https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2019/apr/16/the-culture-inspired-by-notre-dame-paris

To understand the artistic wonder that is Notre Dame you have to accept it as a synthesis of medieval faith and modern fantasy. Viollet-le-Duc crowded the real Notre Dame with grinning, devilish gargoyles just as Hugo populated his fictional one with a deaf bell ringer and his tormentors. This intermixing of a genuine gothic cathedral with the 19th-century dream of what gothic should be has put Notre Dame at the heart of the modern imagination. It’s the artistic embodiment of Paris, the centre of medieval European thought and culture which in the 1800s became the birthplace of modern art.

For at least 300 years before Viollet-le-Duc saved Notre Dame, medieval cathedrals had been shunned. When London’s gothic cathedral St Paul’s was destroyed in the Great Fire of London it was replaced with a trendy new domed edifice by Christopher Wren. No-one this morning is calling for a new Notre Dame to be built by France’s contemporary architectural star Jean Nouvel. That’s because Viollet-le-Duc, who also restored churches across France and the lovely walled city Carcassonne, taught us what makes medieval architecture so magical.

Almost a thousand years after its original creation Notre Dame still speaks to us
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It is the human plenitude, the sense of hundreds of anonymous masons working in humble collectivism, and thousands of people across time sharing our awe for what they built, that gives Notre Dame its mystique. A great cathedral is a vast living organism. It’s like being inside a whale, the vaulting a sublime rib cage above you. Unlike a symmetrical classical building a gothic cathedral is not an image of order but living disorder where flying buttresses sprout, mighty columns soar, lofty galleries conceal prayers and plotters.

Viollet-le-Duc loved the monsters at the edge of medieval Christianity, basing the gargoyles and chimeras that cover his restored stonework on works in French museums. His macabre Notre Dame is the birthplace of French modern culture from Baudelaire’s poetry and Rodin’s Gates of Hell to Matisse’s painting of its unmistakable facade in pink morning light. Yet under all its accretions, the heart of Notre Dame is truly medieval. Gothic architecture was born in Paris. Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis, on the French capital’s outskirts, invented this art style in the early 1100s to glorify God in a spectacular new way. To let in sacred light, gothic builders created stained glass windows – and to make space for those, they raised buildings higher than ever before. Flying buttresses and the pointed arch redistributed the structure’s weight so cunningly that huge areas of wall could be replaced with glass. If Notre Dame survives it will be because the flying buttresses did their job.


America has imported more warlord theocracy from Afghanistan than it has exported democracy.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/16/notre-dame-warning-europe-value-cathedral-flames
To all Parisians and Europeans, Notre Dame is simply a wonder. There it stands, the subject of pride and admiration. Each time we passed by, even if we’d seen it a thousand times, we’d always at least glance at it, almost as if we had to. And yet we took that wonder for granted. Not that it became invisible or that we stopped noticing it, but because it simply stood there as it should: like the pyramids, Greek theatres or the temples of ancient Rome. It was a wonder of the world, an eternal monument that existed well before us and would long outlive us too.

The sorrow becomes even deeper when you realise that the catastrophe of Notre Dame represents so perfectly the condition of contemporary Europeans: people condemned to live among wonders, taking them for granted, ignorant of the fact that they may disappear– then suddenly finding themselves in a situation they’d never envisioned.

After the fire started, a few verses by the 19th-century French poet Gérard de Nerval began circulating on Twitter: “Notre Dame est bien vieille: on la verra peut-être/Enterrer cependant Paris qu’elle a vu naître.” (Notre Dame is very old: we may see her/ Bury, however, Paris, which she saw born.) The poem ends with the vision of tourists, a thousand years from now, contemplating the ruins of the cathedral. Notre Dame could be destroyed only by time, many, many years after we are long gone. We could not imagine being witnesses to such a catastrophe. Yet now we are.
The question that lies before us now is reconstruction. We have to rebuild. Emmanuel Macron has already vowed to repair Notre Dame, announcing the launch of a national donation campaign. But with that question comes another, deeper, one: how do you reconstruct something everyone thought existed separate from time itself?

Even those who have lived in Paris for many years felt humbled each time they passed by the facade, not only because of the massive stained glass windows, or the many carvings shadowing the square outside, but because, despite the hundreds of tourists always gathered at the entrance, there was a special, intimate silence about the place. Many have a very personal memory linked to Notre Dame, whether it is a cold evening silently staring at the cathedral to take some time back from the trials and tribulations of daily life, or the muted tones of a psalm heard from a chapel inside.

The cathedral has always been a part of our daily lives, a presence, a legacy that we share whatever our beliefs. For Europeans, the burning of Notre Dame comes with a wider warning: don’t take the wonders you enjoy for granted. Care for them more, because they may not be with you for ever. Europeans too often blindly navigate through a landscape of wonder, which is allowed to become a banal part of daily life. If they continue not to care for it, they may soon realise that it has already gone up in flames. To rebuild this wonder, to rescue it from being taken for granted once more, Europeans will need more than money and will: they will need a profound, thorough consideration of what they have in common, and what it means to be a European.

• Gilles Gressani is president of Groupe d’études géopolitiques. Mathéo Malik is editor-in-chief of Le GrandContinent

America has imported more warlord theocracy from Afghanistan than it has exported democracy.