual anguish that form
the backbone of Sand’s novel. Lélia’s exceptional status as a thinker is acknowledged by the
doctor at her sickbed: ‘vous n’êtes pas une personne ordinaire, vous êtes philosophe…’ (67).
Sand’s characterization of Lélia changes the direction in which Magnus’s conflict between
body and soul develops. We note that Hugo presents Frollo’s battle to adhere to his priestly vows
mainly in flashback and in the past, and by the main action of the novel, Frollo has already
decided to risk damnation and taste the forbidden fruit. Thus his initial struggle against his desire
shifts to a struggle with Esmeralda as he tries to force her to love him despite her resistance. But
Magnus is so awed, intimidated and even threatened by Sand’s powerfully challenging heroine
Lélia that he hardly dares to pursue her; he even fears her. In consequence, his main struggle is
with his Catholic God, desperately striving for His support as he reacts to the overwhelming
challenge that Lélia represents to his faith and the patriarchal Church. Therefore the theme of
unrequited love that Hugo chooses to develop in Frollo’s conflict is muted in Sand’s portrayal,
overshadowed by her urgency in addressing woman’s unequal place in society. For Magnus
experiences Lélia’s rejection only fleetingly, since he only ventures to approach Lélia in the final
scene, and his few brief impulses of jealous rage or violence against his rival Sténio are not even
carried out (83, 299, 321).
Instead, Sand showcases Magnus’s battle to cling to his faith, and the priest violently resists
his forbidden attraction to the exceptional heroine Lélia for almost the entire length of the novel.
The author highlights Magnus’s attempt to resist desire by incorporating in him a strong spiritual
yearning: ‘cette passion ardente qui me dévorait pour toi, mon Dieu, et qui parle si haut dans une
âme dévorée d’autres passions terribles’ (278). Magnus begs the phantom Lélia to leave him so
that he can pray, and struggles with this vision until he falls down exhausted (84-85). Such is his
determination to resist that, unlike Frollo who gives free rein to lascivious imaginings, Magnus
claims that even in his dreams when Lélia lays voluptuously on his bed, she leaves unmolested:
‘j’ai courageusement résisté, j’ai usé mon âme, j’ai épuisé ma vie à ce combat et je n’ai jamais
cédé’ (86). When cruelly challenged by Sténio that he is losing the battle since his flesh can still
overwhelm his spirit, Magnus voices his determination to conquer his carnal desires: ‘J’irai
jusqu’au bout; […] j’accomplirai mon sacrifice’ (278). Unlike Frollo, who is never shown
praying, Magnus continually addresses God directly, alternating between supplication and
reproach. Feeling abandoned, he despairingly rails at God for not sending him a sign or miracle to
uphold his wavering faith, and ends up blaspheming by denying God’s reality ‘Oh! vous n’êtes
que mensonge et vain orgueil de l’homme, vous n’êtes rien!’ (87). Magnus’s determined attempts
to cling to his Catholic faith do not stem from greater fortitude than Frollo, however, but rather
reflect his terrified reaction to the challenge to his beliefs posed by Lélia.
For such is Lélia’s destabilising effect on Magnus that he experiences devastating doubts as to
the existence of God or an afterlife. This is in contrast to Frollo: although Hugo is sometimes
46
ambiguous as to how far Frollo has strayed from his belief in God, Frollo’s obsession with
Esmeralda does not lead him to an acute crisis of belief or a conscious questioning of the
Church’s teachings.16 Indeed, Sand’s portrayal diverges from most others of the period by
portraying the priest’s bouts of atheism, highlighting her unconventional representation of the
priest/woman relationship. Magnus holds Lélia directly responsible for his loss of faith: ‘Que
n’ai-je pas fait pour toi! A quelles pensées terribles et impies n’ai-je pas ouvert mon sein!’ (84).
The priest first feels a test to his Catholic faith in Lélia’s sceptical demeanour in the church: Lélia
refuses to kneel or lower her eyes, leans her elbows on the sculpted angels, and makes no sign of
the cross (10, 12). Sténio notes the strong effect she has on Magnus: ‘Il m’a semblé que ce prêtre
pâlissait, que sa main tremblante ne pouvait plus soutenir le calice et que sa voix s’éteignait dans
sa vaste poitrine’ (14).17 The undermining effect of Lélia on his Catholic faith is so strong that
Magnus then momentarily renounces God (84). At Lélia’s sickbed where Magnus is summoned
to give last rites, his faith falters completely in the face of more direct questioning of his spiritual
authority from Lélia. Magnus tells the apparently dying woman that she is luckier than he, the
priest, because she will find out if God exists (67). He claims that the doubts caused by Lélia’s
presence are even more destructive than his sensual visions of her, and are almost a physical
violation: ‘c’était le doute, c’était l’athéisme qui pénétrait en moi comme un venin’ (86).
Thoughts of Lélia even cause Magnus uncertainty about the existence of an afterlife, and he
agonizes on whether it is worth denying himself the pleasures of the physical world: ‘les choses
que nous voyons existent; la femme qu’on peut étreindre dans ses bras n’est pas une ombre. Moi
je n’ai que l’espoir d’une autre vie, et qui m’en répondra?’ (86-87).
Sand’s portrayal of Lélia as an exceptional, multi-faceted human being who consciously
resists the role society prescribes for her is reflected in how Magnus views her. For Frollo, it is
Esmeralda’s physical beauty that attracts him, and in his eyes, sets her up as a rival to God: she
symbolizes ‘la femme, le désir, le sexe’.18 But Magnus’s attraction is not only to Lélia’s
extraordinary physical beauty, but also to her lofty intellect and spirit, a double appeal which is

16
When asked by Tourangeau what he believes in, Frollo’s answer ‘Credo in Deum’ is qualified by a
sombre smile that seems to belie his words (614). But clearly some form of religious belief remains with
Frollo throughout the novel, even if it is simply based on a superstitious fear of a God of damnation and
Hell: near the novel’s end, Frollo tells Esmeralda that he has betrayed his God to be worthy of her Hell, and
addresses God on how he is to be judged for his role in his brother’s death (837).
17
This scene echoes Manon’s destabilising appearance to Des Grieux during his lecture at Saint-Sulpice in
Abbé Prévost’s Manon Lescaut, as well as prefiguring Clarimonde on the balcony during Romuald’s
ordination in Gautier’s La Morte amoureuse. However, in Sand’s portrayal, Lélia is not seeking to seduce
Magnus or take him away from God through her physical charms as are Manon or Clarimonde; she is
simply viewing the church service as a spectacle and thus indirectly challenging the priest through her
attitude of superiority and troubling indifference.
18
Laforgue, pp. 90-91.

47
clearly defined since Magnus sees her as ‘double et complète, femme et idée, espoir et réalité,
corps et âme, don et promesse’ (82).19 The dual attraction to both Lélia’s earthly beauty and to
her non-corporeal side is further confirmed when, as Magnus watches Lélia leave the church, he
follows her not just ‘avec mes yeux’ but also ‘avec mon âme’ (83). The imposing authority of this
brilliant, aloof woman, whose apparent pride and even insolence are a challenge to priestly
power, commands Magnus’s love: ‘Oh qu’elle était grande, qu’elle était imposante! Comme elle
planait avec dédain sur eux tous! Comme je l’aimais alors […]’ (82).
However, Magnus feels an ambivalence towards this unconventional woman that transforms
her inner beauty into negative attributes, much as it does her physical beauty: ‘beauté, c’est-à-dire
tentation; espoir, c’est-à-dire épreuve; bienfait, c’est-à-dire mensonge’ (81). While Magnus
recognizes Lélia’s inner qualities of exceptional intellect and spirituality, he nonetheless
continues to view her from a male perspective that sees a woman as an object to be possessed:
‘vous ne la possédiez pas’ or ‘Lélia ne vous a pas appartenu non plus’ (82). Magnus’s desire to
penetrate and infiltrate Lélia’s mind and soul as well as her body has overtones of sexual
possession: ‘Avez-vous jamais saisi son âme?’(82). Magnus is unable to relate to Lélia as an
equal to man, but only through the traditional myth of woman in which she is either degraded as
an object of temptation or exalted as an object of worship.20 Observing how Lélia’s presence
visibly disturbs Magnus’s composure as it does his own, Sténio muses: ‘…a-t-il cru voir en vous
quelque chose de surnaturel, une puissance évoquée du sein de l’abîme ou une révélation envoyée
du ciel?’ (13). On his knees to a spectre of Lélia, Magnus describes how he burns incense to her
and offers her profane worship in his heart. Not surprisingly, when the idol does not satisfy him
or calm his desires, Magnus reproaches Lélia: ‘Ne t’ai-je pas placée dans le ciel à côté de Dieu
même, demandeuse insatiable?’ (84).
Magnus’s deification of Lélia also can be read as a symptom of the inability of the
institutional Catholic Church and its rituals to provide him with spiritual support in the face of a
new, questioning age in which female agency was starting to become more apparent.21 Magnus,
feeling abandoned by his Catholic God in a changing world, is not looking only to the satisfaction
of his physical desires in Lélia; he hopes confusedly that she will heal him (‘…en vain, j’ai jeûné
et prié, Dieu ne veut pas me guérir. Il faut que tu sois à moi; quand je serai apaisé, je serai guéri’
[322]). Lélia explains to him his error in wishing to find comfort in indulging in his physical
desires with her: ‘tu crois qu’il te serait possible de calmer tes désirs par la jouissance. Insensé

19
Grant, ‘George Sand’s Lélia and the Tragedy of Dualism’, p. 507; Ryden, p. 193.
20
See Beauvoir, I, 239-320.
21
After the freedoms that seemed possible for women in the aftermath of the French Revolution,
Restoration France was again a hostile environment for feminist protest; but during the July Monarchy of
the 1830s, female authors such as Sand were continuing to pose the challenges of earlier women writers
such as Olympe de Gouges and Madame de Staël.

48
puéril!’(323). She rejects Magnus’s imputation of such power to her by reminding the priest to
address himself to God: ‘son amour est le seul qui puisse consoler’ (322). On this occasion and
others, Lélia, and thus Sand, warns against setting Lélia up as object of idolisation.22
Not only does Lélia’s spirited intelligence represent an additional attraction and threat to
Magnus that he can only deal with by objectifying her, but she is also a problematic woman due
to her ability to move freely in society and live as she pleases. Independently wealthy, Lélia is
accorded consideration from the highest ranks of society (142). She is thus far less vulnerable to
victimization than Esmeralda, a social outcast. Although Lélia suffers a lack of opportunity in a
society where a woman’s role is limited (as her sister Pulchérie observes, to the three roles of
‘amante, courtisane et mère’ [153]), she retains her independence in personal and societal
relationships, occupying an enviable position of liberty in comparison with Sand’s heroines from
previous novels, Indiana and Valentine. Sand’s characterization of Lélia as free from male
authority would have been particularly provoking in post-Napoleonic France, where women were
generally subject not only to the legal authority of a father or husband, but even more importantly
for this study, to the moral and spiritual authority of the Catholic priest. Indeed, the extent of the
influence exerted by Catholic priests on women was often criticized by anticlerical writers during
the period, who saw confession not only as an opportunity for a priest to seduce a woman, but
even more crucially as a means for a priest to interfere in family life through his spiritual
authority over her.23 Lélia’s independence reverses the traditional dynamics of power between
male cleric and woman and heightens the challenge that she poses to Magnus and patriarchal
authority of the Church.
In Lélia, Sand turns the tables on Hugo’s characterization of archdeacon Frollo’s compelling
and superior intelligence, for in her novel it is Lélia who exercises her natural authority over
Magnus.24 In their confrontations, Lélia dominates Magnus with her composed, sceptical, and
mocking demeanour, a superiority that Sand accentuates by characterizing Magnus as a weak and
timid man (286, 301). Certainly, the initial outward authority of Magnus’s imposing priestly
appearance and manner, seemingly capable of inspiring faith, respect and even awe (11, 64), is
soon exposed as a sham.25 Magnus admits to Lélia that her power is superior to his (65) and

22
Ryden offers other examples on how Lélia rebels against idolization by men, p. 194.
23
Jules Michelet outlined the dangers he saw in the priest-confessant relationship in Du prêtre, de la
femme, de la famille (1845). See also Rémond, p. 26 and Corbin, pp. 556-558; Sand herself would later
take up this theme in her novel Mademoiselle la Quintinie (1863).
24
Frollo is described as: ‘Une intelligence haute et profonde, puissante et supérieur’ (605), who is
accustomed to dominating others: ‘Gringoire le suivait, habitué à lui obéir, comme tout ce qui avait
approché une fois cet homme plein d’ascendant’ (777).
25
Wingård sees the breakdown and withering of Magnus’s initial ‘prêtre idéal’ appearance throughout the
novel as reflecting Sand’s view that the outward trappings of pomp of the institutional Catholic Church
masked a lack of true spirituality, p. 162.

49
concedes her greater reasoning ability: ‘Madame […] Si j’avais osé faire le prêtre avec vous,
n’auriez-vous pas achevé de me rendre incrédule?’(67). How much Sand changes the balance of
power between the priest and the woman becomes evident when we compare Hugo’s and Sand’s
novels: whereas in Notre-Dame de Paris it is Esmeralda who is terrified at the sight of Frollo
(‘Oh! dit-elle tout bas en frissonnant, c’est encore lui! le prêtre!’ [744]), here it is the priest who
reacts with fear when he recognizes his desired object (‘en reculant avec terreur’ [65]). In the face
of Magnus’s deeply misogynist fears and incoherent denunciation of her, Lélia responds with
laughter, with taunts (‘approche, prêtre, et parle-moi de Dieu […] n’en as-tu pas la puissance?’
[65]) or even with sarcasm: (‘voilà un prêtre consolant!’ [66]). Lélia has the power to summon or
dismiss Magnus (as well as a host of other men) from her sickbed and Magnus must beg her
permission to leave her (67). Even in the final scene, Magnus, though dangerously crazed, is
momentarily intimidated into silence by Lélia, who judges him a ‘mauvais prêtre’ and tells him to
abase his pride (322-23). Unfortunately, the insane Magnus finds Lélia’s attitude of calm
superiority, which he takes for mockery, deeply provoking and he attacks her.
Not only is Magnus unable to respond intelligently to Lélia’s verbal challenges, but her effect
on him severely disrupts his voice, especially when he speaks as a representative of the Church.26
Magnus mixes Lélia’s name with that of the Virgin and angels (84); he confusedly adds a verse
not in the liturgy (268-69); and he can only mutter instead of pray (299-300). When Magnus sees
a hallucination of Lélia, words are frozen on his lips and his tongue vainly searches for a formula
of exorcism. He claims that she even makes him forget the name of God (86). Faced with her
presence, Magnus loses his voice completely (‘Le prêtre garda le silence et resta terrifié’ [86]).
The superstitious Magnus’s inarticulate inability to counter Lélia’s reasoned arguments not only
reflects the threat that Lélia’s questioning, reasoning mind poses to him, but also incorporates a
criticism by Sand of a monastic rule that teaches its members submission (322), and she suggests
that monastic life has withered Magnus’s intelligence (299). Here, Sand is reflecting a general
perception during the period that the intellectual level of the clergy, with recruits increasingly
from less elevated ranks of society, was low; Lamennais would say in 1828: ‘Jamais depuis bien
des siècles le clergé, pris en masse, n’a été aussi ignorant qu’aujourd’hui’.27
The novel’s ending would suggest that Magnus and the patriarchal church have the last word:
when formulas of exorcism prove useless, Magnus strangles Lélia with a rosary, so tightly that it
must be cut off. The use of this Catholic symbol to silence the independent woman is clearly

26
I note that Esmeralda, who is less intellectually challenging, does not have a similar effect on articulate
Frollo. In their encounters, the discourse is one-way as Frollo subjects Esmeralda to lengthy monologues
and tells her not to interrupt him, and Esmeralda seldom responds with more than repeated short phrases.
While Frollo’s internal turmoil causes him to utter unintelligible phrases into the plainchant on occasion
(609), he is practically never at a loss for words with which to try to win Esmeralda or manipulate others.
27
Cited in Hamon, p. 60.

50
significant within Sand’s narrative of a woman constrained by the patriarchal society of 1830s
France. Indeed, Eileen Boyd Sivert notes the ways in which Magnus tries to negate Lélia’s
presence, and sees his avoidance and murder of her as an attempt to put the disruptive female
back in her ‘non-place’ in society and eliminate the danger she poses to the social order.28 But
Magnus’s own capacity for meaningful human speech is also destroyed: the last heard of him by
the villagers are ‘des hurlements effroyables’ (324). Moreover, reflecting the dynamics of their
relationship throughout the novel, Magnus’s elimination of this problematic woman is less of a
definitive victory than it appears, especially when compared to Esmeralda’s victimhood through
her horrific death by hanging. Even when dying, Lélia still manages to bless God for reuniting
her with Sténio, and she dies turned towards the sunrise (324). It even paradoxically seems as if
Magnus is doing Lélia’s will by killing her, since he fulfils her wish of a spiritual reunion with
Sténio. While critics such as Naginski, similarly to Sivert, see Magnus’s murder of Lélia as her
failure to establish ‘une parole féminine’ in a male-dominated society, this reading does not
consider the significant collapse of ‘l’ordre établi’ that has conversely been affected by Lélia
through the total breakdown of Magnus’s authority and voice – and which, tellingly, is not
restored at the end of the novel with Lélia’s death.29 Through Magnus, Sand complicates and
intensifies the novel’s protest against a societal order that constrains women, portraying its
damaging effects not only on women but on the men who uphold it.

Priest as representative and victim of the Church: reader reaction

Sand’s condemnation of the institutional Church in her portrayal of Magnus is intensified by her
criticism of what she perceived as its misogyny and patriarchal bias. But like Hugo in his
nuanced treatment of Frollo, Sand raises Magnus above a vehicle for commentary through
techniques that complicate the reader’s judgement of the character. While contemporary critics
accused Sand of an attack on orthodox Catholicism and blasphemy in Lélia, in a defence in a later
preface to the novel in 1834, she gives an insight into how Magnus was led to transgress that
counters our perception of him as the ‘villain’:

Que la foi religieuse qui suffit à consoler les âmes énergiques attise les feux d’un cœur faible
au lieu de les éteindre, et pousse au meurtre un prêtre égaré par le jeûne et la veille, est-ce
donc un si grand étonnement pour la piété de ce temps-ci?30

28
Eileen Boyd Sivert, p. 51.
29
Naginski, ‘Les deux Lélia: une réécriture exemplaire’, in Revue des sciences humaines, 226 (April-June
1992), 65-84 (p. 68). Although Naginski considers Magnus only in opposition to Lélia’s quest for a voice,
in George Sand: Writing for her Life, she observes that ‘the male voice of poetry’ in Sténio is also silenced
(p. 137).
30
‘Romans et Nouvelles’, Revue des Deux Mondes, 2 (April 1834) 110-16.

51
Thus there are mitigating circumstances for Magnus’s actions: he can be understood as a victim,
both of his own weak nature and of the dehumanising effects of the institution he represents.
Lélia herself suggests to Magnus that he was never suited to the priesthood, especially of a
dogmatic religion: ‘je ne vous aurais pas conseillé d’être prêtre. Votre organisation devait vous
rendre impossibles ces devoirs rigides’ (322). Thus like Hugo, Sand encourages an understanding
of, even at times sympathy for, her priest figure as subject to possibly overwhelming social and
innate forces; this understanding is, again like Hugo’s, born out of her identification with aspects
of the character. While it would be natural to associate Sand with her heroine Lélia, Sand stated
that part of herself was in all of her characters, including Magnus. Writing how the characters of
Lélia were linked with different stages of her life, Sand states that:

Magnus, c’est mon enfance […]. Magnus, avec ses irréalisables besoins, avec sa destinée de
fer et son éternel appétit de l’impossible, représente encore une douleur énergique,
combattue, réprimée, que j’ai subie longtemps dans sa force et dont je ressens encore parfois
les lointaines atteintes.31

By ‘mon enfance’ she refers to Catholicism as a youthful phase in the evolution of her personal
religious beliefs, for she had struggled deeply with the question of whether Christian worship
required a renunciation of the world and its attractions.32 Magnus’s determined struggle between
ascetic religious devotion and repressed passion was thus not only one that Sand had lived
through herself at an early age, but that still echoed within her. Sand further infuses Magnus’s
conflict with her intensely-lived experience of despair in the spring of 1833, when
disillusionment with life and society led her to a metaphysical crisis so profound that there are
hints that she contemplated suicide.33 As she would reflect in 1854: ‘Le livre a été écrit […] sous
le poids d’une souffrance intérieure quasi mortelle, souffrance toute morale, toute philosophique
et religieuse’.34 Sand’s doubts in God’s existence during this period are embodied not only in
Lélia’s crises of belief (181, 196), but also in Magnus. The priest’s cry to God in the face of his
ungovernable desires for Lélia, ‘vous avez abandonné votre peuple!’ (87), expresses Sand’s sense
of an absent or uncaring God at a low in her spiritual journey, and indeed that of an entire
generation searching for belief in the face of the breakdown of Catholicism as a spiritual

31
Sketches and Hints, in Œuvres autobiographiques, II, 615.
32
Sand, HV, p. 759; see also Hamon, pp. 14-16. As an adolescent in a convent, Sand underwent a spiritual
epiphany, and she developed a Catholic faith characterized by adherence to ascetic practices, even wishing
to become a nun.
33
Wingård, p. 123.
34
‘Notice de 1854’, in LR, p. 357.

52
authority.35 It is arguably Sand’s incorporation of her own experience into Magnus’s character
that gives his struggle its universal and moving quality.
Compassion for Magnus as a human being is stimulated by Sand through sympathetic
references to the priest (‘le moine infortuné’ [216]; ‘le pauvre prêtre’ [298], ‘pauvre moine’
[323]) and through her depiction of him as a self-confessed ‘homme faible’ (286), whose ability
to resist temptation does not match his resolution. Sand makes frequent references to qualities of
Magnus that induce pity: his timidity (such as ‘une voix tremblante’ and ‘un regard timide’ [84]);
his fearfulness (‘regard effaré’ [298]), his somewhat touchingly childlike nature (‘la sotte frayeur
d’un enfant’ [84]), and his need for reassurance (‘ses deux mains serrant avec force la main de
l’homme sage’ [279]). In order to further our understanding of Magnus’s situation, Sand allows
him a lengthy, confessional monologue in which he explains the nature and development of his
obsession with Lélia (77-87). In a similar technique to Hugo, initially Sand shows the priest’s
turmoil only from the outside through a suspenseful withholding of the ‘secret’ of Magnus’s
forbidden sexual desires. Thus the priest’s eventual confession of his obsession and suffering to
Sténio shares the strong impact, although not the poetic passion, of Frollo’s declaration to
Esmeralda. Sand uses another ‘confession’ to temper the reader’s censure of the priest’s actions
further: Magnus’s contrite mea culpa of his spiritual failures to his prior (304-305), which
contrasts with Frollo’s unrepentant attitude: ‘tout ce qu’il avait fait, il était prêt à le faire encore’
(750). Although Sand criticizes through Magnus the selfishness of an ascetic religion turned
inwards rather than outwards to help others, she still shows him as having some flashes of
concern for his fellow man. Magnus worries about his fitness to absolve other souls (86), and
feels a generous anxiety for his rival Sténio’s spiritual and physical welfare (although he
ultimately fails to help him due to his fear of violating monastery rules) (87).
But while Sand’s portrayal of Magnus’s childlike timidity and capacity for self-reproach
perhaps elicits greater indulgent pity than Hugo’s portrayal of Frollo, there is no hint of the
perverse grandeur of evil that we find in the archdeacon’s downfall from good man to demon.
Frollo energetically decides to risk all in order to possess Esmeralda once he has lost his battle
with desire, but Magnus is unable to bring himself to act on his impulses, good or bad. He is
frozen in a halfway state: ‘Oh! […] Satan ne voulait ni me prendre ni me lâcher’ (87). Magnus’s
hesitations are symptomatic of a faith based on fear of the world,36 for his strong will to resist his
desires as compared to Frollo’s pursuit of Esmeralda reflects the greater threat that Lélia

35
Sand emphasizes that she was not alone in having religious doubts during this period: ‘Ceux qui liront
plus tard l’histoire de ma vie intellectuelle ne s’étonneront plus que le doute ait été pour moi une chose si
sérieuse et une crise si terrible. […] Portant je n’ai pas été une exception aux yeux de tous. Beaucoup ont
souffert devant le problème de la vie […]. Je persiste à croire que le doute est un droit sans lequel la foi ne
serait pas une victoire ou un mérite’. ‘Notice de 1854’, in LR, pp. 357-58.
36
Wingård, p 160.

53
represents to him. Sand highlights the pathos of Magnus’s situation, rather than the tragedy, by
depicting him as sick and mentally ill rather than damned, and there are references to the idea of
Magnus being healed (322, 325). Even in his murder of Lélia, Magnus is more wretched than
culpable when compared with Frollo’s calculated destruction of Esmeralda, for the mad,
exhausted Magnus is suffering from a head injury and hallucinations. These elements allow the
reader to judge Magnus with less censure than a strong aggressor such as Frollo who uses
manipulation of others as well as violence to achieve his ends, but Magnus thus lacks Frollo’s
Byronic, anti-heroic magnetism. Furthermore, since the fearful Magnus flees Lélia and denounces
her when face-to-face with her on her sickbed, rather than pursuing her with ardent declarations
of passion like Frollo, the element of Romantic lover that we see Frollo’s portrayal – albeit in a
very dark form – is quite absent from Magnus’s characterization.
Both authors also use narrative voice and viewpoint in order to further nuance our perception
of the priest-in-love character, although each in their own way. Like Hugo, Sand steps away from
delivering an unambiguous judgment on the priest character, instead engaging the reader and
allowing him a degree of freedom of interpretation. We have seen that Hugo’s novel has a strong
unifying voice, that of the heterodiegetic narrator, who encourages the reader’s active
involvement in interpreting Frollo through a series of shifting perspectives. In her unusually-
structured novel that combines letters, monologue, reported dialogue, and third-person narrative,
a ‘narratologist’s nightmare’,37 Sand stimulates reader participation through an alternative
approach. Her polyphonic style allows the different voices of the five main characters to speak
without ever giving full authority to any one of them.38 Unlike Hugo’s novel, there is no unifying
narrator to either direct our interpretation or purposely leave ambiguity. A narrator (third-person)
only first appears well into the novel in the thirteenth chapter, but he/she does not explain or
interpret the fragmented text for the reader, provides few clues to historical time or setting and no
depictions of everyday life to orient the reader. As Margaret Waller notes, ‘no mentorlike
narrator guides the reader by the hand to contextualize the series of impassioned and portentous
outpourings with which the novel begins’.39 The text’s overall structure contributes to this sense
that the reader is left undirected, with confusing flashbacks, jumps between genres and lack of
conventional suspense, plotting and action. It has been suggested that the lack of help from the
narrator in deciphering the text creates a feeling of insecurity in the reader,40 even a ‘sense of
vertigo’.41 Yet this very uncertainty and ambiguity opens up the text for reader participation and

37
Schor, p. 57.
38
Isabelle Hoog Naginski, George Sand, Writing for her Life, pp. 118-25.
39
Margaret Waller, The Male Malady: Fictions of Impotence in the French Romantic Novel (New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1993), p. 142.
40
Godwin-Jones, p. 46.
41
Waller, p. 143.

54
engagement. From the perspective of the priest-in-love Magnus, the effect of these narrative
techniques is to actively involve the reader in deciding for himself if Magnus is a character whose
persistence against difficult odds could be admired, or who is a flawed, weak representative of a
repressive, dying institution – or indeed both at once. An attempt by the reader to reach any
definitive judgement of Magnus as a man is continually undercut by the layers of ambiguity
inherent in the novel’s polyphonic structure, in which no single viewpoint represents the ultimate
authority, and indeed the voices often contradict one another.
In Hugo’s novel, the narrator confidently directs our understanding of Frollo when he
describes flashbacks to Frollo’s youth. He stimulates sympathy with his description of young
Frollo’s capacity for tender and self-sacrificing love at the same time as alerting the reader’s
reservations with his warnings about Frollo’s obsessive nature. But Sand’s flashback to a past
humanitarian act of Magnus, in which he rescues Lélia from death by carrying her away on
horseback from a violent storm, is not described by the narrator but only referred to in passing by
Lélia and Magnus. Lélia sees the priest’s rescue of her in a negative light (‘La pitié, le zèle que
donne la foi à ceux mêmes qui manquent d’humanité lui firent trouver la force cruelle de me
sauver’ [199]) while Magnus claims that he risked his life for her (322); thus the reader is left
with ambiguity as to the value of priest’s past selfless act.
Sand’s narrative approach also has strong consequences on how we view Magnus’s agonies of
suffering, since without a directing narrator, we must rely mainly on the observations of the other
characters. Lélia, who often seems to express Sand’s own views, is unforgiving and scornful in
her judgement of Magnus, and even enjoys taunting him about the weakness of his faith (‘homme
de peu de foi’ [65]). At first Lélia seems to feel that the depth of Magnus’s suffering may make
God forgive him, but concludes that his despair is simply not heroic enough (323). Sténio is
similarly mocking and even cruel when he confronts Magnus about the monk’s failure to
extinguish desire within himself. But as Wingård points out, Lélia’s and Sténio’s harshness
towards Magnus is a reflection of their own disappointment in their search for transcendence.42
Consequently, the reader cannot fully count on them as impartial judges of Magnus, as one might
be more likely to do with a seemingly trustworthy narrator.
The most conflicting element for the reader in his interpretation of Magnus is given by
Trenmor, a reformed convict, whose suffering leads him to a calm stoicism. Since Lélia
encourages us to admire this character’s wisdom, Trenmor’s words carry a strong weight with the
reader, and surprisingly Trenmor contradicts other characters such as Lélia and Sténio who
censure Magnus. He lauds Magnus’s ‘volonté victorieuse’ and ‘inconcevable vigueur’ and praises
the way Magnus always returns to God through a sublime hope (282-83). Trenmor acknowledges
that Magnus’s Catholicism is not his own way of worship, but affirms that martyrs and heroes of

42
Wingård, p. 162.

55
all faiths and ages will applaud Magnus’s efforts. He raises Magnus’s suffering to that of a
religious martyr: ‘vous combattez encore, vaillant, infatigable, sillonné de blessures, épuisé de
sueur et de sang’, and exhorts him to continue in the name of Jesus and Socrates (283). Although
perhaps the compassionate Trenmor is simply trying to comfort the suffering priest, Trenmor’s
association of Magnus’s suffering with Christ is nonetheless significant for the reader’s
interpretation of the priest. In contrast to the reader’s increasing censure of Frollo as he descends
into ever more reprehensible actions in Hugo’s novel, is there something to admire in Magnus’s
sheer determination to keep returning to his Catholic faith after each failure, what Trenmor calls
his ‘grande persistance dans les idées’ (282)? Certainly Magnus himself dares to hope that his
sheer will to master his physical impulses, even if Catholicism is the wrong path, will be
favourably viewed by God: ‘si la parole divine a été détournée de son vrai sens […] du moins tu
me tiendras compte du désir opiniâtre, de la volonté féroce’ (278). But, as always in Sand’s open
narrative, this is countered by Sténio’s harsh response that the desire to resist without the power
to achieve counts for nothing (286).
The polyphonic form of Sand’s novel, with characters acting as counterparts and parallels to
one another, encourages us to read the priest-in-love’s personal battle relative to the other
characters’ struggles with both their social and innate constraints (Hugo’s two anankès). On a
social level, Magnus’s need to fit Lélia into a role as an object of desire puts his character in
opposition to hers, but on a human level, they share the same universal yearning for the spiritual
and the same anguish that it seems beyond reach, and which Lélia expresses as: ‘Hélas! j’ai
besoin du ciel, mais je doute’ (69). One message from Sand that seems clear is that the freedom
of choice that Lélia and others claim for themselves in trying to engage with social constraint and
the limitations of the human condition is superior to Magnus’s blind faith in dogma, his
victimhood, and his blaming of Lélia and God for his situation (86). But at the same time, such
superiority is tempered, because all of the characters in Lélia either destroy themselves and each
other through their internal tensions (Magnus, Lélia, Sténio) or their solutions for living are
achieved only by denying full and satisfying expression of one facet of themselves (Trenmor,
Pulchérie). When Lélia tells Magnus that if he had not become a priest, ‘tu aurais pu trouver le
bonheur dans la liberté’ (323), her words ring hollow in light of the dark fates of other characters
who are freer to address their internal conflicts.
The novel’s ending does not resolve these ambiguities. If one were indeed tempted to interpret
in Trenmor’s words a message by Sand that we should admire Magnus’s determination and
persistence as a man striving for the sublime, even if we condemn him as an ineffective priest,
such a positive assessment seems to be contradicted by Magnus’s murder of Lélia in the novel’s
final pages. In this light, Grant can only see the novel’s ending, with Trenmor striding off into the

56
sunrise in hopes of helping Magnus and mankind, as ironic.43 Sand’s narrative technique with its
multiple, competing voices is a very different approach to that of Hugo, whose authoritative
heterodiegetic narrator alternately strongly wields and yet subtly undercuts his own narrative
authority. Nevertheless, each author with their contrasting style equally engages and involves the
reader in making his own judgement of the priest in love, thus blurring distinctions between
villain and victim, sympathy or censure.

43
Grant, ‘George Sand’s Lélia and the Tragedy of Dualism’, pp. 512-13. Yet as further evidence of the
novel’s openness of interpretation, Goodwin-Jones conversely sees the ending as symbolically hopeful due
to the apparent reunion of Lélia’s and Sténio’s spirits after death, p. 45.

57
 Conclusion

It is not entirely surprising that previous critical studies of the priest in love have focussed on
Frollo’s and Magnus’s roles as religious commentary, for Hugo and Sand took advantage of the
character’s symbolic value in the eyes of readers and society to deliver, as we have seen, a
provocative and sometimes scathing criticism of the Catholic Church of the 1830s. However,
from their Romantic perspectives, Hugo and Sand bring a more modern sensibility and
complexity to their transgressing priest compared to the stereotypical villain of Gothic
melodrama or the classic heroic model of earlier periods. Magnus and Frollo do not transgress
lightly or cynically, but agonize in their situation of forbidden love, for Hugo and Sand depict
them as victims of the repressive institutional Church as well as representatives of it.1 Certainly,
Hugo’s and Sand’s development of the psychological dimension of the priest’s conflict in their
instantly-popular and widely-read novels paved the way for other authors to treat the le prêtre
amoureux as a dramatic rather than symbolic character. In 1836, the soul struggle of the priest in
love became the central theme in Lamartine’s Jocelyn, and similarly to Notre-Dame de Paris and
Lélia, his poem caused a great sensation, reportedly moving young women to tears.2 The young
Verne (Un prêtre en 1839, written in 1845-49) was directly inspired by Hugo in his depiction of
Pierre Hervé, whose crazed criminality is tempered by sympathetic flashbacks to the priest’s
youth. By 1846, the suffering Catholic priest, torn between his love for a woman and his vows,
was sufficiently well-established as a feature of Romantic literature that Merimée could engage in
gentle mockery in his short story L’Abbé Aubain.3
The comparative aspect of this study of Frollo and Magnus highlights the versatility and
flexibility of the priest-in-love figure as a literary device, for Hugo and Sand model this character
differently according to their respective concerns. Hugo’s personal experience of unrequited love
takes his portrayal of the priest figure on a perhaps unexpected course: Frollo’s downfall is
infused with the terrible yet tragic grandeur of the Romantic lover driven to crimes of passion, for
the archdeacon is willing to lose everything, even his soul, to follow Esmeralda to hell. The
complexity of Frollo’s development from a victim, instinctively revolting against sexual
repression, to an active persecutor of Esmeralda becomes an investigation by Hugo into the
interplay of personal freedom of choice against fate, which he provocatively leaves unresolved

1
Such is the universal emotional intensity and lyrical expression of Frollo’s battle with repressed desire
and Magnus’s spiritual doubts that such passages were later ‘borrowed’ by American Samuel F.B. Morse to
lend a convincing emotional resonance to his anti-Catholic propaganda, Confessions of a French Catholic
Priest (1836); see my ‘Hugo and Sand in Morse Code’, French Studies Bulletin, 31: 115 (2010), 21-24.
2
Guillemin, p. 669.
3
Merimée satirically depicts a young society woman who, influenced by Jocelyn and a biography of
Abelard, sentimentalizes a handsome young abbé as a romantic hero with a tragic love story in his past.

58
and open to the reader’s interpretation. Frollo’s portrayal also has political and historical
implications in the aftermath of the overthrow of government in the 1830 July Revolution, when
the French Revolution and Terror took on a renewed significance for Hugo and his countrymen.
In Frollo’s trajectory from a possibly justified revolt against the repression of enforced celibacy
to his own oppression of Esmeralda, we can read Hugo’s concerns about the dark side of
revolution that underlay his desire for progress towards liberty.4 Moving from royalist to liberal
leanings, Hugo experienced unease about the possible excesses of revolution despite his
championing of liberty, and the destruction caused by the unleashing of Frollo’s sexual desires
reflects these political uncertainties in a time of transition.5
While Hugo chooses to explore in Claude Frollo’s character the male tragic anti-hero, Sand
approaches her priest-in-love character with questions of female equality strongly at the fore.
This is not to say that Hugo was insensitive to this issue: as we have seen he criticizes the
demonization of women through his portrait of Esmeralda and her interaction with Frollo, and in
his funeral eulogy for Sand in 1876, he emphasizes his continuing support for women’s rights:
‘Dans ce siècle qui a pour loi d’achever la révolution française et de commencer la révolution
humaine, l’égalité des sexes faisant partie de l’égalité des hommes, une grande femme était
nécessaire’.6 However, Sand portrays her unconventional heroine as a challenge not only to
Magnus’s senses but also to his patriarchal and spiritual authority, underlining the importance of
the role of the female character in further research on the priest-in-love’s drama. It would be
worth identifying texts on the priest in love by nineteenth-century female authors to compare with
Sand’s in this regard,7 or those by male writers in which the woman character loved by the priest
is equally developed in her own right, as in Paul Alexis’s short story Après la bataille (1880) and
Anatole France’s Thaïs (1890). It is important to observe, however, that Sand’s female
perspective does not lead her to objectify Magnus in his turn by making him simply a lightning

4
In a similar vein, Seebacher argues that Hugo, while in accord with Lamennais’s revolutionary ideals as
he was writing Notre-Dame de Paris, nonetheless (as an ‘homme d’ordre’) felt a subconscious misgiving
that Lamennais’s championing of the potentially destructive masses posed a risk: Seebacher notes that later
Hugo incorporated collusion between Frollo and the truands to his libretto for Bertin’s La Esmeralda.
‘Victor Hugo et Lamennais: autour de Claude Frollo’, Cahiers Mennaisiens, 16-17 (1983), 26-31
(p. 30).
5
I take here as inspiration Ronald Paulson’s analysis of Lewis’ Gothic monk Ambrosio in Representations
of Revolution (1789-1820) (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983), pp. 217-25. Paulson interprets
Ambrosio’s portrayal as a response to the events of the French Revolution and Terror.
6
Cited in Biermann, p. 29. In 1853, Hugo already asserted his belief that equality for women, while too
slow in coming, was inevitable: ‘Le XVIIIe siècle a proclamé le droit de l’homme; le XIXe proclamera le
droit de la femme; – mais, il faut l’avouer, citoyens, nous ne nous sommes point hâtés’. ‘Sur la tombe de
Louise Julien’, in Actes et Paroles II, Pendant l’exil, 1852-1870, in Laffont, Politique, p. 440.
7
Examples are Sophie Panier’s Le Prêtre (1820), La Comtesse Dash’s La Marquise de Parabère (1842),
and Marie-Louise Gagneur’s Le Roman d’un prêtre (1876).

59
rod for her criticisms of the patriarchal Church. Sand’s frustration and sense of alienation as a
woman writer in an unequal society led her not only to incorporate a protest through Magnus, but
also at the same time, it made her particularly sensitive to the priest-in-love’s plight as repressed
by different, but equally mutilating, societal rules.9 This is reflected in the more sympathetic
elements in Magnus’s portrayal that lead the reader to pity him, and perhaps even admire the
tenaciousness of his struggle with enforced celibacy.10
While the aspects of the priest-in-love’s conflict that Hugo and Sand choose to emphasize
may differ, both portrayals reveal an overall similarity in their dark and pessimistic tones, even
beyond any implied criticism of the Church they represent. From the perspective of other priest
portrayals in nineteenth-century French literature, few exhibit the degree of stifling hopelessness
in both their sexual desire and spiritual aspirations that links Frollo and Magnus. Of course, the
situation of any Catholic priest in love is, by definition, characterized by a sense of blocked desire
due to the celibacy vow. But while treatments of this theme often feature destructive outcomes,
most other authors at least give an illusion of a possible path to happiness for the priest by
portraying a strong Catholic faith that would support him, or a woman who fully requites his
love. For Frollo, Hugo stresses the additional barrier of unreturned love and the almost
unbearable sense of frustration that Esmeralda’s non-compliance causes him: ‘Le jour où une
femme repousserait un pareil amour, j’aurais cru que les montagnes remueraient’ (732). Neither
is there any hope that Frollo could still find satisfaction on a spiritual plain, as his desperate and
despairing analysis of his situation sums up: ‘Il pensa à la folie des vœux éternels, à la vanité de
la chasteté, de la science, de la religion, de la vertu, à l’inutilité de Dieu’ (749). Magnus’s
condition is equally acute, as he is blocked both within the Church due to his devastating
religious doubts, and out of the Church due to his paralysing fear of the woman he desires, in
addition to Lélia’s rejection of him. Sand ensures that any other exit routes for Magnus that might
lead to happiness are cut off: as Lélia observes at the end of the novel, Magnus would now be
incapable of experiencing love with any woman (323). Magnus’s situation in which he can go
neither backwards or forwards expresses a sense of claustrophobia and even suffocation, for he
describes non-priests as free men who ‘respirent à l’aise’ (87).

9
Nancy Rogers makes a similar observation in the context of Sand’s Indiana and Jacques: ‘In her attention
to marriage and divorce, however, Sand is not a female chauvinist, but recognizes that the male suffers as
well’. ‘George Sand: Social Protest in her Early Works’, in George Sand Papers, Conference Proceedings,
1976, Hofstra University, ed. by Natalie Datlof and others (New York: AMS Press, 1980), pp. 66-75
(p. 68).
10
Sand also exhibited this understanding in her relationship with Lamennais, for while his misogyny
caused her pain on occasion, she professed that nonetheless she loved him as she would a child for his
faults of temperament, which she believed were brought about by the suffering in his life (‘il était à mes
yeux comme un enfant généreux’). Cited in Wingård, p. 533.

60
 The authors’ depiction of Frollo and Magnus as trapped between unrequited love and a God
that does not answer their prayers, can, as we have seen, be partially explained as an expression
of the emotional turmoil in the personal lives of the authors. But the unbridgeable gap that the
priests experience between desire and reality can also be read as a reflection of a more collective
crisis in the early 1830s in the aftermath of the July Revolution. The failure of ‘les Trois
Glorieuses’ to usher in a new, hoped-for age of liberty and social equality, after high expectation,
led to a perception of a halt in progress, as Hugo would later expand on in Les Misérables.11
Analysing Frollo in this context, Laforgue argues that he is a ‘un héros de 1830’: Frollo’s sexual
dissatisfaction and lack of any route for possible fulfilment express, in common with mal du
siècle 1830s characters such as Musset’s Octave, the author’s growing sense of the impossibility
of reconciling desire and reality after the disappointment of initial hopes in the July Revolution.12
By 1833, when Sand was finishing Lélia, disappointment in the new government had even more
time to be felt; she was particularly negatively affected by the bloody repression of the 1832
Saint-Merry uprising.13 Sand’s comprehensive despair with society and even mankind in the
aftermath of the false dawn of the July Revolution is perhaps even more directly expressed in
Magnus’s situation than Frollo’s, as it is not filtered through the parallel that Hugo makes
between 1482 and 1830 as societies in transition. In his hopelessly blocked desires, Magnus can
also be read along with Sténio and Trenmor as a marginalized figure, alienated from a society
that offers no outlet for young energy.14 If Musset would in 1836 say ironically that the only
option for young men in post-Napoleonic France was ‘faites-vous prêtres’, these portrayals of
Frollo and Magnus (and indeed that of Julien Sorel) portray the danger of a career path that
cannot provide true fulfilment to talented and passionate men in the 1830s.15 As priests in love,
Frollo’s and Magnus’s plight is depicted as even more acute than other mal du siècle characters
who consciously reject society’s norms, since the priests are tragically frozen into rigid, dogmatic
mind-sets, conscious that the old world is disappearing but unable to change.16 The authors’
anxieties in the 1830s about social progress and the future of humanity are further expressed in
their portraits of the ‘poet’ characters Gringoire in Notre-Dame de Paris and Sténio in Lélia. If
Magnus and Frollo as Catholic clergy are inadequate as spiritual authorities, neither do these

11
Laffont, Roman II, pp. 651-57.
12
Laforgue, pp. 83-101.
13
Sand, HV, II, 142-46. Sand would later include the uprising as a key event in her novel Horace, as would
Hugo in Les Misérables.
14
Wingård, p. 181.
15
Alfred de Musset, La Confession d’un enfant du siècle, ed. by Maurice Allem (Paris: Garnier, 1956),
p. 5.
16
Frollo expresses his melancholy awareness of his disappearing world, in which theocracy gives way to
democracy and rigid church dogma falls to the liberty of the printed word, in his ‘Hélas! dit-il, ceci tuera
cela’ (617).

61
other characters live up to the ideal of an inspiring ‘clergé littéraire’ that would guide humanity
forwards.17
The strong parallel in pessimism in Sand’s and Hugo’s portrayals of Magnus and Frollo as
revealed by this study from the perspective of the priest in love is perhaps unexpected, for these
two Romantic authors are generally perceived to be linked in their lives by their positive belief in
humanity and its potential for progress. But for both Sand and Hugo, their 1830 priest-in-love
portrayals express a time of painful transition towards a more assured vision of social progress.
Later, Hugo and Sand fully embraced the century’s call for a new spiritual authority, and in
William Shakespeare (1864), Hugo articulated his vision of the poet-prophet who would lead
mankind forward. Arguably, a less fatalistic vision of humanity emerges in his later novel Les
Misérables, and he claimed that his novels, including his anankè-laden Notre-Dame de Paris,
were ‘une série d’affirmations de l’Âme’.18 For Sand, her despairing attitude in 1833 also
represented only a momentary low: soon after she finished Lélia, her outlook became more
positive. One can perhaps discern hints of Sand’s later optimism in human progress in the novel’s
narrative approach, which leaves an opening for the reader to interpret Magnus as ill rather than
damned: Sand counters Lélia’s final bleak message to Magnus (‘Va, malheureux, nous ne
pouvons rien les uns pour les autres’ [323]) with Trenmor’s hope that he could help the priest
(‘peut-être puis-je le guérir’ [325]).19 Seeking out reformers such as Lamennais and Pierre
Leroux, she slowly recovered her faith in humanity and developed her social vision, and Rogers
observes that a watershed in Sand’s movement from pessimism to progress was marked by the
revised version of Lélia in 1839.20 Looking back from her new perspective in 1839, Sand would
explicitly link her own passage through the painful time writing the first Lélia with the dark
uncertainties that Hugo expressed in Notre-Dame de Paris: ‘Hugo n’écrivait-il pas au frontispice
de son plus beau roman anankè?’.21 Thus for both Hugo and Sand, le prêtre amoureux in Notre-
Dame de Paris and Lélia reflects the tension of reconciling spirit and body, desire and constraint,
past and future during the early July Monarchy.

17
Hugo, Le Rhin, in Laffont, Voyages, p. 425.
18
CFL, XIV (1868-70) 387.
19
In Lélia, Trenmor’s humanitarian outlook represents Sand’s conception of a possible way forward for
society; similarly, in Notre-Dame de Paris, Quasimodo and his self-sacrificing actions may be read as
embodying the ideal of fraternité that Hugo believed was key to mankind’s future progress.
20
Rogers, p. 3. In the second version, while Magnus is not rehabilitated, at least his strangulation of Lélia is
eliminated from the plot; and an unconventional new priest character is introduced, the Cardinal Annibal, a
reformer who treats Lélia with greater respect and more as an equal to men, although whether he also
harbours romantic feelings for her is unclear. Also, Trenmor and Lélia take a more active role in translating
their dissatisfaction with society into positive actions to help others.
21
‘Préface de 1839’, in LR, p. 351.

62
 This study of Frollo and Magnus highlights the importance of le prêtre amoureux as a literary
device for nineteenth-century French authors to explore universal human conflict as well as a
symbol for religious commentary, for this character is at the intersection of not only religious but
also sexual, social, and political concerns. Extended research into this figure in French literature
throughout the nineteenth century – or even beyond in other periods, languages or different media
such as film – is thus imperative, especially since its utility to authors as a dramatic device seems
to have been overlooked by critics who focus on his religious significance. This comparative
study indicates several specific directions for further research on le prêtre amoureux. The insights
gained into Hugo’s and Sand’s personal and public concerns in the 1830s suggest that interesting
comparison could be made with other Romantic authors who also utilized the character’s
dramatic conflict. While Hugo’s and Sand’s depictions are born out of the tradition of the Gothic
criminal priest who battles with physical desire, it would be worthwhile to study texts that are
within the contrasting Romantic strain that feature sympathetic portrayals of young men who
sacrifice their earthly love for a woman when they become priests, such as Sainte-Beuve’s
Volupté, Nodier’s Franciscus Columna, and most famously, Lamartine’s Jocelyn. Alternatively,
Gautier’s La Morte amoureuse, a conte fantastique about a priest torn between his priesthood and
his love for the vampire Clarimonde, provides another potential direction for research. Gautier
was a younger-generation ‘petit Romantique’ whose artistic ethos of ‘l’art pour l’art’ contrasted
with the political and social engagement of Hugo and Sand (‘l’art pour le progrès’), and one
could analyse how this differing Romantic outlook might be expressed in treatment of priest-in-
love Romuald.22 Broadening the focus to the second half of the century, one could expect to find
a similarly rich entwining of social, political and religious tensions into the priest-in-love’s drama
in works written during the Second Empire, when the Church’s political association with
Napoleon III’s regime resulted in conflict with the Republican opposition; indeed the plethora of
novels appearing around the 1860s attests to an increasing interest by authors in this character.23
Moreover, we have seen that Hugo and Sand complicate the plight of Frollo and Magnus by
suggesting that their innate natures, too passionate and/or too weak, contributed to their
downfalls. These nuances appeared as a theme in Naturalist priest-in-love portrayals of the later
nineteenth century: in 1869 Zola stated his aim, later pursued in La Faute de l’abbé Mouret, to
study in his literary priest ‘la grande lutte de la nature et de la religion’ by placing him under ‘des

22
Gautier articulates his artistic philosophy in his preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835); in William
Shakespeare, Hugo proclaims his different outlook: ‘L’art pour l’art peut être beau mais l’art pour le
progrès est plus beau encore’ (Laffont, Critique, p. 399).
23
Gaston Lavalley, Aurélien (1863); Joseph Doucet, Les Tentations d’un curé de campagne (1863); André
Theuriet, L’Abbé Daniel (1863); Octave Lacroix, Padre Antonio (1865); Alfred Assolant, La Confession de
l’abbé Passereau (1869); Ernest Daudet, Le Missionnaire (1869).

63
influences héréditaires’,24 as did other authors dealing with this topic during the period.25
Comparison of these portrayals to Romantic treatments would potentially provide interesting
insights into developments in character-making and literary history during the Realist/Naturalist
period.
Through the pens of writers such as Hugo and Sand, le prêtre amoureux is not only an ideal
literary device for authors to comment on the specific controversies and concerns of their time,
but the character’s conflict possesses a timeless dimension. The literary priest-in-love’s
experience of the pain of impossible love and the gap between dream and reality has a universal,
if much overlooked, resonance.

24
Cited in Ouvrard, p. 65.
25
Marcel Prévost, Le Scorpion (1887); Paul Alexis, Après la bataille (1888).

64
 Bibliography

Primary Works

Hugo, Victor, Œuvres complètes, ed. by Jean Massin, 18 vols (Paris: Le Club Français du Livre,
1967-70)
— Notre Dame de Paris; Les Travailleurs de la mer, ed. by Jacques Seebacher and Yves Gohin
(Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1975)
— Œuvres complètes, ed. by Jacques Seebacher and Guy Rosa, 15 vols (Paris: Éditions Robert
Laffont, Bouquins, 1985-90)
— — Roman I, ed. by Jacques Seebacher (Paris: Éditions Robert Laffont, Bouquins, 1985)
— — Roman II, ed. by Annette Rosa (Paris: Éditions Robert Laffont, Bouquins, 1985)
— — Roman III, ed. by Yves Gohin (Paris: Éditions Robert Laffont, Bouquins, 1985)
— — Théâtre I, ed. by Anne Ubersfeld (Paris: Éditions Robert Laffont, Bouquins, 1985)
— — Poésie I, ed. by Claude Gély (Paris: Éditions Robert Laffont, Bouquins, 1985)
— — Politique, ed. by Jean-Claude Fizaine (Paris: Éditions Robert Laffont, Bouquins, 1985)
— — Critique, ed. by Jean-Pierre Reynaud (Paris: Éditions Robert Laffont, Bouquins, 1985)
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