What the Notre Dame restoration says about France’s past – and its future

Visitors rediscovering Paris’s Notre Dame cathedral when it reopens this weekend will be stepping into a highly charged conversation about France’s past and its future. Both sacred and secular, the cathedral tellingly illustrates the conflict between tradition and reform in France, as a historically Catholic and imperial power tries to adapt to its multicultural and postcolonial present.

After the blaze that engulfed Notre Dame in April 2019, the French government quickly announced a competition to redesign the cathedral’s roof and spire. But the following month, 55% of respondents to a public poll favoured preserving the original design.

An row eventually erupted between Jean-Louis Georgelin, the army general in charge of Notre Dame’s reconstruction, and the cathedral’s chief architect, Philippe Villeneuve. Their exchange (Georgelin told Villeneuve to “shut his mouth”) typified the tension between those who believed something new could emerge from the ashes, and those who wanted Notre Dame to be rebuilt exactly as it was.

Ironically, the “original” edifice many French people wished to recreate was, itself, a new creation. It was architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc’s modern reimagining of medievalism, designed during his mid-19th-century restoration of the cathedral. He argued that “to restore a building is not to preserve it” but to “reinstate it”. Viollet-le-Duc understood the preservation of the past as an act of rehabilitation that required a modern touch if history was to live on.

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Macron’s soft power

In a similar vein, by the summer of 2020, President Emmanuel Macron had dropped the idea of a dramatic revamp. The French National Commission of Heritage and Architecture even recommended eschewing modern, potentially more sustainable, building materials.

They did, however, envisage modernising the cathedral’s access and surroundings to better manage its 14 million annual visitors. Their approval of the related interior refurbishments and new lighting effects deepened the general discord.

The essayist Alain Finkielkraut and the historian Pierre Nora blasted the plans as “kitsch” in the New York Times. Notre Dame’s then rector, Patrick Chauvet, countered that they would make more sense for visitors and connect the cathedral’s medieval origins with the modern day.

Neither view has yet resolved the quarrel over Macron’s desire to introduce new stained-glass windows in the side-chapels. Despite these ongoing disagreements, reactions to last Friday’s images from inside Notre Dame suggest that the president’s resolve for an ambitious renovation has paid off.

Touring the site, Macron posted a picture on X (formerly known as Twitter) of the assembled crowd. Photographed from the galleries, some 1,300 members of the restoration team stood cradled within the newly bright nave. Its walls had been cleaned, not just of soot, but also of the dirt that had accumulated since Viollet-le-Duc’s restoration.

This was French solidarity cast in its most sublime light. And Macron’s instinct for soft power was on full display. “To realise the impossible together. This is France,” he tweeted.

Macron was using the reborn Notre Dame as a recognisable symbol of endurance and unity to reiterate his faith in French exceptionalism. Expressing France’s deep gratitude for the monument being “repaired, reinvented and rebuilt”, he has channelled this spirit of renewal into a national mood beset by the same decline that has increasingly hamstrung his presidency.

France’s fears of waning international influence and of growing internal dissent have powered a “booming industry” of national self-doubt. The cathedral’s €700 million (£582 million) renovation helps to counterbalance that insecurity. Not least in a year when the Olympics have drawn the eyes of the world to Paris.

Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame

By harnessing Notre Dame’s combination of a sense of institution with the spirit of innovation, Macron was imitating one of his heroes – Victor Hugo. Hugo’s bestselling 1831 novel, Notre-Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre-Dame), was integral in making the cathedral a beloved icon.

Hugo mustered public support for the cathedral’s restoration after it had been vandalised during the French Revolution. He roused public sentiment by comparing the building to flesh that had been wrinkled by time and bruised by revolt.

Yet Macron would also do well to remember that this vision of Notre Dame remains as much a warning against complacency as it does an ode to its unifying majesty. That warning is apt in a week when his latest government looks almost certain to fall.

For Hugo, nothing remains unchanged through the ebb and flow of time, making continuity and rupture part of the same universal law of creation. This is why his novel – a “cathedral of poetry”, as historian Jules Michelet put it – thinks in nuanced instead of categorical ways about the fluidity between the past and the future.

Hugo’s Notre Dame is “an edifice of transition”, mirroring France itself. Marked by both Romanesque and gothic styles and built over successive centuries, it is a collective and continuing achievement: at once whole and diverse. For Hugo, it therefore nurtures the multifaceted outlook that he argued exemplifies France’s potential to welcome, inspire and elevate all people.

At the very heart of Paris, Notre Dame invites visitors to see beyond the dividing lines between this and that, then and now, and them versus us. But Hugo also insists that the “vast symphony” he hears ringing in Notre Dame’s bells and across its history has the sound of a storm.

In his romantic understanding of the way opposites are intimately interconnected, foreboding uncertainty and forthright conviction ultimately go hand in hand.

The future is not set in stone and so obliges us to be vigilant and to continue working. With an additional €140 million from worldwide donations to invest in Notre Dame’s future preservation, France is well positioned to meet this obligation. The cathedral’s fortunes nevertheless serve as a reminder that the social togetherness dreamt of in France’s revolutionary history – and in its future ambitions – requires concrete labour, not just vivid imagination.

Bradley Stephens does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.