Seeing the familiar gothic façade of Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral framed against flames leaping hundreds of feet into the sky behind it was heartbreaking, and we sat spellbound Monday before our television screen.
The massive structure is on the Île de la Cité in the Seine, in literally the heart of the city, its geographic center. And it’s the soul of the city as well, and not only for the French. People from around the world have come to Paris to be awed by the massive exterior and soaring vaulted interior of this monument to faith.
We were among the millions around the world, including in this country, who watched in disbelief and despair as hundreds of firefighters fought for hours to save the iconic 850-year-old church, one of the oldest surviving structures in the city. For agonizingly long hours, it appeared that the cherished building – which took nearly two centuries to build – would vanish in less than a day.
Paris is among the five or so most visited cities in the world. Nearly 18 million travelers made their way there in 2018. And the cathedral of Notre Dame is one of its most popular tourist destinations, along with such iconic sites as the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre and the Arc de Triomphe.
We Americans love to travel – a lot – and Paris with its famed cathedral is high on most travelers’ wish lists. Those of us who don’t physically leave this land can and do still travel in books, in travelogues, in films and television, in our imaginations. Many of us feel we somehow know the cathedral of Notre Dame.
And the now beloved cathedral has had a tumultuous past. Its very construction, over nearly two centuries, undoubtedly cost the lives of uncounted workmen, who were likely still pleased to be working on this proclaimed monument to God. And over the centuries people fiddled with it, adding some adornments and subtracting others.
At times it was grievously neglected and abused – particularly during the bloody French revolution, which began in 1789. Ordinary people violently rebelled against domination by the aristocrats and clerics who’d held them in thrall for centuries. The revolutionaries took a particularly savage delight in despoiling churches and – among other things – chopping off the heads of the statues of saints. Tourists today see headless statues adorning countless houses of worship, including the Paris cathedral.
But in the early 19th century, the popularity of a novel, of all things – The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo – drew new attention to the dilapidated building. It was then gloriously restored by a zealous reformer, Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, who among other things added the great spire (replacing an earlier much smaller one), which collapsed so dramatically in Monday’s fire.
Fighting the blaze wasn’t easy. The fire started in the middle of its expansive and hard-to-reach peaked roof, and – fueled by tinder-dry ancient tree-sized beams (from a reported 1,300 oak trees) that supported that roof – it grew by the minute. Bombarding the sprawling building with massive airborne water drops – as if it were a forest fire – would have accelerated the destruction, crushing it all, even its great walls.
Even as the firefighters waged what seemed to be an impossible battle, legions of people (including some of those same firefighters) raced into the building’s massive interior to try to save the priceless artwork that had accrued over the centuries, forming human chains to relay the precious treasures to safety.
After many hours, the fire was tamed and, eventually, extinguished. And, amazingly, many of the church’s treasures survived, thanks to the heroic volunteers and thanks to the fact that an ongoing renovation had prompted the earlier temporary removal to storage of many invaluable artifacts, including some massive and irreplaceable exterior statues that just days earlier had been air-lifted from the structure.
The ancient church, revered by many as a jewel of medieval Gothic architecture, is grievously damaged. Its famed Great Organ, which dates from 1401 and is the largest in France, seems to have survived intact, although more detailed examination has to be done.
The massive stone outer walls and bell towers, which largely still stand, must be carefully tested to see if they’re still structurally sound. Parts of the building have been irretrievably lost. Their replacements and the rebuilding of the structure will take massive amounts of time and money.
And they will have both, thanks to the French billionaires who each began trying to outdo the other in a bizarre competition. Notre Dame’s repair project had, by last Thursday night, topped $1 billion in pledged contributions.
This, of course, prompted some Frenchmen – and women – to complain angrily that the billionaires weren’t spending that lavishly on the poor of France, which may well be true. On the other hand, their billions in this case at least aren’t being squandered on bigger and better yachts. Or on helping impoverished Third World countries to buy ever more deadly weapons that First World nations, including France, are all too eager to sell them.
And we – along with a whole lot of other Americans – will be glad to see Notre Dame rebuilt, with its renowned rose windows (which, amazingly, survived the fire) once more glowing as the afternoon sun streams through them.
Because there’s an interesting American family secret, passed down over the centuries. However much we might complain about the Europeans and mock them – especially the French – we like them. Ever since we kicked the troops of England’s George III out of our corner of the New World and proclaimed ourselves independent, we’ve been happily going back to visit that Old World, particularly France.
Many of our Founding Fathers, including Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, spent considerable time in Paris.
And while we came to France’s (and Europe’s) aid in two world wars, France helped us when it really counted. They threw their lot in with the audacious American colonists in 1775 when we began our bloody revolution against the British. The French sent gunpowder, cannons and clothing to the upstart army. In 1778, they became one of the fledgling nation’s first official allies by signing the Treaty of Alliance.
That support from the French – real, material and substantial – was a bold and, most historians today believe, decisive factor in Americans achieving their independence.
So we’re allowed to be a bit sentimental about one of our oldest official friends when – as now – it’s hurting.
(“Monitor” columnist Katy Burns lives in Bow.)