Quasimodo’s election as Pope of Fools

Quasimodo’s election as Pope of the Fools begins as an interruption of Pierre Gringoire’s play and becomes a public carnival of grotesque faces, improvised ceremony, and social reversal. Chosen by acclamation for his extraordinary appearance, Quasimodo is carried from the Palais de Justice to Place de Grève as the sovereign of a crowd that ordinarily despises him. The ceremony grants him an unfamiliar moment of pride, but its honor is inseparable from mockery, spectacle, and fear.

The play gives way to the contest

Jacques Coppenole, a hosier from Ghent, interrupts the performance with a blunt complaint: the actors only quarrel with their tongues, while he has waited in vain for a real blow. He had expected a Feast of Fools and a pope’s election, not what he regards as dull talk. He proposes the custom of his own country: each competitor puts a head through an opening and makes a grimace, and the person whose face is ugliest is elected by general acclaim. He suggests that Paris has enough grotesque faces for a worthy contest, turning the insult into an invitation to participate.

The suggestion succeeds where Pierre Gringoire’s play has failed. The bourgeois, scholars, and law clerks take it up enthusiastically, in part because Jacques Coppenole has flattered them by addressing them as squires. Pierre Gringoire, whose work had briefly seemed to command the crowd, is left without a way to resist. He hides his face in his hands as the audience’s attention shifts from his drama to the prospect of a public competition. The sudden change lays bare how quickly popular favor can pass from a performance to a more immediate spectacle.

The improvised stage and the winner

The contest is arranged in a small chapel opposite the marble table. A broken pane in the rose window above its door leaves a circular opening for the competitors’ faces; two hogsheads are stacked below it to provide access. Men and women may enter. To keep each grimace hidden until its turn, the candidates cover their faces and wait inside the chapel, whose door is then closed. In a few moments the improvised venue is full.

The election turns on the face that appears through the opening. After a succession of unusual grimaces, the crowd gives a thunder of applause to one it considers unsurpassed. The winning expression combines malice, amazement, and sadness. When the crowd rushes to bring the winner out, it discovers that the grimace is not a mask: it is the competitor’s actual face, and, more broadly, that his whole body seems to belong to the same grotesque spectacle.

The man is Quasimodo, the bellringer of Notre-Dame Cathedral. The crowd recognizes him at once by his name and by the features it uses to identify him: his hump, one eye, and bandy legs. His head is huge and bristling with red hair; his shoulders bear an enormous hump, with a corresponding projection at his chest; his legs meet at the knees, while his hands and feet are monstrous. The description sets his formidable vigor and agility beside a body that appears, in the narrator’s image, as if a giant had been broken and badly put together again. His election is therefore not a separate comic face winning a prize: the competition has selected the person whose whole visible form most completely answers its grotesque ideal.

A mock coronation in the streets

The crowd brings Quasimodo out in triumph and acclaims him as Pope of the Fools. The celebration continues in a procession that leaves the Palais de Justice, gathers additional participants along the way, and reaches Place de Grève with torches and uproar. Its ranks make a rough parody of civic and courtly order. The Egyptian contingent leads, with its duke on horseback and counts on foot holding his bridle and stirrups, followed by men, women, and children in rags. The Kingdom of Argot follows in an order arranged by rank, from lesser members to its concealed king, who rides crouched in a small cart drawn by two large dogs. After it comes the Empire of Galilee, led by Guillaume Rousseau in a wine-stained purple robe, with buffoons, macebearers, and clerks around him. The law clerks bring up the rear.

At the procession’s center, officers of the Brotherhood of Fools carry a litter loaded with candles. Quasimodo sits upon it in cope, mitre, and bearing a crozier: the outward insignia of authority turned into carnival regalia. The several groups contribute their own music, from drums and African tambourines to goat-horn trumpets, rebecs, flutes, and brass. Around Quasimodo, the combined instruments make a magnificent discord. The orchestra is Pierre Gringoire’s, so the procession that supplants his play also carries his music through the city in a form transformed by the crowd’s disorderly ceremony.

Pride, ridicule, and the crowd

For Quasimodo, the procession is more than a public joke. Until then, he has known humiliation, disdain for his condition, and disgust at his own appearance. Now he receives acclamations from a crowd he has hated because he believes it hates him. The people are fools, cripples, thieves, and beggars, but they are still a people, and for this moment he is their sovereign. The narrator describes his face as expanding with pride and happiness, making the election the first pleasure of self-love he has experienced.

That pleasure is real, although the ceremony’s respect is not uncomplicated. The crowd’s applause is derisive, and its admiration includes genuine fear: Quasimodo is robust, agile, and malicious despite the labels attached to his body. His deafness also separates him from the full meaning of the occasion. The account stresses that he does not clearly understand either his own feelings or the feelings he inspires; joy reaches him, and pride dominates, but the rest remains indistinct. The election thus gives him a brief, powerful reversal of his usual social position without dissolving the exclusion on which the spectacle depends.

As the procession reaches Place de Grève, its noise diverts attention from the recluse’s denunciation of the gypsy at the pillory. The change of focus connects Quasimodo’s carnival elevation to the larger public scene: the crowd’s attention moves on, while the gypsy remains subject to accusation and exposure. The election’s noisy triumph is temporary, but it establishes the contrast that defines the episode—Quasimodo can be elevated by popular acclamation and still be displayed chiefly as an object of ridicule.