There is a passage in Quatre vingt-treize where Hugo confronts Lantenac with an enigma : the character looks at bell towers emptying and filling up without hearing anything, he « sees the tocsin ». We have studied this passage through the prism of an analysis of Carlo Ginzburg’s regarding « estrangement ». The historian shows the literary device to have its roots in stoicism, and analyses a Proustian avatar, whose intention is less satirical than aesthetic, and which he wants to use for the purposes of his discipline. We will show the point of estrangement, which uses the dissociation and valorisation of meaning, in an historical novel. And we will make the specificity of the device in this case stand out. It has to do mainly with its function : the issue is to raise the reader’s curiosity and alarm him. Three rather than two types of estrangement therefore coexist, satirical, aesthetic, and dramatic; they can be pinpointed in the literature of the 19th century.