The literary genre Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre-Dame) belongs to is notoriously open to discussion. Many prefer to call this hybrid text, often considered badly composed, a novel. Nonetheless, confronting the work with the epic and dramatic traditions enables a deeper understanding of its ambitions. In particular, the analyses of the concept of the epic put forward by Erich Auerbach and Emil Steiger in 1946 create tools for the understanding of the work’s loose composition as that of a style which strives to create the conditions of an immediate apprehension of the world, an ambition traditionally associated with epic forms. As a matter of fact, Victor Hugo multiplies his use of apparently autonomous images that in reality instate a common mode of perception of the world and give themselves over to the reader’s perception.