The Resurrection of Notre Dame: The coming spectacle

What with the Olympic Games followed by the Paralympics, let alone the normal goings on and a clamour of French politics, Paris has been satiated by spectacle these last few months.

There had been hopes of another kind of spectacle. It was hoped by many who had followed as well as they could the great efforts being made since the terrible fire in 2019 to stabilise and preserve the fabric  of the great cathedral, and to rebuild and restore, would reach a conclusion this summer too.

Knowing

But as we all know, once you get in the builder,  the architect and the civil engineer,  there is no knowing when you will get them out. But a date has now been set for that great re-opening, December 8. This, of course, is the feast day of the Immaculate Conception, and is a special day through the Catholic cultures of the world, one which finds echoes too in Orthodox traditions, despite their differing views. It may be a public holiday in Monaco, but not in France. Nevertheless we  can expect it will be a memorable event.

The fabric of Notre Dame as it has been known in the last two centuries is not that of the middle ages in its entirety”

But the re-opening is only a part of the matter. Over the course of the years of work  much insight and experience has been gained, the full discussion and absorption of which will take an even longer time, I suspect.

The fabric of Notre Dame as it has been known in the last two centuries is not that of the middle ages in its entirety. In the 19th century, when Paris was being reorganised by Baron Haussmann with all the ruthlessness of that father of all town planners, Notre Dame was also renovated by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, a man with his own ideas of how medieval architecture should be seen. He was quite prepared to tidy up what the medieval builders had left. The wooden fleche, at the peak of the roof of the cathedral, the burning of which was so symbolic in the photographs of the destruction in 2019, was actually his work.

Best

The archaeologists, engineers, and architects at work also have their own idea of what is best. So initially what is restored will in many ways be different from what we once knew.  But it is the new light to cast on the past, especially the past we could not see because the centuries had covered it up. From the ashes of the fire artefacts of medieval making have re-emerged.

I was very taken by one official photograph I have seen: it is a fragment of the medieval jube, the rood screen or rather the gallery above it, which collapsed. Among all the debris sifted by the archaeologists of the Institut National de Recherches Archéologiques Préventives, there is a fragment of a carved stone head – can it be of Christ himself – which in the medieval manner had been painted. The blue eyes glow out of the pink, beige and gray tones of the visage. It is a moving symbol in itself of what has been going on at Notre Dame.

The opening having been pushed back to December by events, many are looking forward to the revelations of more such fragments of the real past. It is these rather than the 19th century “restoration” which are perhaps the real treasures of this great task.