It is the kind of thing that happens, we know, but it never seemed likely to happen in our time. It’s not the kind of thing that never happens, just not the kind of thing that we expect to live through, much less watch in real time, on cable television. Perhaps because our tragic familiarity with terrorism has shaped our minds for dread, for imagining the deliberately unimaginable, what seems to be an accidental disaster of the classic historical kind becomes even harder for us to accept. If we had read about the Great Notre-Dame Fire of 1535, let’s say, in which the roof burned up and the spire fell, though the towers remained intact, it would seem eventful, certainly, but hardly out of the normal run of what happens.
Indeed, if it had happened in 1535, it would have been within the lifetime of Montaigne, the first essayist, who is said to have made the remark that, justice being what it is in the world, if someone accused him of having stolen the towers of Notre-Dame, he would flee the country rather than face trial—meaning that no accusation, however absurd, fails to carry its own momentum. That he took the cathedral’s towers as his instance of something permanently entrenched, impossible to remove, is just one indication of how central the Paris cathedral is to the French imagination. From Montaigne to Matisse—who painted it often—it’s just present. Less sublime or celebrated among the great French Gothic cathedrals than Chartres, and not a martyr, as Amiens and Reims—both of which were shelled during the First World War—were thought to be, Notre-Dame was just there.
Its conflagration, which threatened its destruction for several hours on Monday night, was, therefore, obviously historic; though I hope it is not merely art-historical pedantry that adds the detail that the spire, which fell so vividly and horribly, was not original to the medieval work—which began in 1163—but was built in the nineteenth century, by the restorer Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, who is, indeed, in large part responsible for the façade of the cathedral as we know it. (The façade was heavily defaced some fifty years earlier, during the French Revolution, when a mob imagined that its statues were of French kings.)
Americans, including President Trump, who tweeted his own recommendation—to douse the flames from a plane, making cathedral fires one more subject about which he combines complete ignorance and absolute arrogance—seemed initially a bit impatient with the firemen, the pompiers, of Paris. They did appear somewhat overwhelmed at first, but with the morning light it became evident that, in fact, they had done a semi-miraculous thing, containing the fire so that, for all that was lost, the essentials of the structure were apparently maintained. (Certainly, anyone who has had experience with the pompiers will have been impressed by their intelligence and their aplomb. They are on call not just for fires but for general emergencies—I recall once a team came to release an unhappy older woman from a bathroom into which she had been accidentally locked. Having been apologized to, since the problem with the lock, in retrospect, seemed obvious, the head pompier said, “Ah, well, in retrospect, everything seems obvious.”)
The scale and the insensitivity of much of the nineteenth-century restoration of Notre-Dame, including much of the remade stained glass, as well as the façade statuary, all made more to Viollet-le-Duc’s vision of the Gothic than to its original manner, has always made Notre-Dame less valued than its sister churches among lovers of pure, high Gothic style. The architectural Romantics—Ruskin and Proust and the rest—who resurrected the glory of the Gothic for the world, turned their eyes more often to Chartres, with its blue-tinted interior, than to the Paris city church.
Notre-Dame is indisputably something of a patchwork of time and changing historical impulses and nineteenth-century folly. And little art of major consequence resides inside it; Notre-Dame is not St. Peter’s Basilica. But this makes it, in its way, more specific. Its special virtues reside in its form, which seems to have been, blessedly, saved: the familiar play of the towers facing west and the matchless, buttressed rear curving down along the Seine, where it can be discovered, almost as a secret, walking on the bridges east of the cathedral.
And the same hodgepodge of architectural qualities that many Romantics disdained proved, in the end, central to its romance. It was the greatest of the Romantic novelists, Victor Hugo, who imagined it first not as a religious monument but as a cultural one, a civic one, where religious piety could manifest as a sheer tribute to the power of the irrational in human life. Love, Hugo wrote, in his 1831 novel about the cathedral and its strange inhabitant, Quasimodo, makes no sense: “The inexplicable fact is that the blinder it is, the more tenacious it is. It is never stronger than when it is completely unreasonable.” Quasimodo’s love for Esmeralda is set in and around Notre-Dame precisely because the sheer power of life’s irrational forces is felt so deeply there. Hugo, not a pious figure but a Republican and political one—the voice, in fact, of the impious populace—made the cathedral the quintessential French romantic setting.
At moments of enormous and historic loss, one seeks, perhaps foolishly or with false reassurance, for some sense of continuity, including the continuities of disaster and renewal. So, let it be said that Paris, though to a stranger’s eyes a city of continuities, has hardly been immune to catastrophic circumstance. Nearly a century after Notre-Dame was looted in the revolution, it narrowly escaped being set on fire during the Commune of 1871. The palace of the Tuileries was burned then—whether by accident or by arson is still a question that divides right and left—and its ruins remained intact, or, rather, ruined, and in situ for most of the next decade, until they were finally demolished. Even that story, in a sense, offers an encouraging lesson about civic disaster and civic recovery: while the politicians debated what to do with the ruins, the culture of the Impressionists rose up around them. Life and light found their way.
Many other catastrophes, large and small, have befallen Paris, and that history of destruction and renewal as a source of civic faith offered a wan hope, as Notre-Dame burned on Monday. As New Yorkers have learned about civic disasters, it is important to focus on the specific as a way out of the horrific, and the specifics here, though hardly good, are not completely desolate: the fire, though unimaginable the morning before, did not do the worst that one could have imagined.
Nevertheless, our emotions follow a familiar course: shock that it is happening, relief that it is not as bad as it might have been, and then shock again at realizing just how bad it is. Still, the cathedral belongs to everyone, and everyone is rooting for its restoration. The French leftist and staunch atheist Jean-Luc Mélenchon wrote on Monday evening that, while he could not see the hand of God in the cathedral, nonetheless, “If it seems so powerful, it’s without doubt because human beings surpassed themselves in putting Notre-Dame in the world. Those who feel the emptiness of a universe deprived of meaning and the absurdity of the human condition see here the apotheosis of the spirit of thousands of women and men who worked over two centuries and eight hundred years.”
You can, in other words, take the cathedral as you choose to find it. Montaigne was right that justice can be fleeting in a nation, but there is much resilience in a town. Our civilization is still resourceful enough to remake its past, in every sense. I would take a bet that, within a decade, Notre-Dame will be back in more than decent shape, because Paris will still be Paris.
