Notre Dame: A Cathedral for a Fragile Age

Like many across the globe I was shocked and deeply saddened by the horrific fire at Notre Dame de Paris which has sat on the  Île de la Cité  - the historic heart of Paris in the middle of the River Seine - for 850 years.  Paris is perhaps my favorite city in the world. Part of my attachment to Paris and France may stem from the part of me that descends from French immigrants who ultimately settled in New Orleans.  Part may stem from my frequent visits to Paris years ago on business trips and more recently on pleasure trips, the last taking place last September.  Another part my come from the realization that without France, Yorktown might have been lost.  Visit the Yorktown Revolutionary War Museum and you are reminded that it was a joint American-French army that defeated the British after the French fleet had driven away British reinforcements.

Whatever the allure, on every trip to Paris, I'd visit Notre Dame or walk by it.  It seemed immortal and a forever constant. With luck, the French will restore Notre Dame and also restore that nation's national unity which has been frayed by far right forces and Russian meddling akin to what America suffered.  A piece in the New York Times also suggests that the cathedral and French culture and French Enlightenment - a strong source for the Founding Fathers - may remind Americans of what has been lost but is capable of being restored in its own society.   Here are column excerpts:

Kilometer Zero: Notre-Dame de Paris, the place from which distance in France is measured, the reference of a people, the starting point and endpoint, the “epicenter,” as President Emmanuel Macron put it. That is why so many people, religious or not, were in tears as the great cathedral burned. A part of themselves, their bearings, was aflame.

Ransacked during the revolution in an anticlerical frenzy, restored and rebuilt during the 19th century after tempers cooled, site of imperial coronation, national liberation and presidential funerals, Notre-Dame became the nation’s soul, the place where France could reconcile its turbulent history, the monarchical and the republican, the religious and the secular.

What is Paris after all? Beauty. The horror of it lay in watching beauty burn, the delicate spire toppling into an inferno of 800-year-old beams. Here was the best of humankind, as powerful an expression as exists of the sacred, going up in black smoke.

In a time of anxiety, of ugliness and hatred and lies, the blaze felt ominous. “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” John Keats wrote, and that is “all ye need to know.”

A friend in Paris, Sarah Cleveland, wrote to me: “It was strangely quiet and still, as if people were in a trance, watching the fire boil inside the shell of the cathedral walls, like a caldron. The scene was solemn, reverent. Hopeless. It seemed impossible that something so monumental could be so fragile.”

Civilization is fragile. Democracy is fragile, like that spire. It is impossible today, it is dangerous, to ignore that. When a universal reference goes up in smoke, an abyss opens up.

Notre-Dame is a sanctuary, in a time when the American president spits on sanctuaries and has considered, as punishment, dumping poor migrants in those cities that dare to call themselves by that name.

Our Lady of Paris is still there after the blaze, with her towers, roofless now. President Macron vowed to rebuild the cathedral. Money is pouring in. The French president was dignified, a reminder of the unifying power of dignity at a time when it has vanished from the White House.

Notre-Dame, Macron said, is “our history” and “our imaginary”: a means, in other words, to remember and an inspiration to all who aspire for something transcendent, beyond self. The contribution of President Trump, for whom self is all, was to suggest sending “flying water tankers” to douse the cathedral. His advice was ignored.

Perhaps, for an American, the closest thing to Notre-Dame, in its power to represent the nation, is the Statue of Liberty, work of a French sculptor. A mist hung over the water the other day, with the magical result that the torch of liberty hovered in the air, apparently detached. Seeing it, I imagined Emma Lazarus’s poem rewritten for the age of Trump:

Give me your despots, your rich,Your vulgar tax evaders yearning to flee,The depraved and debauched that itchTo steal, I will make them free.Send these, the dishonorable, to watchHow easy it is to corrupt like me.

I don’t recall French civilization feeling so important in my lifetime. It’s what we have. There will be ugly polemics over the coming weeks, once the first shock passes, over who was responsible, how this disaster happened, what negligence was involved.

But in those silent, reverent, hymn-singing crowds on the streets of Paris, I also saw the possibility of a French coming-together in the determination to rebuild — not only the cathedral, but also a nation shaken by the violence of the Yellow Vest movement and the social divisions it reflects. The story of Notre-Dame is a story of endurance and rebirth.

It is also a story of European civilization. Notre-Dame survived Hitler, just. Its fragility, now demonstrated, demands Europe’s unity, too.

Here at home, Trump and many in the GOP have been destroying America's institutions just as thoroughly as yesterday's fire destroyed the roof of Notre Dame cathedral.  All of us must vow to rebuild those endangered institutions and protect them from Trump and those who would destroy them.  Just as the French will set about restoring Notre Dame.