The Gargoyles of Notre-Dame is Michael Camille’s long-awaited last book, published seven years after the author’s untimely death in 2002. By that time, the text must have been finished, since the preface is signed: “Paris, February 2001”; the editor indicates that only some of the citations in the footnotes remained incomplete (379).

Throughout Camille’s brilliant career he was interested in medieval image making, paying equal attention to “high” and “low” art, a distinction which he identified as a modern construct. Modernity’s shaping influence on perceptions of the Middle Ages was therefore always an important aspect of Camille’s work, as can be seen in his recent Mirror in Parchment: The Luttrell Psalter and the Making of Medieval England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). In an obituary, Camille’s partner Stuart Michaels describes how the subject became central to Camille’s research during his last years and quotes him asking: “Where did this idea of the medieval and Gothic come from?” The present book provides an answer, highlighting “the impossibility of viewing the art of the Middle Ages without looking past and through the nineteenth century, without appreciating our own and the cathedral’s substantial modernity” (xi).

What subject could be more appropriate for such a study than Notre-Dame in Paris, known in the nineteenth century as “la métropole” and object of a celebrated restoration between 1843–64 under the architects Lassus and Viollet-le-Duc? Typical for Camille’s unorthodox approach and his interest in the marginal, the main focus is not the building itself but the reconstructed gargoyles—in the generic sense of the popular use of the term, including the gargoyles themselves, the figurative rain spouts jutting out from the towers, as well as the monsters or chimeras perched on the balustrade above the tall thirteenth-century gallery of the façade. Among these the pensive demon gazing out over Paris (shown on the front cover) is the hero of the story. He most clearly embodies the Romantic roots of the restoration project. Later, he became an object of identification for generations of artists. In fact, the pensive demon and the other gargoyles are by no means a secondary topic. Like the modern tourist, the nineteenth-century flâneur was more fascinated by the gargoyles than by the jamb figures of the cathedral, and they are as crucial to the Paris skyline as the Eiffel Tower. “Notre-Dame,” Camille says, “is not a medieval monument but one that thinks it is medieval through its fantasy of the gargoyle” (362; emphasis in original).

In part 1, “Restoration,” Camille adds considerably to our knowledge of the making of the gargoyles and chimeras, emphasizing, for example, the role of the almost forgotten sculptor, Victor Joseph Pyanet. His minor position on the building site, well below the artist who carved the statues, allows Camille to explore the horrendous labor conditions on the Notre-Dame building site that were far removed from the ideal mythic unity of the medieval construction yard that Viollet-le-Duc insisted on in his writings. In reality, the study of medieval art in nineteenth-century France was dominated by Catholic conservatism and lacked the social consciousness of more radical figures like Ruskin in England.

Moreover, Camille has found a group of fourteen unpublished preparatory drawings for the gargoyles and chimeras in a private collection, and probably representing Pyanet’s own sculptor’s album. These drawings demonstrate the important role played by Lassus (died 1857) in the early part of the campaign and at least until 30 April 1850 when the restoration came to a halt for nearly two years. One of the drawings signed by Lassus shows that the demonic Gothic, so typical of the sculptures created in this earlier campaign and exemplified by the pensive demon, owes much to Lassus.

Camille also discusses the ideology behind the restoration project. In the 1843 proposal for the restoration Viollet-le-Duc argued that Notre-Dame, a building that retained its practical and symbolic function, should be restored to its former glory. Although Viollet-le-Duc could be scrupulous with regard to historical veracity, in this case he clearly left himself room for personal interpretation. His original plans include fewer gargoyles and no chimeras. At that time, most gargoyles had been replaced by eighteenth-century lead pipes, but a small number of them remained on the building. Viollet-le-Duc studied them carefully, and, eventually, gargoyles became an important part of his argument that in a rational structure every form had a function. The case for the chimeras is more complicated. In 1856, Viollet-le-Duc claimed that the chimeras replaced originals of which he had found fragmentary evidence in the form of claws attached to the balustrade of the gallery. While a drawing of the façade from 1699 seems to support that some sculptures once decorated the balustrade, Camille emphasizes that in their final form the chimeras are not based on archaeological evidence and that there are no thirteenth-century models for this type of sculpture.

Indeed, the monsters are very different from, for example, the birds drawn by Villard d’Honnecourt. Rather, Viollet-le-Duc looked to later Gothic models, like the chimeras on the Tour Saint-Jacques in Paris. Above all, the creatures with their uncanny humanity and “bloated individualism” (57) are part of Viollet-le-Duc’s own imagination. The architect was undoubtedly stimulated by medieval art and the images therefore produced a deep affinity with the building he was restoring. Nevertheless, unlike medieval patrons, Viollet-le-Duc did not see the monstrous as part of the enigma of God’s creation and demonic creations as magically functional. He could not replicate the horror, fear, and pain that were expressed in medieval sculpture. The monsters are therefore not copies but originals, evidence of a new, nineteenth-century concept of monstrosity. They are the “monsters of modernity” that give the book its subtitle.

Camille carefully analyzes the imaginative universe that lies behind the invention of the gargoyles. A foremost influence was Hugo’s novel Notre-Dame, first published in 1831, more than a decade before the restoration started. Hugo, who shared his generation’s fascination with the grotesque, the fantastic, and the diabolic, celebrated monstrosity and invested the stones of his Notre-Dame with an uncanny life of their own. Famously, Hugo compared the cathedral to a book and its architecture to a living language representing a form of free expression. Viollet-le-Duc’s chimeras reflect this idea of the medieval sculptors’ freedom of fantasy that owes nothing to medieval bestiaries or encyclopaedias. But where Hugo considered the cathedral post-Gutenberg as dead, Viollet-le-Duc with his inherent optimism and belief in rational force of human creation brought it back to life.

Viollet-le-Duc was greatly interested in the sciences and in important contemporary figures, such as the palaeontologist Georges Cuvier (1769–1832). But there were other more disturbing influences on the architect, among them anthropological, ethnographical, and evolutionary theories that only thinly veiled racism and anti-Semitism, and biological and medical discourses that were influenced by pseudosciences, such as phrenology. (As an aside, Camille reveals as nineteenth-century forgeries a series of miniatures in a book of hours in the Bibliothèque National [BNF MS Smith-Lesouef 317] showing, for example, a Jew striking a nail through a host.) The political events of the day—especially the 1848 Revolution—also shaped Viollet-le-Duc’s design of the chimeras. Camille’s sensitive and sympathetic discussion of Viollet-le-Duc’s political ambivalence to progressive versus reactionary political positions, his attitude toward the church, and his shifting political allegiances emphasizes less the inherent contradictions among the architect’s principles, as other authors have done, but regards him as part of nineteenth-century society with its hopes and aspirations but also its dark underside.

By the time the restoration was completed in 1864, politics had changed and Paris was transformed under Haussmann. The chimeras quickly became emblems of Parisian identity closely associated with loss and destruction. Part 2 discusses how in the 150 years since 1864, successive generations of artists and writers have set the monsters within the context of their own contemporary concerns. The most famous image of the pensive demon is an etching entitled “Le Stryge” (it is important that the word “stryge” normally designates a female type of vampire) by Charles Méryon (1821–1868), the illegitimate son of an English physician, who died in an asylum, suffering from sexually transmitted disease and mental illness. In Méryon’s interpretation the demon becomes the timeless representative of a dark past, looking out and mourning over modern Paris, a city of sinful pleasure, but also a city on the verge of destruction—an image into which the unfortunate artist condensed the fear of his own sexual fantasies. Méryon’s is a highly personal attitude, but it was also symptomatic of what contemporaries recognized as the “modern melancholy.”

As the nineteenth-century wore on, the gallery became a famous spot for all kinds of visitors, and the gargoyles’ fame grew. Sexuality and gender continued to play a central role in their reception. Climbing up the towers were artists working in the new medium of photography whose posturing among the chimeras made the gallery a place of male display. Sigmund Freud was fascinated by the chimeras when he visited the gallery while he was staying in Paris to study hysteria. Some of his positivist medical colleagues read the chimeras directly as representations of hysteria and linked them to the dangers of female sexuality and homosexuality. The monstrous feminine associated with the chimeras was clearly a counterpart to and an extension of the vision of the cathedral as a woman, virgin or whore, widely explored by nineteenth-century writers such as Émile Zola and Joris-Karl Huysmans. However, the connotations of danger and aberration given to the gargoyles were subverted by gay artists, like Aubrey Beardsley, who deliberately identified themselves with the chimeras, especially with the pensive demon. Gargoyles were finally appropriated by the media, first with postcard sales and more recently by the cinema and internet. This chapter reveals Camille’s highly personal attitude to the subject of his research. He provides a glimpse of the desk in his Chicago office covered with desktop demons, including a four-inch Squeaky Stryge, and readers also learn that Camille himself had gargoyle tattoos.

Equally personal and highly thought-provoking are the meditations in the final epilogue to part 2, written in light of the 2000 restoration of the façade and discussing what the gargoyles currently mean and what they might signify in the future. It is here that Camille’s central argument lies: The gargoyles are a tombstone set by modernity upon the medieval past which will never be fully recoverable. Instead of providing a link with the past, they look to the future with each generation, including ourselves, who project into them fears and aspirations that are always new because they are always changing. The book is illustrated with hundreds of photos and often otherwise little-known illustrations and paintings that support its arguments. Deeply provocative but always engaging and witty, and presenting a highly philosophical argument with great humanity and warmth, the Gargoyles of Notre-Dame is beautifully written. It is not the first time that a reviewer of one of Camille’s books concludes that the subject, in this case Notre-Dame and indeed medieval art more generally, will not be the same again.