Has Notre-Dame ever been a symbol of unity for the French?

From the kitchen of her apartment on the Quai de la Tournelle in Paris, the journalist and broadcaster Agnès Poirier could see the bright yellow plumes of smoke rising into the sky. Notre-Dame de Paris was on fire, and suddenly, in that tourist-crowded, hyper-expensive ‘cradle of France’, nothing was certain — ‘democracy, peace and fraternity’ — any more. The following morning, children living on or near the Île de la Cité took to school little plastic bags filled with blackened bits of roof picked up from balconies and pavements (as well as probably quite a lot of lead dust) which ‘dated back to the Crusades’.

Live-streaming of that apocalyptic conflagration taught millions of people around the world that a building can be mourned like a human being. ‘Notre-Dame is one of mankind’s greatest architectural achievements, the face of civilisation and the soul of a nation,’ writes Poirier. ‘On 15 April 2019 she almost died as a result of human carelessness.’