The Court of Miracles

city, alterity and power in 19th century

Abstract

This article analyzes the historical novel The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831), by Victor Hugo, focusing on the representation of the Court of Miracles. The objective is to understand how the work participates in the construction of images of alterity within European modernity, highlighting the relationships between literature, history, and power. Situated within a context of intense political and cultural transformations in France, the narrative is conceived as an organism that absorbs and reorganizes social tensions, producing meanings related to national identity. The study develops a discursive analysis of selected passages from the novel, articulating the concept of modernity (Harvey, 2015) with the notion of literature as a social practice, as formulated by Antonio Candido (2006), in dialogue with Edward Said’s category of Orientalism (2007). The analysis suggests that the Court of Miracles operates as a narrative dispositif that organizes boundaries between “the people” and the “Other” through a lexical repertoire marked by indeterminacy, animalization, and the moralization of poverty, frequently associated with Romani populations. By intersecting historiography on these groups with the tradition of beggar literature, it is argued that the novel participates in the symbolic pedagogy of modernity by condensing, within this space, the ambivalences of Romanticism in relation to the modern city. Although the work criticizes the loss of social solidarity and the neglect of heritage, it also reproduces stigmas and reinforces symbolic hierarchies. It is concluded that literary space functions as a mediator between aesthetics and power, contributing to the crystallization of images that have shaped and continue to persist in social memory.