A balmy day in late October seemed the perfect time to take a fresh look at Notre Dame, to see how restoration is going after the disastrous fire of April 15, 2019, a date which has already passed into history, spawning universal concern, hills of tourists staring at a building they can’t get into and now a television series in France, the métro posters for which show us sweaty actors making brave faces, all of them too cute to be fireman or rescue workers.
I post this excellent video so you can take a look at the state of the building yourself, without commentary. Unfortunately my shaky video skills do not extend to editing or sound balance so here you are. I could have walked all the way around the old cathedral filming but decided to keep it short. There’s a good deal of information in the 1 minute + but ask questions at the bottom of the page, whatever you want. How long will repairs take ? How is it being done, in traditional style or with modern materials ? If the latter, will the church look different ? What was it that caught fire exactly ? Why can’t people walk up to the front of the church, which looks like a military barrack, with barbed wire on top of metal walls ? What’s the scandal going on about all the money raised for repairs ? Ask away. Because this is Paris, France, and there’s always a scandal, count on it, with architects fuming, the President not daring to repeat his promise of repairs being finished in time for the ‘24 Olympics, millions disappearing from the pockets of billionaires and…and… whatever happened to that crazy idea of putting a swimming pool on the roof ? That was my favorite. Swim and then make a healthy break of it. Or the other way around : confess your sins before an invigorating swim with a view of the heavens in all their glory. Seems very Catholic to me. An architect did propose that idea early on but it didn’t get any traction. The little old religious ladies were out in force in the days after the fire, handing out leaflets demanding that everything be done traditionally, which presumably means workers wearing wooden clogs taking two hundred years to finish the job.
In any case the swimming pool was a better idea than our Start-Up President’s glowing spire, a proposal he subsequently didn’t drop so much as forgot he’d ever mentioned.
(Why make anything up when reality constantly intercedes ? We live in post-religious times and our president is a modernizer, who presumably would like people to pay by credit card before they enter the shrine. My idiosyncratic religious taste is questionable (God is a bore, Jesus was an outlaw, sermons are tedious but the organ player after makes it worth getting out of bed) but there’s a difference between blasphemy and a blague. God can take it.)
No, is the answer to your No. 1 question. No, they don’t know what started the fire. Or rather they do know, but “they” aren’t saying. What do I mean ? The proximate cause of the fire in ‘19 was repair work on the crumbling wooden spire (first photo below) which dated over 150 years old. Metal scaffolding was erected and men set to work, first beheading (!) and then removing the bronze figures of the saints which held the spire in place. (Second photo.) The most reasonable explanation for the fire is too many generators on the roof with one of them shorting. An investigation into the incident was carried out but it was swiftly classé, closed, classified, buried. Why ? Joint pressure from the group in charge of restoration and the team that erected the scaffolds, backed by the insurance company which turned a blind eye to the presence of a generators on an old, rickety, wooden, world-historical roof. You get the picture.
Fireman and anarchists agree on one thing : old wooden churches were made to burn. Reasonable, conservative estimates for repair work range from twenty to forty years.
The unspoken question looms, How will they go about it? How does one restore the past ? What is the proper approach ? How authentic is authentic, really ? In Iraq, they’ve dusted off the Great Ziggurat of Ur, built by King Ur-Nammu, dedicated to the moon god Nanna. Fully restored, it will soon be trampled by tourists who haven’t a clue what went on inside, much as French Catholicism, which inspired both Crusades and cults of secular love, will remain a mystery to the masses. (I cannot forget the first time I stumbled in to Notre Dame and found an abandoned corner, lit only by candles, silent, gloomy. Jeanne D’arc loomed in such shadows I didn’t even see her at first. It was cool and dark and I still regret not staying longer. We experience things only once. After that, it’s all ritual or repetition.) We can only pray the Tech-Cult doesn’t have a say about the interior, turning the old lady into the waiting room at a bus-station, with fancy windows and endless public service announcements.
So what is authentic ? They cut down a forest in Normandy to build the roof beams for Notre Dame, and it was those old, flammable sticks that caught fire and fell, causing so much damage. Should we replace them with titanium ? No one will ever know. Everyone is sensitive about trees these days, rightly so, Parisians not least because we have a concrete-crazy ecologist in City Hall. Her administration loves cutting down trees whether they’re healthy or not, there are even plans to sacrifice the giants alongside the Tour Eiffel, planted when Napoleon was alive, to make way for a tourist mall. But I digress…Arguments about the past are always arguments about the future. Day- and nightmares get them all mixed up. With the Grand Ziggurat or Notre Dame, you have to choose which reality you want to inhabit. There isn’t only one. Young men alive in the years after Napoleon were all for pushing Notre Dame, which was in crummy shape back then, into the Seine. Beautiful old stones, they admitted, but really, nothing to do with us, our lives, hopes, dreams. They were honest. We live in cities where Unesco runs around telling us we can’t touch this or that, it’s Patrimoine de la Humanité when they want to restore ancient city walls, as if they weren’t torn down for a reason the first time.
I vote for a meticulous Notre Dame restored by a new generation of craftsmen trained in the old arts — a dark, solemn, cobwebby church with as few priests as possible, maybe one or two of them serving as lifeguards at the pool on the roof. That’s an authentic present tense, voluptuous and contradictory.
And your opinion would be ? I didn’t say a thing about the organ. Did that survive the fire ? What condition is it in now ? What about other churches in Paris ? Where else should you go to confess that religion turns you off but some churches send shivers up your spine. Ask. I can tell you a few.
By the way, the singer in the jazz band on the bridge is singing a song about his good old girlfriend, who was fine and mellow and never let him down. Seems appropriate.
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As Wuz Dept.
A scene from the good old days, before the fire, before Covid. Photo mine.
Old Classics Are Never Finished