Sentiment will see Notre-Dame rise from ashes

Every year, about 12 million visitors, watched silently by a menagerie of Gothic gargoyles, chimeras and grotesques, teemed through the portals of Notre -Dame de Paris.

Some, of course, came to pray. Most came to take photographs, bathe in the plays of kaleidoscopic light through great rose windows, stare into the high pointed vaults, listen for bells and, perhaps, sense something of the mysterious, miraculous and even diabolical.

In the popular imagination, Notre-Dame has long been the most gothic of Gothic churches, and yet we owe much of its theatricality to Victor Hugo, whose 1831 novel was set in the magnificent cathedral.

English speakers know it as The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. Hugo wrote it to draw attention to the sorry state of the cathedral.

Much damaged by passionate zealots of the French Revolution, when for a spell it had been rededicated to the Cult of Reason and then to the Cult of the Supreme Being, it was also, despite classical intrusions, complete with cherubs playing in plaster clouds, notoriously Gothic and, therefore, dark, dismal and out of fashion.

Hugo’s novel sparked intense new interest. A competition held in 1844 to renovate the cathedral was won by JeanBaptiste-Antoine Lassus and the young Eugène Viollet-leDuc, a passionate Gothic Revivalist.

The cathedral was revived with structural repairs, bestiaries of new sculpture and the spire we saw flaming like a gothic torch on Monday evening. When, after 25 years, the architects’ work was complete, Notre-Dame was deeply and movingly Gothic even though much of it was new.

For all its venerable vaults, stained glass and flying buttresses, the cathedral we know and love is as much a 19thcentury as a medieval creation.

Spared serious damage in World War 2, cleaned and renovated in 1963, from 1991 and again in recent months, Notre Dame has not been allowed to decline again. But fire, however caused, has no respect for sentiment and much less for timber beams under high roofs, whether 19th-century or medieval.

Sentiment, however, will see Notre Dame rise from the flames, not miraculously but by determined effort and through the deep pockets of the state.

The big question for the future is how will the clergy, architects, experts, officials and the French public itself wish to see Notre-Dame restored?

Notre-Dame is not just an architectural wonder and symbol of Paris and France, it has also inspired everything from operas, ballets and novels to films and video games.

As the French authorities begin planning the reconstruction of the gothic masterpiece from the ashes of Monday’s blaze, here is a review of some of the works of art it has inspired.

Notre-Dame may have sent the spirits of medieval troubadours soaring, but it owes much of its literary fame to Victor Hugo’s sprawling 1831 gothic novel ‘Notre-Dame de Paris’ – better known in English as ‘The Hunchback of Notre Dame’.

The fervently Catholic poet Paul Claudel – brother of the brilliant and tragic sculptor Camille – credited it with helping him see the light in his 1913 poem ‘My Conversion’.

It was Christmas Day 1886 and the choir was singing the Magnificat when “in an instant, my heart was touched and I believed … with such an uplifting of my entire being”, he wrote.

Even the Communist poet Louis Aragon paid homage to it in his novel ’Aurelien’ and his poem ‘Paris 42’, in which it becomes a symbol of resistance to the German Occupation.

The American literary guru Joseph Campbell – whose book ‘The Hero with a Thousand Faces’, was obsessed with the cathedral.

He was taken with ancient ideas of the goddess being re-expressed in Christianity with the “second mother” – Notre-Dame (Our Lady in French).

Hugo’s novel alone has been filmed no less than 10 times, the first dating back to the birth of cinema in 1905 with La Esmeralda.

The cathedral is the heart of the blockbusting ‘Assassin’s Creed Unity’ (2014) set during the French Revolution of 1789.,

Notre-Dame has been the setting of plays, operas and musicals, as well as Jules Perrot’s ballet ‘La Esmeralda’.

But the most successful stage show by far was Luc Plamondon and Richard Cocciante’s 1998 musical ‘Notre-Dame de Paris’, which has been staged in more than 20 countries since.