The French Gothic Revival was set on sounder intellectual footings by a pioneer, Arcisse de Caumont, who founded the Societé des Antiquaires de Normandie at a time when "antiquaire" still meant a connoisseur of antiquities, and who published his great work on architecture in French Normandy in 1830. The following year Victor Hugo's historical romance novel "The Hunchback of Notre-Dame" appeared, in which the great Gothic cathedral of Paris was at once a setting and a protagonist in a hugely popular work of fiction. Hugo intended his book to awaken a concern for the surviving Gothic architecture left in Europe, however, rather than to initiate a craze for neo-Gothic in contemporary life. In the same year that "Notre-Dame de Paris" appeared, the new French restored Bourbon monarchy established an office in the Royal French Government of Inspector-General of Ancient Monuments, a post which was filled in 1833 by Prosper Mérimée, who became the secretary of a new Commission des Monuments Historiques in 1837. This was the Commission that instructed Eugène Viollet-le-Duc to report on the condition of the Abbey of Vézelay in 1840. Following this, Viollet le Duc set out to restore most of the symbolic buildings in France including Notre Dame de Paris, Vézelay, Carcassonne, Roquetaillade castle, the famous Mont-Saint-Michel Abbey on its peaked coastal island, Pierrefonds, and Palais des Papes in Avignon. When France's first prominent neo-Gothic church was built, the Basilica of Saint-Clotilde, Paris, begun in 1846 and consecrated in 1857, the architect chosen was of German extraction, Franz Christian Gau, (1790–1853); the design was significantly modified by Gau's assistant, Théodore Ballu, in the later stages, to produce the pair of "flèches" that crown the west end.