Almeida Garrett rereads Victor Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris: O Arco de Sant'Ana and the experience of masses

Abstract

With the success of his novel Notre Dame de Paris (1831), Victor Hugo was responsible for the popularization of another type of historical narrative, different from the model created by Walter Scott. Among other characteristics, Notre Dame de Paris differs from the Scottish writer's work because it can be associated with the reactionary vogue of romanticism, which, according to Lukacs, defended the nostalgia of the past and an averse look at the revolutions. Defined by Maria Helena Santana (2007) as a heterodox historical novel, Almeida Garrett's O Arco de Sant'Ana (1845-1851) has many points of contact with Hugo's work, recognized by the Portuguese writer himself. One of these points that strikes us is the representation of the experience of masses, apparently similar in the two novels, but profoundly different, which would show the distance in the political perspectives of the two authors. It is our objective, in this sense, to analyze the thematic and stylistic recovery that Garrett promotes from Hugo's novel, in order to understand its specificities in the Portuguese context.