What next for Notre Dame?

Notre Dame is only important from a Shakespeare’s-birthplace point of view. Architecturally it is a nullity beside the cathedrals of Beauvais and Laon, Albi and Marseille, Rouen and Clermont-Ferrand (a sinister marvel of black tufa).

The ashes of the cathedral are now the site of a proxy struggle between some of the greatest fortunes on the planet. The struggle has begun with the architectural competition announced by the widely loathed Macron and the so far less loathed PM Édouard Philippe. How will the competition be conducted? Who will select the committee that will select the committee that selects the architect or engineer whose name will get attached to the building like Viollet-le-Duc, who restored it in the mid 19th century with all the nous of a mediaeval surveyor enjoying the good fortune to live under the July monarchy. William Burges, an architect of genius, described Viollet-le-Duc as ‘a great scholar, an average architect and a disastrous restorationist’.

A verdict which ought to be recalled by that constituency that demands Notre Dame should be rebuilt ‘just as it was’. Just as it was when? With the exceptions of Salisbury (spire apart) and Amiens, the great cathedrals have been built over many centuries in many styles: they are accretive collages. It should, however, also be recalled that Viollet-le-Duc, unlike both his English Tractarian contemporaries and the aesthete Burges, was a rationalist: restoration was precisely not copying what had once been there and was now destroyed. It was the ‘re-establishment of a structure as it had never been before’: in other words, just as it wasn’t.

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He was a technocrat avant la lettre who considered the gothic to be a programmatic system of building rather than a sacred duty. An evidently inanimate system of minerals to which feeling, memory, national outpouring, godliness, beneficence etc.