Notre-Dame’s Breach
——— Must the age of cathedrals fall in line with political haste? Definitely not, according to Patrick Bouchain and Christophe Catsaros, who suggest restoring the permanence of Notre-Dame’s’ regained symbolic dimension and its vocation to transmit.
It only took four days for the option “Donate for Notre-Dame” to appear on supermarket point of sale terminals. And yet, the anticipated mobilization of the people had already been supplanted by the donations of the wealthiest patrons. Stéphane Bern’s tears had barely even dried that millions of Euros were already flowing in, putting the government in a difficult situation, in some respects. The sums that were promised quickly exceeded the estimated cost of reconstruction. Consequently, what should be done with such manna? One wonders if this project shouldn’t be more than a mere restoration, true to the original, to Viollet-le-Duc’s’ folly, or to the folly of our own time. This mobilization is indeed a reflection of the nature of our time: immediacy, excessiveness, and
what immediately follows, disruption. After receiving all the attention, the Notre-Dame fire has become a saturated topic, neglected by the media in favour of other less consensual causes. Taking a leaf from the rashness of his time, Emmanuel Macron did not wait long before announcing an outstanding reconstruction with an extraordinarily short time frame – which most specialists immediately considered hasty. Claiming to be able to restore the monument in five years is a choice that conditions the restoration’s objectives and results. By picking a deadline worthy of an entrepreneurial challenge and most of all by reducing the people’s participation to simply “rounding up” the sum donated to Notre-Dame, the government has missed the opportunity to let ruin accomplish its restorative job on the dislocated body of society.
SACRILEGIOUS DESTRUCTION
For what this reconstruction ultimately entails is working on the body of society.The severely burned patient is not so much the monument with its scorched roof as the community it was no longer able to embody and into which, paradoxically, its destruction allowed it to fit once more. Monumental cathedrals are collective bodies epitomized in stone. That is the way they were designed, kept up and transformed, for centuries. If sacrilegious rage devastated a few, if their destruction by the “enemy” filled the people with patriotic outrage, it is because they are meant to represent the collective body in the various shapes it has taken on throughout the centuries: communities of believers, populations in revolt, nations in combat, emotional Facebook “friends”. 21st-century French, despite the thousands of individual distractions that alienate them, have rediscovered a common body. It is almost as if the monument’s destruction has created a breach, literally towards the sky, but mostly towards a symbolic dimension of monumental architecture that had presumably disappeared in 20th-century rationality and 21st-century virtuality. The gaping monument points to a long span, the time of NotreDame’s convening role that defies the ages. It also begs the question of our desire to be a part of the continuity of our relationship to architecture. The eagerness to finish repairs before the 2024 Olympics opening means closing up the breach as quickly as possible, in order to restore the monument to its former condition as an iconic non-place, inexistent because submerged. The disaster will have reminded us to what extent the sacred feeds off sacrilegious destruction, be it accidental or ritual. Veneration finds its meaning in the martyrdom of destruction. This applies to damaged sacred monuments as well as desecrated relics. Weren’t saints and kings’ bodies dislocated after death, to better adore them? The heart in the box, the shinbone on pilgrimage throughout the colonies. The destruction of a cathedral resembles this ritual scattering. It represents an age where the edifice deconstructs, scatters and is open to examination. It has revealed how finely-structured the inside of the cathedral is, how it is meant to be felt collectively from within, more than from without. Such was the case for centuries, the density of the medieval city only allowing people to see it from up close. The parvis and the unobstructed view it allows for are just the Haussmanian interpretation of the monument. An interpretation that turns it into an object of distant contemplation.
FROM ONE CATHEDRAL TO THE NEXT
The destruction presents society with a series of challenges, and it would be a mistake not to let people seize them. The collective challenge does not come down to the timeliness of reconstruction or to restoring an image consistent with the postcards. What Notre-Dame is calling for is a meaningful reconstruction. A long one, which would let society take part, not by picking out the colour of the wallpaper, but through a number of measures and actions likely to carry society’s values and aspirations. What is expected is a project that will engage people thanks to the way it will be carried out and the ideas it will put forward. A project that will let the restoration radiate beyond the cathedral and set a precedent for the city and not just for the monument. This may take on different forms: a “Grenelle du Patrimoine”, leading to the creation of a space for education and research on restoration, from which would emerge builders with a new way of regarding ancient architecture.The High Court of Paris has just been emptied out. Why not use it as a prestigious school for stonework and woodwork that would serve as the starting point of a true renaissance? A place dedicated to reinventing the act of restoration through a holistic approach, both archaeological and human? Notre-Dame could thus become the site from which would arise restoration practices less focused on the materiality of the architecture than on the construction processes as craft. We could learn from Japan and rebuild NotreDame like the carpenters of the Ise Grand Shrine, by focusing on the transmission of a skill rather than on the immutability of the original materials.The monument’s reconstruction would then provide the opportunity to put forth the craft before subjecting it to being transmitted. Furthermore, this centre for restoration trades could be devised as an axis or a network, rather than reinforcing the Parisian centrality and once more concentrating resources and knowledge. It would be a terrific way to radiate NotreDame’s restoration towards all the French monuments in need. To start with, we could ponder on Notre-Dame along with another wounded monument: the Basilica of Saint-Denis. A bridge could be built between Saint-Denis and Notre-Dame, a bridge of resources, knowledge, desires and fates. The axis created by both monuments would encourage us to rethink the town, its make-up, its evolution, its cohesion. Redesigning the city based on a thousand-year-old axis: this kind of project would at last offer the great chance to discover a cultural dimension of the Grand Paris project. To start from a scorched monument, to link it to a discarded monument, in order to reinvent the act of building and a new way to make a city.