What Parisians Really Think of Notre Dame

"Let it burn," said one, in an essay I wrote on the night of the cathedral fire, still relevant today.

Photo by Godefroy Troude

For today’s installment, I was tempted to write something about the utterly bonkers political situation in France right now, but I didn’t think you all needed to be bogged down in parliamentary minutia on a weekend. The light is leaving us in the Northern Hemisphere. So as not to make it go out entirely, I’ll just give you a very quick resume. (TL;DW, which stands for “too long, didn’t write”: France is fucked.)

In the Assemblée Nationale, France’s legislature, the embittered left and populist hard right have made common cause and ousted the admittedly dysfunctional center-right ruling government just when EU rules dictate that the country has no choice but to go full austerity. France’s deficit is at 6.2% of its gross domestic product, and the EU requires no more than 3%. Spending in excess of tax receipts, intensified during the pandemic, is unsustainable. But people don’t vote for reality, they vote for what they want to believe. Coming elections, including the presidential in 2027, are now much more likely to go to fascists, who lie more effectively in times of chaos.

Since I’m not holding my breath that Marine Le Pen will be disqualified from running once the verdict for her fake jobs trial is delivered this coming March, I’m finally applying for citizenship. I would like to stop relying on the whims of work permit quotas, which will be tightening no matter who takes the top job. If France says yes, I will be able to vote against Benoît, the abrasive petit fonctionnaire on the Comité des Fêtes, when he runs for mayor here. I hope not to be denied this date with destiny.

Meanwhile, That Guy is in Paris, rather than our Catholic actual POTUS, basking in the majesty of an almost-miraculously rehabbed Notre Dame. On time and on budget is a holy marvel anywhere in the world; more so in the center of Paris with every exigency of medieval engineering on the table. Praise the Lord and Les compagnons du devoir, the rigidly policed association of French craftspeople who supplied a lot of the labor and knowhow à l’ancienne to the rehab.

I miss the old hood, an out of the way village on the eastern edge of town with the dippy name of “La Campagne à Paris.”

On that April night in 2019, when the fire broke out that burned the church, I was still strenuously avoiding my ex. I ate out, early, whenever I could, just to be somewhere else, because the fights had gotten so bad that it was borderline physically threatening. As he was home that night, I went out to a café.

What follows is a piece I wrote for Travel & Leisure about that dinner out, chopping it up with my fellow diners as Notre Dame burned. The story sadly no longer lives on their servers, so I’m rerunning it below. Excuse the lack of visuals. Let’s call this a Parisian eye view of the meaning of the church. I think it’s every bit as relevant today.

A Local Reflects on the Tragic Fire and the Paris Cathedral's Enduring Legacy
Alexandra Marshall
April 16, 2019

As last night’s harrowing fire at Notre Dame burns up this morning’s headlines, much is being made of the medieval cathedral’s iconic status. Notre Dame is one of the most visited monuments in all of Europe. It’s the geographical heart of Paris, the point zero from which all of the country’s distances are calibrated. (Seriously, there’s a plaque.) But because icons only become icons by being bigger than all of us, they don’t engender uncomplicated love. For all the thousands who gathered at Notre Dame last night to shed tears and sing hymns as fire brigades fought the flames, some others rolled their eyes and laughed and said, "Let it burn."

Last night I was in a café just off the Place Edith Piaf, in the 20th arrondissement, when news of the fire broke. It was before the dinner rush, so I was alone with a few groups of my fellow locals, fiddling with a bowl of minestrone as they drank their apéritifs. Naturally we started talking. The images of the 19th-century spire falling into ash had just rolled out over social media and soon I was in tears, my face glimmering in the reflected blue light of my phone.

Whenever I cross into central Paris, my route takes me over the Pont Marie, the bridge that crosses the Ile de la Cité behind the cathedral, and I’m treated to a view of the towers, the roof, and the spindly flying buttresses. I’m always floored by its strange combination of grandeur and humility. In the 12th century, those buttresses liberated architects to create ever-larger windows and ever-taller spires. As the Gothic period progressed, churches became obsessed with height. Cologne, Chartres, the Duomo in Milan — these cathedrals are all thrusting to the sky, the better to show the might of human ingenuity, and the power of the Catholic Church to bankroll such glory. But Notre Dame is more discreet, its aesthetic power centered in the harmony and balance of its volumes. From a distance, those proportions and the perfect scale of its lacy sculptural ornamentation make it hard to tell just how huge it is. It’s only when you’re in front of Notre Dame, or better yet inside, that you understand its heft.

The café owner saw my distress and struck an optimistic note, pushing aside his trucker cap to wipe sweat off his brow. “Notre Dame has survived fire before,” he said. (Actually it hadn’t suffered a fire of this scale. Happily, it turns out it will survive this one.) He continued: “I have stonemason friends who are 35 years old. The art of masonry still lives in France. They will rebuild it, and fast.” Across the room, an older man in a Peruvian cap and a windbreaker cackled. “Who cares?” he said with a shrug. “Let’s move into the modern age. Screw the Church!” His companion and I looked at each other in horror. She said, “Maybe it’s cheesy, that church. I’m certainly not a Catholic, but it’s a symbol of our history.”

Cheesy? This transcendent building whose 13th century stained glass windows — also miraculously saved — glitter like rubies and sapphires and emeralds in the late afternoon sun?

But hang on: If I grew up in Paris, and shared my city with hordes of foreign tourists trafficking in trinket-sized reproductions of the building and t-shirts with its likeness, maybe I’d roll my eyes too. Maybe.

As we were talking, I simultaneously scrolled through Twitter, where my American follows were expressing their heartbreak. I asked my fellow diners if the only people who were mourning unreservedly weren’t French. The café owner replied, “Maybe. We grew up with this thing. In this city. It’s been occupied. Maybe we’re just more pragmatic and factual about it. And we’re kind of anticlerical here.”

Ah yes. Even for those in our impromptu debate society who defended the cathedral last night — and there were more of us than there were detractors — “Je ne suis pas du tout catholique, mais…” (“I’m not Catholic at all, but…”) was almost always the opening gambit to a pro-Notre Dame sentiment. It was yet another reminder of the vexed history so many in France have with the Church that dictated its affairs until 1905, when the country officially separated church and state. (That law is today the nexus of an ongoing debate about national identity and Islam in France.) Last night, the historically oppressive role of the Church was clearly still fresh enough in these people’s thoughts that the members of my left-wing corner of Paris still had to reflexively distance themselves from it, in 2019.

I was under no such pressure. “Monsieur, your notion of modernity is itself old-fashioned,” I said to M. Windbreaker as I got up to leave. “The last time people thought it was modern to erase the past was the 1950s, with the International Style. That hasn’t left such a good footprint here. Do you want them to put up another Opéra de la Bastille?” I asked, referring to the severe 1980s building almost everyone considers the city’s most egregious eyesore. A woman one table over piped up in agreement. “Notre Dame is a symbol of human history, of beauty divorced even from any system of power,” she said. “We don’t progress by burning down the past. We incorporate it for everything that it gives us. We learn from it. It’s part of us.”