Dom Claude Frollo is a pious, highly intelligent French nobleman who was orphaned along with his younger brother Jehan when their parents died of the plague.

During the religious holiday in Eastertide called Quasimodo Sunday, Frollo adopts a deformed hunchback infant whom he finds abandoned on the cathedral's foundlings bed.

After a lifetime of concealment and suppression, Frollo's latent narcissism and psychopathy finally erupt when he first sees lascivious dancing by the 16-year-old Roma (Gypsy) girl Esmeralda, who eventually proves to be his undoing.

He first considers her to be a temptation sent by the Devil to corrupt him and, instead of taking personal responsibility and seeking a healthier means to process through his own lustful thoughts and desires, he instead blames Esmeralda and loathes her as a demon.

He ultimately decides, in the throes of a midlife crisis, that he is predestined to gratify his mounting lust, only to learn that Esmeralda is still a virgin, that she wishes to become a Catholic, and is accordingly repulsed by Frollo's desperate longing to violate his priestly celibacy.

A group of the scoundrels led by Clopin Trouillefou and whose ranks include Jehan Frollo, who are enraged by news that the French King Louis XI has ordered his soldiers to violate Canon law regarding the right of sanctuary and remove Esmeralda from the cathedral to be hanged and that the Archbishop of Paris has agreed to allow it, arm themselves.

Saying she fears death on the gallows less than Frollo, Esmeralda again rejects him, so he leaves her to an anchoress to hold her for the royal soldiers coming to hang her and goes back to Notre Dame Cathedral.

In a deliberately symbolic metaphor for his renunciation of Christian morality and of the Catholic Faith, Frollo loses his grip, falls from the Cathedral, hits the pavement, and is killed instantly.

Due to policies of the NAMPI Thirteen Points,[2] the filmmakers of the 1923 film adaptation would not portray a member of the Catholic Church in a negative and controversial light.