Victor Hugo, the son of one of Napoleon's officers, decided while still a teenager to become a writer. Although he studied law, he also founded a literary review to which he and other emerging writers published their work. In 1822, Hugo married his childhood sweetheart, Adele Foucher, and published his first volume of poetry, which won him a pension from Louis XVIII.In 1831, he finally finished Notre Dame de Paris. In addition to promoting a Romantic aesthetic that would tolerate the imperfect and the grotesque, the book also had a simpler agenda: to increase appreciation of old Gothic structures, which had become the object of vandalism and neglect. Hugo's writing spanned more than six decades, and he was given a national funeral and buried in the Pantheon after his death in 1885.Why did Victor Hugo write Notre Dame de Paris?