N is for Nave (On the Fire at Notre Dame)

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Prologue
Notre Dame de Paris was one of the first buildings I knew by name.

For this, I surely owe credit to Ludwig Bemelmans’s classic Madeline children’s books about an adventurous young girl who lives in an old, vine-covered house in Paris. Between the picture books, the animated TV series, and the computer games, Madeline was my childhood ambassador to the world outside the United States. Bemelmans’s charming illustrations introduced me to the Seine and its many bridges, Notre Dame, and the omnipresent Eiffel Tower. Paris was one of the first cities I could name, right after my home city of Chicago.


“In an old house in Paris that was covered in vines, lived twelve little girls in two straight lines.”

Madeline used these landmarks to make a place as distant and ancient as Paris feel familiar to me at age five. I didn’t really know anything about Paris. But I sensed the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, and the Arc de Triomphe were what made the city unique, just as Chicago had the Sears Tower and Navy Pier. I implicitly understood the power of architecture and time to transform steel, concrete, masonry, and glass into an icon able to define and represent a place and its people.

“Notre Dame is Paris; it’s all its history,” Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo told the press on the eve of April 15th, 2019. Earlier that afternoon, a fire broke out in the rafters below the cathedral’s spire, the cause of which is believed to be an accident related to ongoing renovation work. The cathedral’s steep gable roof was framed with massive timber beams, which are very dry and extremely flammable. With so much fuel to burn and a delayed response by church personnel to identify the source of the fire alarm, the blaze quickly grew out of control. Flames ripped through and destroyed the entire roof structure, causing the spire to collapse through the vaulted ceiling and into the sanctuary, leaving behind gaping holes and char marks. Stained glass windows crafted centuries ago were shattered. Hand-carved stone blocks in the vaulted ceiling which were hoisted by pulleys and set by several generations of masons came crumbling to the floor. Mighty oak trees planted in the 8th or 9th century—having grown for over 300 years before being logged, cut, transported, and erected into a frame that would stand for over eight centuries—were reduced to ash in a matter of hours.

Fortunately, no lives were lost in the fire. But the destruction was spectacular, in the very worst sense of the word. Terrible clouds of smoke bellowed from the roof, casting darkness over the Île de la Cité. My mom, fearful the entire structure would imminently collapse, texted me that afternoon to express her gratitude we had the opportunity to see it before it was completely destroyed. Notre Dame was the top trending topic in the world that day, as friends, family, and strangers took to social media to share their memories of the cathedral from vacations and study-abroad programs. It was a period of public grieving for a building that belonged to the world as much as it did to Paris.

I had not known the extent to which I treasure Notre Dame until I had to sit through the rest of that afternoon at work in a haze of worry and grief. I came home that evening and immediately sat down and began scrolling through hundreds of tweets, news stories, and videos of the destruction, exposing myself to its horrors as many times as possible so my brain could build a tolerance to the idea of a world without the Notre Dame I’d known since my childhood. I think this is what we really mean when we say we need to “process” something.

I didn’t add any of my vacation photos to the public grieving, largely because I was left speechless. I couldn’t finish processing this loss until I understood the extent of the destruction. Would forensic experts condemn the building to be razed because it was too unsafe? Or would we soon see a new roof better equipped to resist fire? I didn’t want to underreact nor overreact. (So naturally I chose to spend the next year writing an essay about it, because I’m a swarm of contradictions.)

When I had finally seen enough photos for the night, I realized it would be very easy to put aside the initial shock and sadness and conclude, “Oh well. They’ll fix it eventually.” But that seemed unthinkable while my emotions were still so raw. It felt like one of those tragedies where I’d always remember what I was doing when I first heard the news. I wanted to give myself time to feel that grief rather than allowing it to be buried the next morning by the sands of time.

I soon turned inwards, trying to understand why I, along with the rest of the world, reacted so strongly to this particular tragedy. As I learned more about the fire and the history of the building, I came to see the story of Notre Dame as the story of what it means to be human, standing at the forefront of all the history preceding us and asking: “What is my place in all this?” This is my humble attempt to tell that story and look to the future.

Part I: “Our” Lady
Notre Dame de Paris was born on an island shaped like a cradle, or perhaps like a boat. The Île de la Cité is nestled in the Seine and lies at the geographic heart of Paris. Archeologists believe the plot of land on its eastern end where Notre Dame stands was previously the home of four different basilicas and cathedrals before this one. The creation of Notre Dame began with an act of destruction: around 1160, Bishop Maurice de Sully ordered the demolition of a cathedral dedicated to Saint Étienne[1] to clear the way for a much larger church. Stones from this house of worship were reused to form the foundation of what would become Notre Dame de Paris.

The cornerstone of Notre Dame was set in 1163 and major construction was completed by 1220. But its builders would spend the next 125 years topping out the bell towers, erecting the spire, refining architectural details, and incredibly, demolishing and remodeling the earliest-built parts of the cathedral using better technology. Renovation work on Notre Dame began before they even finished building it.

In a 90-year span around the turn of the 13th century, the French built an astonishing eighty cathedrals. Notre Dame de Paris is hardly the tallest, oldest, or most magnificent. It’s not even the most magnificent cathedral named Notre Dame that was severely damaged in a modern fire. But undoubtedly, it is the most famous church in France, and arguably the world, which is why the fire provoked such a huge global reaction. Why does this particular church earn such widespread recognition?

Simply put, I believe Notre Dame is famous because Paris is famous, and it happens to be the only cathedral[2] in the city. The building itself could just as easily be one of the lesser-known Notre Dames in Chartres, Reims, or Amiens and be renowned all the same. Notre Dame’s fame rides the coattails of Paris’s reputation much more than it can be credited to its own architectural merits. I don’t mean to imply the cathedral isn’t remarkable and majestic—it is both those things and more. But France is overflowing with Gothic majesty. It makes much more sense to say Paris is ten times more visited than Reims than it does to say one cathedral is ten times more beautiful than the other. It’s all about location.

Paris’s reputation as an internationally renowned center of art and culture is owed to the extreme concentration of wealth among the French royals and the Catholic Church, both of whom have centered their power and influence there for centuries. These authorities built grand palaces, churches, and abbeys, which led them to commission and patronize artists to fill these spaces with sculptures, portraits, furniture, and other artwork. Thus, Paris became the home of monasteries, universities, and art academies, which attracted yet more scholars, writers, craftspeople, and artists.

Notre Dame hasn’t always enjoyed the status of a universally beloved national icon. By the end of the French Revolution, it had suffered significant damage from riots, been converted into a temple for the atheistic Cult of Reason, and used as a warehouse to store wine. Even after Napoleon Bonaparte reestablished Catholicism as the majority religion of France, Paris was apt to let Notre Dame decay into ruins until it caught the attention of a young writer named Victor Hugo. Hugo was outraged by the mistreatment and public apathy towards Notre Dame, so he set out to make the case for its beauty and importance. The result was a novel he titled Notre Dame de Paris, better known in the U.S. by its English title, The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Hugo, like Ludwig Bemelmans, understood the power of compelling fiction to endear a place to its readers. In fact, he objected to the English title because it detracted from his intended focus of the novel: not the deformed bell-ringer Quasimodo, but the cathedral itself. Hugo’s novel was a hit, successfully garnering enough public interest in Notre Dame to convince King Louis Phillipe to order a restoration in 1844.

Only after its reputation was bolstered by Hugo and its image was made presentable by the ensuing renovation did Notre Dame become the iconic tourist attraction we know today. The long-standing institutions of politics and religion shaped Paris into the capitol of France in every possible sense of the word, endowing it with dozens of monuments, churches, and museums. Notre Dame is well-visited because Paris has every reason to be well-visited. The wealthy and well-connected have always been over-represented in deciding which art and artists matter.

Which brings us to the present-day United States and its frequently myopic view of the world.

Outside France, there is surely no other country where Notre Dame (and more broadly, Paris) is more popular than the United States. American culture and tourism surely played a significant role in turning Notre Dame into a destination visited by 12 million people every year. The U.S. has held strong cultural and political ties to France since the American Revolution. French language and history are commonly taught in American schools. French art and culture have long been romanticized in the U.S., being regularly exhibited in its most prominent concert halls and museums. Paris is one of the most common destinations for American trips abroad. It is no surprise many Americans feel a special connection to Paris (and to a similar extent, London) because of its cultural prominence in the United States. Madeline forged that bond for me when I was young, and she had help from other animated ambassadors targeting my generation. Rugrats in Paris. Ratatouille. The Aristocats. Disney’s adaptation of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. I think growing up with these movies makes the foreign familiar, helping to create in us a sense of global citizenship and shared international heritage that endures our coming of age.

Establishing shot from Rugrats in Paris. Pretty accurate for a cartoon, though if the Eiffel Tower really appeared that tall from Notre Dame, it would be a preposterously oversized wrought iron monstrosity (more than it already is) and possibly the tallest structure in the world.

All these historical and cultural forces connecting Americans with Paris seem to have done so at the expense of other places in the world being treated as equally important. The fire at Notre Dame garnered more attention in the U.S. than the three historically black churches in Louisiana that were destroyed by an arsonist just a week earlier. Seven months prior, Brazil’s National Museum suffered a catastrophic fire that incinerated 200 years of the nation’s historical treasures as well as artifacts from around the globe. A few years before, ISIS used pickaxes, sledgehammers, and explosives to obliterate countless ancient temples and artifacts across southwest Asia. I didn’t feel the need to spend an entire evening “processing” any of those losses of cultural heritage. I admit this reflects a deeply ingrained cultural bias on my part, one perhaps wrapped up in latent racism.

It’s emotionally difficult to claim personal responsibility for an institutional bias, since the forces that created it had compounded, propagated, and reverberated through the American consciousness decades before my generation was born. But I can’t honestly explain my reaction to the destruction at Notre Dame without acknowledging the influences I inherited, for better or worse.

To be clear, I don’t feel the need to express guilt for the way I reacted to Notre Dame. I don’t think Americans who mourned were being unreasonable for singling out this particular icon, with historic and symbolic value unlike few other structures in the world. Maybe that value was fairly earned, or maybe not. But a close relationship with Europe does not excuse the general American tendency to ignore or undervalue non-European culture and peoples. Francophilia isn’t itself “bad” or “racist.” Lack of empathy for other cultures is. Fortunately, empathy is not a zero sum game.

These social ethics become thornier for me when it comes to the question of philanthropy. If there was any significant backlash in the global reaction to the fire, it was regarding the hundreds of millions of euros immediately pledged by European billionaires and corporations to fund the restoration. If they have this kind of money to fix a single church, why can’t they do something about food insecurity, refugee crises, and the lack of access to reliable healthcare systems around the world? Why don’t they allocate their resources in a way that will reduce the most human suffering? I think those are compelling moral arguments, and I have no good retort except to point out ways in which Notre Dame’s financial situation is complicated.

A 1905 secularism law gave ownership of all cathedrals in France to the state. That means the French government owns Notre Dame and allows the Catholic Archdiocese of Paris to use it permanently for free. France’s Ministry of Culture is responsible for Notre Dame’s maintenance, but the Archdiocese handles day-to-day operations and upkeep.[3] If you find that confusing, so do the French: the exact breakdown of responsibility for managing aging cathedrals is unclear, and it had led to tensions between church and state. A few years ago, Time Magazine ran a rather prescient article reporting on the Archdiocese’s struggle to obtain enough money from the government to repair crumbling stones and replace substandard mortar at Notre Dame. Both of these items are critical to the long-term survival of the cathedral, but the cost far exceeded their annual subsidy for maintenance. The Archdiocese finally admitted the money wasn’t coming, and in 2017 launched an ambitious pledge drive with the goal of raising €100 million over the next 5 to 10 years. Restoration after the fire of 2019 may cost ten times that amount.

That money needs to come from somewhere. It’s simply too large a sum to be raised from within the Archdiocese and from pledge drives in a reasonable amount of time. And it’s widely considered infeasible for the French government to spend hundreds of millions of euros on just one of hundreds of old (and lesser-known) state-owned churches in need of maintenance. Nobody wants to put the French people in the dilemma of having to choose which parts of their cultural heritage are more important than others. Nor do they want to be forced into an equally awful dilemma over whether they can afford to save Notre Dame and still fund the rest of the government.

The amount in question is a small fraction of France’s annual budget, but the nation is not currently in a political position to easily increase federal spending, even for an emergency like this one. At the time of the fire, France was in the midst of months-long protests from the yellow vest movement, a group seeking economic justice on behalf of the working class. These protesters are urging the government to provide higher wages, affordable fuel, a better-funded pension system, reduce France’s soaring rates of homelessness, and for President Emmanuel Macron to reinstate taxes on the wealthy—things that actually affect humans’ well-being. If the government were to fund Notre Dame and ignore the yellow-vesters, it would be giving in to one set of budgetary pressures over another and playing right into that awful dilemma.

Before France could get into a debate over public financing for the emergency repairs, the money had already been pledged by billionaires and corporate donors. The French law enacted to govern the restoration process created a “national subscription” to collect funds and accept donations and payments. Some local government bodies contributed funds, but the law doesn’t appropriate any federal money. As long as wealth is distributed so vastly unequally, one of the better outcomes is for the extraordinarily wealthy to swoop in and foot the bill for culturally important projects like this. Admittedly, this creates a perverse incentive for them to withhold their donations until the project goes in their preferred direction. If and when they do eventually pay up, it would be no different than any other time in history: the wealthy yet again exerting disproportionate influence over which art matters.

As for whether their philanthropy is misprioritized, it is easy to raise awareness for causes that are acute, highly visible, and simple to understand, like a fire at a famous building or aiding hurricane victims in your own country. It is more difficult to raise awareness for, say, the complex relationship between logging, farming, and climate change that led to unprecedented forest fires in the Amazon last August. Even less obvious is how to spend resources effectively to protect people from such ongoing, systemic problems. I can see why it may be tempting for CEOs to throw money at Notre Dame and ride the wave of positive PR, rather than do the hard, quiet work of figuring how and where their money can accomplish the most lasting good. Charity, unlike empathy, isn’t quite a zero sum game. But with billions of euros comes the luxury and the chore of not having to pick and choose causes. Participating in cultural charity shouldn’t give billionaires a pass on their responsibility for humanitarian charity, but neither should that participation be condemned in and of itself.

The yellow vest activists were understandably angered by the outpouring of donations to Notre Dame in the face of their weeks of protests. Having Notre Dame’s economic problems take precedence over theirs was perceived as an insult. But they didn’t go so far as to call for the donations to be returned. Support for the idea that France should give up on Notre Dame, demolish it, and save the money for something else is virtually non-existent. The French have an implicit understanding that leaving Notre Dame in ruins is simply not an option. Rich and poor alike felt grief watching the flames burn a national monument that Monday night.

Notre Dame could not have been built and maintained over the centuries without deep imbalances of power and wealth. The economic systems that created and preserved it may be cold, indifferent, and unfair. But what endures is an act of good will for all: a grand work of art that stands at the heart of one of the world’s great cities, existing only to stir the hearts and minds of believers and non-believers alike, its beauty given away for free. A building is always more than just a building. Notre Dame transcending the value of its materials to become a symbol means nobody, not even the French state, can truly own it. And that means we all own it.

After all, notre dame means “our lady.”

 

Part II: Whose Lady?
In the days following the fire, French President (and non-building expert) Emmanuel Macron promised the cathedral would be rebuilt “more beautifully than before,” setting an impossibly ambitious goal of completing the work before Paris hosts the 2024 Olympics. (Experts estimate it will take at least twice as long.) I imagine most people assumed the building would be restored to appear exactly as it did before the fire. But soon after Macron’s statement, Prime Minister (and non-building expert) Édouard Philippe announced an international design competition for a new roof and spire, kicking off a debate on what the future of the building ought to look like.

To dramatically oversimplify: on one side are the purists, who want to see a restoration as close as practicable to the original design, but with modern building techniques and materials to protect from future fires and corrosion. High-resolution 3D scans of the entire building exist, enabling precise recreations if that’s eventually the direction chosen. Opposite the purists are the architectural provocateurs who proposed ludicrously unconstructable designs to incite debate about what it means to restore a medieval building. Somewhere in-between are the ambitious architects who genuinely believe they deserve the privilege to stamp their name on a bold reimagining of centuries-old cultural heritage. Naturally, the ambitious architects called the purists a bunch of snobs afraid of change and innovation, and the purists called all the new proposals a pile of hubristic lunacy by artists with no understanding of the laws of physics.

No real consensus formed around any of the proposals, but I think the broader conversation about restoration is worth exploring because it asks us to consider what a cathedral actually is.

For example, let’s take one big question that needs to be answered: what should be done to replace the spire? I had assumed the spire lost in the blaze was part of the building’s original construction, but I was totally wrong. The original spire was built around 1250 and dismantled around 1787 after it became unstable in the wind. The spire destroyed in 2019 was designed and built by architect Eugène Viollet-Le-Duc in the 1860s as a replacement. I had no idea this wasn’t the first time Notre Dame needed a new spire. I was initially strongly in favor of a faithful and exact recreation, but gaining more historical context complicated the way I thought about these new proposals.

Viollet-Le-Duc and Jean-Baptiste Lassus were the chief architects for the 19-year-long project (1845-1864) to restore Notre Dame after Victor Hugo rallied public support for its repair. In addition to the new spire, the restoration involved a nearly complete rebuilding of the sacristy, repair of the great organ, and the replacement of many panes of stained glass on the western rose window. Perhaps most visible to tourists, Viollet-Le-Duc is credited with leading the effort to restore nearly every statue on the main façade. Photos and drawings prior to the restoration work show a barren front elevation bereft of gargoyles[4] between the bell towers, without the 28 Kings of Judah over the three entry portals, and missing or damaged sculptures within the portals and near the doorways. Viollet-Le-Duc and his team of sculptors referenced old drawings, archives, and similar sculptures at nearby churches to decide how to replace all this missing stone artwork. The gargoyles looking out over Point Zero today are of his design.


Left: West end before 1841. Right: West end in 2018 (photo by me). Look how much was missing!

Viollet-Le-Duc reinvented Notre Dame to such a degree that some historians consider it a 19th-century building as much as it is a 12th-century building. Generations of architects, masons, sculptors, craftspeople, church officials, and politicians have made their mark on Notre Dame, collectively and cumulatively steering it through centuries of history. The purists who want Notre Dame to be restored exactly as it was have valid concerns about preserving the Gothic nature of the cathedral, but I think they need to be honest about what exactly they are arguing to protect. The notion that Notre Dame de Paris is—or ever was—a singular work of architecture conceived at a singular time that should look a singular way is an absolute fiction. Even as it was being built, the project was led by different master builders over the 200 year construction process, each with their own ideas and technological innovations. Parts of it were demolished and renovated before the building was even completed. There is no unified, canonical, specific vision of Notre Dame to be preserved and respected. In fact, this is exactly the kind of thinking the roof design competition proposals seek to challenge. “Viollet-Le-Duc got to put his mark on this timeless masterpiece. What makes me any less worthy to design a new spire?” these architects ask. “Why does his vision deserve to be recreated without considering any new ideas?” Though I don’t care for their proposals, they’re right to ask this question. Viollet-Le-Duc was just one of many who recognized change is inevitable and happened to be in the position to steer the ship in his preferred direction. His is not necessarily the final word.

Most renderings of the new roof proposals are jarring to me because even to my non-expert eyes, the new material choices, geometric shapes, and architectural styles are so blatantly in contrast with the original Gothic design. But even Viollet-Le-Duc wasn’t immune to this criticism. To historians and Gothic architecture experts, his additions—especially his spiky, ornamented spire—were somewhat overzealous and more decorative than befits a Gothic cathedral. Mitchell Owens, writing for Architectural Digest, calls his designs a “pastichery” of the original style.

I would venture a guess most observers today (including me) lack the knowledge and historical context to appreciate the distinctions to that degree. But so many of the new proposals—even the serious ones—are such radical, polarizing departures from the Gothic style. Nobody seems to be offering a middle ground between a strict reproduction of Viollet-Le-Duc and a complete abandonment of the style that will appear obviously dissonant to the architecturally clueless even centuries from now.

On July 29th, 2019, the French government officially enacted a law declaring the restoration of Notre Dame must “preserve the historic, artistic and architectural interest of the monument.” This was a departure from an earlier version of the bill passed by the French Senate requiring the cathedral to be restored exactly as it was, suggesting the legislature didn’t want to be involved in making creative decisions. It’s uncertain whether this law effectively brings Prime Minister Édouard Phillipe’s design competition to an end.[5] Legally, I don’t think this clause has a clear meaning at all, which leaves the future of the cathedral’s architecture an open question. Nobody is quite sure what will happen when the building is finally cleaned up, stabilized, and ready for new construction.

We find ourselves at a turning point in history where we must make a choice about what our generation will contribute to Notre Dame. What we decide now may have rippling impacts on future restorations as other aging cathedrals crumble and are subjected to the harsh realities of a warming climate. There is no restoration project in the world more visible than this one. Will we allow the new spire to become a vanity project for an architect more concerned about their own legacy than that of Notre Dame? Or will we stick with what works and copy Viollet-Le-Duc? Will we use this opportunity to create something new and inspiring, or tarnish something old? Future generations will judge us for how we answer these questions.

Nineteenth-century writer and preservationist Prosper Mérimée cautioned Viollet-Le-Duc, “A restoration may be more disastrous for a monument than the ravages of centuries.” Whatever path we take, we must be careful not to further add to the disaster with thoughtless alterations.

 

Part III: The Ship of Theseus
There’s this famous thought experiment in philosophy called The Ship of Theseus. It goes like this: suppose the warship sailed by the ancient Greek hero Theseus is brought home from battle and put on display. Over time, the wooden beams and planks begin to rot and are replaced one by one with new wood, until eventually none of the original pieces remain. Is that ship still the Ship of Theseus? If not, at what point did it cease to be the “original” ship?

I’m sure you can see the parallels to building restoration. How many original shingles, spires, sculptures, stones, and stained glass windows can be replaced before we must ask: is this building still Notre Dame? Would it still be Notre Dame if the bell towers burned down and the roof were replaced with sleek, curved glass? Would it still be Notre Dame if the walls were somehow reinforced with steel and the iconic flying buttresses were demolished because they were no longer necessary?

Victor Hugo had particularly strong opinions on whether replacing elements of Notre Dame was actually contributing to its destruction. In the vein of Prosper Mérimée, he described disagreeable renovations to the cathedral as nothing less than “vandalism,” a term itself named for the Vandals who destroyed buildings in their ransacking of Rome. Hugo’s 1831 edition of Notre Dame de Paris begins with an interesting anecdote from his explorations of the cathedral. He once came upon the Greek word for “fate” carved into the stone in one of the bell towers, most likely by a medieval scribe. Hugo was struck by this—he pondered what kind of anguish would inspire a person to spend no short amount of time chiseling this message. When he later returned to the tower, the marking had been scraped and plastered over, erasing the human experience recorded into that wall. Hugo presents this incident as representative of the carelessness and apathy with which architects and clergy members in his day treated medieval churches like Notre Dame. He feared eventually the entire cathedral would be scraped and plastered over until nothing remained. I find it fascinating and extremely telling that Hugo sees the defacement of a wall with graffiti as meaningful and architectural modifications sanctioned by church and state as vandalism. To Hugo, The Ship of Theseus after all the planks have been replaced is a zombie ship, taking the form of the original but retaining none of the humanity carved into it.

A man of many interests, Hugo notoriously spent entire chapters of his lengthy novels going on tangents about society, history, the intricacies of the Paris sewer system, and whatever else suited his fancy. (Seems like my kind of writer, really.) In the middle of Notre Dame de Paris, Hugo pauses from the story to expound on a phrase spoken by his villainous archdeacon Frollo: “The book will kill the edifice.”

Hugo argues that from the beginning of civilization, humans have expressed the dominant ideas of their time and culture through architecture. Without widespread literacy and an efficient medium to promulgate language, the symbolic, durable form of the edifice was a way for “the genius scatted among the masses” to unite their crafts and produce the “prodigious result of the union of all the resources of an epoch.” Hugo seems to have revered the cathedral as the pinnacle of architectural achievement, and by extension, all human artistic endeavors.

Human expression was forever changed with the invention of the printing press, which Hugo calls “the greatest event of history.” “Under the form of printing, thought is more imperishable than ever,” he writes. “Durability has been exchanged for immortality. One can demolish substance, but how extirpate ubiquity?” The printed word offers human thought a purer, longer-lasting medium able to preserve it over the centuries with the power of duplication and cultural memory. With such a simple and inexpensive alternative, architecture no longer had a reason to remain the singular, collective mode of societal expression. The days where France would begin constructing eighty cathedrals within a few decades came to an end.

I think Hugo wants us to conclude Notre Dame de Paris represents 12th-century France’s single most important message to the present, rendered in a form never again to be replicated. That made it all the more important to Hugo for his country to respectfully and urgently protect those medieval voices, lest they fall silent forever.

Obviously, writing remains the dominant mode of transmitting ideas in the 21st century, advanced by the internet in ways we’ve hardly begun to understand. But cultures continue to express their ideas and values through architecture. In fact, you can tell a lot about societal change in France by examining how Notre Dame has been modified over the centuries. The book may have killed the edifice, but to lose Notre Dame is to lose a library.

Before the French Revolution, the kings of France did as they pleased with Notre Dame. Occasionally a king would decide to demolish the raised area where the clergy sits in front of the altar (known as the choir) and replace it with something completely different. In the late 17th century, Gothic architecture had fallen out of style. King Louis XIV, carrying out the wishes of his father, ordered an extensive remodeling of the choir and commissioned a new high altar to reshape the cathedral in line with the tastes du jour. Neoclassical rectangular pillars, clad in marble, were formed around (or in front of) the original stone columns. Semicircular arches in a similar style connected the new pillars together. If you’ve ever visited the Louvre, right around the corner from the Mona Lisa is this Louis David painting of Napoleon’s 1804 coronation at Notre Dame de Paris:

I remember stopping at this piece to think, “Wait a minute, that’s not Notre Dame! It doesn’t look anything like that!” The transformation was so complete I genuinely questioned the accuracy of the painting. I thought it must have been creative interpretation, or my own misunderstanding of which church this was. But Notre Dame really did look like this for over a century. Other pieces of artwork and engravings of the coronation show this same style of pillars and arches. The power of the monarchy to authorize changes was so absolute that the choir was rendered unrecognizable to eyes both modern and medieval.

This wasn’t the only attempt to cover up Gothic features around the early 18th century. While the choir was undergoing this renovation, the headstones of about a dozen French royals and Parisian archbishops were removed from the floor and replaced by the same drab checkered marble tiles that exist today. Tapestries were hung over the pointed arches lining the aisles, cloaking the original stonework. The cathedral was deemed too dark, so the walls were whitewashed, obscuring the natural color of what stone was left visible. To let in even more light, the last remaining 12th-century stained glass windows behind the choir were demolished and replaced with clear white windows. Today, the only remaining medieval glass is in the rose windows, which are very fortunate to have survived the fire.

Perhaps the most egregious change of this era was architect Jacques-Germain Soufflot’s partial destruction of the Last Judgement Portal over the central door of the main entrance. This sculpture illustrates the scene of Christ sitting on the throne on Judgement Day[6], saints rising from their graves, and some unfortunate sinners being chained by a demon. It’s remarkably detailed, rich in theology and symbolism, and anyone off the street is free to walk up and examine it as closely as I did in this photo.

The original portal and doorway below committed the crime of being mildly inconvenient for church processions in the 18th century. A pillar featuring a statue of Jesus divided the doorway into two panels, making it awkward to file in in large numbers. The doors also weren’t quite tall enough for the tent canopy carried over the Sacraments of Holy Communion to be brought into the church. The Archdiocese’s response to this problem could easily have been to change the way the clergy processed in at the beginning of Mass. Instead, they employed Soufflot to remove the pillar and carve out parts of the intricate 12th-century sculptures above the doorway to make the door opening taller. I almost didn’t believe this one either. But go back to Part II and look at the photo of Notre Dame from before 1841: sure enough, the central door is taller with an arch on top. Thankfully, Viollet-le-Duc recreated what was lost during his restoration work.

To destroy hundreds of years of history to make room for a processional tent is beyond unthinkable today. This is how little 17-18th century Catholics regarded Gothic artwork. The Church saw itself as the guardian of Christ’s eternal kingdom and the heart of French society. They believed their power and traditions were handed to them by God’s own self, making their ways beyond reproach or compromise. Notre Dame to them wasn’t a timeless monument, but a fleeting sandcastle, easily shapeable to serve their liturgical whims. They cut and plastered with no regard for preserving the humanity written into its history.

I keep wondering how much more emotionally affecting the Louis David painting of Napoleon’s coronation would be if it depicted Notre Dame exactly as we know it today. Wouldn’t that be such a great example of architecture bearing witness to history? We owe it to our descendants to consider these interruptions to the continuity of centuries-old public art when we decide to change them to fit contemporary trends.

Contempt for the cathedral continued after the French monarchy was deposed, Catholicism was outlawed, and new institutions came to dictate the look of Notre Dame. Remember those 28 Kings of Israel over the portals? The revolutionaries famously mistook them as a symbol of the French monarchy and had them beheaded—or at least that’s how the story is commonly told. I’ve always (perhaps naïvely) pictured a small gang of young anarchists scaling the walls with ropes and hammers to commit this destructive act in the dead of night. But this incredibly thorough French history blog cites sources claiming the Paris Commune actually solicited and paid contractors to erect 50-foot-high scaffolding in front of the cathedral and dismantle the statues over the course of several weeks. The idea of slow and deliberate vandalism is so bizarre from our modern perspective that it is literally a Monty Python joke. But that was reality in the French Revolution: anti-religious, anti-monarchical sentiment had taken such a hold among those in power that vandalism and iconoclasm was a government-paid job.

Since the restorations by Viollet-le-Duc in the mid-19th century, Notre Dame has retained more or less the same appearance. In fact, it looks more medieval than it did during the days of the monarchy: in one of the last major aesthetic alterations, the sterile white glass was replaced with colorful stained glass in the early 20th century. This restraint speaks volumes about how successfully Victor Hugo made the case that Gothic architecture is beautiful and worth preserving. Widespread destruction across Europe during the World Wars also left an indelible mark in the public consciousness about the vulnerability of their societies and monuments. The newly-formed United Nations created UNESCO, an organization tasked with identifying and protecting cultural treasures like cathedrals. Historical preservation was elevated into the world of codified laws and certified experts. In recent decades, the values we chose to write into Notre Dame came through our decisions not to change it.

This makes the question of what to do with Notre Dame’s roof and spire all the more meaningful. It would be consistent with the last century of practice to create a faithful facsimile of what was destroyed. But it would be inconsistent with the entire nine-hundred-year history of Notre Dame to refrain from casting our modern design ideas in with those from different eras.

In the same Architectural Digest piece I mentioned earlier, Mitchell Owens seeks a compromise, calling for the restoration committees to continue the legacy of modest reinvention and replace what was lost “with 21st-century Gothic statements in the same way that Viollet-le-Duc created his own Gothic vocabulary in the mid-19th century.” I’ve come to believe this is the most fitting and honest way to go about renovating Notre Dame, a church built on foundations literally made from the church that stood there before it. I am optimistic this is a direction laypeople and architects will broadly agree “preserves the historic, artistic and architectural interest” of the cathedral. We should learn from the mistakes of the past and not radically alter a historic monument just because we can. But we shouldn’t let our fear of change and idolization of the past prevent us from taking this opportunity to participate in the ongoing artistic dialogue that is inextricably part of Notre Dame.

There’s a Japanese art called kintsugi, where broken pottery is repaired and gold or silver-powdered lacquer is spread over the cracks, highlighting the fractures rather than concealing them. Behind kintsugi is a philosophy acknowledging damage and brokenness as an important and even beautiful part of the object’s history. France’s tumultuous history is written into Notre Dame through cycles of vandalism, renovation, and repairs. In a perfect world, Notre Dame would be as pristine and untouched as it was the day it was completed in 1325. But in a world with vanity, mistakes, and willful destruction, it is our choice whether to see the repairs and renovations as features of Notre Dame rather than blemishes, features which more fully acknowledge the humanity in how the building came to be. Looking at the cathedral as a perfect monolith does a disservice to its history.

The Ship of Theseus is such a classic thought experiment because it is simple, and yet manages to propose so many interesting, unanswerable, and totally fundamental questions about the relationship between identity, material, and time.

Is Notre Dame a collection of specific stones, glass, and lead?
Yes. But not entirely.
Or is Notre Dame a symbol, an aggregation of the stories and memories we share about those materials?
Also yes. But still not entirely.
But isn’t Notre Dame also the story of how some of those materials fell away and were replaced by others?
Still yes. But not entirely. A building is always more than just a building.

The wonderful mystery about interpreting art is that there are so many right answers. Part of Notre Dame was lost when it burned. And in a different sense, something will also be lost when new pieces replace the lost ones. But I choose to believe its brokenness enriches its story and bestows upon it more beauty, even if it is not the kind visible to the eye.

 

Part IV: Symphony in Stone
The Ship of Theseus isn’t the only way in which Notre Dame is like a ship.

Notre Dame’s floor plan takes the shape of a cross, as is typical for European Gothic cathedrals (and neo-Gothic churches around the world). The “arms” of the cross are called the transepts, and the place where the two “boards” of the cross meet is known as the crossing (or, to a certain audience, “The Literal Heart of Jesus”). The spire is built over the crossing. The congregation sits in the main aisle in the center of the building, called the nave, and the clergy sits up front in the choir.

If you stand in the nave of Notre Dame and look up, you’ll see the bays of the vaulted ceiling forming a long hall covered by a roof arched and ribbed like the hull of a ship:

So why is it called the “nave?” Because it comes from the Latin word navis, meaning “ship.” It’s where we get the words “navy” and “navigation.”

The Christian church has adopted ship imagery and symbolism from its earliest years, thanks in part to the abundance of stories involving water and nautical life in the Bible. Humanity is delivered from extinction in The Great Flood on Noah’s ark. The same Hebrew word for ark (tebah) is used to describe the floating cradle Moses’ mother placed him in as a baby to send him down the Nile to escape persecution. Jesus calms a dangerous storm while he and his disciples are out sailing on the Sea of Galilee to demonstrate his total ability to protect his faithful followers. Perhaps it is with this history in mind the Church itself came to be described as a ship, one under the protective captaining of a Triune God, steering its passengers toward Heaven.

Historians and etymologists are unsure if the nave got its name as a nod to these larger theological and scriptural themes, or simply because it happens to resemble a boat. I doubt church builders intended any symbolic meaning when they chose the forms of their roofs. A cross-shaped floor plan may be intentional, but the arched roof was born of structural necessity. An arch experiences only compressive stresses, which suits the brittle stone materials available to medieval builders. Stone, like unreinforced concrete, is weak in tension and therefore has limited ability to span horizontally as a beam before it cracks. Arched roofs were the only practical way medieval builders could have made spaces this large.

Proposal by Won C Kim. Inspired by Noah’s Ark, this design would see the original spire restored and a greenhouse installed in place of the previous roof.

I had the privilege of visiting Notre Dame de Paris in May of 2018, a little less than a year before the fire would force it to close indefinitely. At the time, it was the oldest building I’d ever visited, and I felt that as soon as I set foot inside.

(Tangentially and curiously related: the oldest building I’d ever visited before Notre Dame was a different French Gothic church named for Saint Joan of Arc. It was originally built in France around 1420. Centuries later it attracted the whims of a wealthy railroad tycoon who had the building dismantled, moved across the Atlantic Ocean, and reassembled in Long Island, New York in 1927.[7] If that isn’t enough of a real-life Ship of Theseus scenario, in 1965 it was dismantled again and reassembled on Marquette University’s campus in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where I visited it in 2009. So now I’m asking myself…how old was that building really when I set foot inside?)

I could try to describe the architecture I saw when I stepped inside Notre Dame. I could try to capture the way the light streaming in from the high clerestory windows reflected across the nave’s ceiling in beautiful blues and greens. I could try to conjure words for its column capitals and the stained glass and the ornamentation of its dozens of side chapels. But I don’t have the architectural knowledge to have really appreciated what I was looking at. What really spoke to me was the fact that it was very, very old.

In Chicago, we’d call anything that survived the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 “old,” which amounts to only seven buildings. So I found it absolutely mind-boggling to enter a grand, functioning, well-lit building that had stood there for 850 years. I couldn’t help but to look at it as a feat of engineering. I looked at the stone columns and thought about how the equation we use to predict the load columns will carry before they buckle wouldn’t be developed for another 400 years after Notre Dame was completed. I marveled at how the builders devised the clear, logical load path of the cathedral’s structural system and innovated the use of flying buttresses 350 years before Newton would codify the laws of motion and vector analysis that are the backbone of how engineers think about structures today. The builders had no statistical understanding of the strength of their stone blocks, if they did any testing at all. Notre Dame was not “designed” in the way modern engineers use the term, with rational analysis, calculations, and factors of safety. Instead it was designed by rules of thumb, the knowledge of generations of trial and error, and experienced master builders intuiting the geometric path forces take through the structure. And that was enough. I was standing in an intricate, cavernous space that survived nearly nine centuries of wind, earthquakes, political unrest, destructive vandals, German bombs, and poor maintenance, and it was built on educated guesses.[8] The architecture was pretty, but that fact blew me away.

While all this was weighing on my mind, I realized people were filing in and taking seats for an evening Mass that was about to begin. In my jet-lagged state of affairs, it hadn’t occurred to me today was Sunday and Notre Dame de Paris was an active Catholic parish which would be celebrating Mass that evening. The central nave was roped off, which herded us tourists into the side aisles and transepts, out of the way of the service. There were easily twice as many tourists than actual members of the congregation. I felt somewhat uncomfortable lining up to watch these people go to church, as if they were some kind of zoo animals behind glass. I would be mortified if scores of foreigners were to gather and watch me engage in personal acts of devotion and song. But that is hard to imagine; the church building I attended in college used to be a CVS Pharmacy, so pretty much any church is something of a tourist attraction for me.

It is unmistakable how Mass at Notre Dame de Paris begins: with a prelude on the great organ. The prelude started with soft, airy tones and soothing melodies. It barely registered as I continued to walk around and look at all the artwork. Eventually the organist built up the intensity, literally pulling out all the stops to create these absolutely howling, thunderous, dissonant chords. I genuinely feared stones might collapse in response. The music now had my full attention. I turned towards the crossing at the center of the church to wait for whatever was about to happen next. The organist ventured back into consonance and played the cues for the beginning of the entrance hymn, at which point the congregation began to sing as one:

Laudate Dominum! Laudate Dominum!
Omnes gentes! Alleluia!

Of course I stole a missalette from the front of the church. It had music printed on it!

I’d heard enough liturgical music sung in Latin to have known this translates to something like Praise to You, God! All people! Alleluia! But I think the hymn loses much of its charm translated into English. Latin may be a “dead language,” yet there I was in France and this hymn was the most I’d understood the French since arriving there. Latin is something of a liturgical lingua franca for Christians around the world. There is something rather Ship-of-Theseus-like in how the Church persists in its traditions and texts passed down from the faithful centuries ago, even if the language is no longer native or convenient among the current set of participants. For me, Latin keeps church music “extraordinary,” or “holy,” or otherwise unlike anything else in my secular life. (Except, I suppose, researching etymologies.)

The melody these words were set to was captivating. It sounded ancient and mysterious. It has unexpected harmonic shifts and colors (that F# adding a touch of brightness on only the fifth note!) and yet was so repetitive and simple, I memorized it after hearing it only twice. I remember standing in the cathedral lamenting how rarely I had the opportunity to sing ancient-sounding chants like this back when I was a person who regularly attended Mass and felt so invested in the beauty of liturgical music.

Eighteen months after my visit, I typed these Latin words into Google so I could fact check my translation. What I eventually found—buried in a YouTube comment section of all places—were two facts I found astonishing:

  1. This hymn was written not centuries ago, but in 1980 for the Taizé Community. Def Leppard is older than this hymn.
  2. Except actually, the basic shape of Laudate Dominum’s harmony and melody dates back to the 16th century and is considered one of the oldest chord progressions in the entire European tradition.

It turns out this hymn is based on a theme known as the Folia, which was basically the classical music world’s version of modern songwriters constantly borrowing from Pachelbel’s Canon in D. Scores of famous composers (pun intended) have incorporated the Folia into their work—J.S. Bach, Beethoven, Handel, and Vivaldi among them. In 1980, an organist named Jacques Berthier joined their ranks (pun also intended) when he set a verse from Psalm 117 to the melody of the Folia for this Taizé chant. The Taizé Community is a non-denominational monastery in east-central France. They are known around the world for their worship style of short, repetitive hymns that are intended to be memorized easily and allow the participants to focus on prayerful contemplation. Although this background was unbeknownst to me as I stood listening in Notre Dame, this is exactly the effect it had on me.

Laudate Dominum!
I’m standing in a centuries-old space singing centuries-old words.
Laudate Dominum!
French Catholics hundreds of years before me may have bounced these exact words off these exact walls.
Omnes gentes! Alleluia!
Repetitive and unchanging as it is, isn’t it remarkable that you can walk into a Catholic church on any continent and understand what’s happening because the structure of the Mass is universal?
Laudate Dominum!
Like the buildings that outlast us, language too can be a bridge to centuries and cultures past.
Laudate Dominum!
How lucky are the few hundred people who live close enough that they can come to church here every Sunday?
Omnes gentes! Alleluia!
Would I still go to church if I could come to a place as magnificent as this?
Laudate Dominum!
Did my relationship with God depend too much on my ability to appreciate church aesthetics rather than spiritual substance?
Laudate Dominum!
And yet, wasn’t this whole incredible building erected painstakingly, brick by brick, to inspire believers?
Omnes gentes! Alleluia!
Imagine the act of indomitable faith it must have taken to work on this building.
Laudate Dominum!
The masons who started the building all died before they had the chance to see it finished.
Laudate Dominum!
So did their children. And perhaps their grandchildren. This building was their legacy. We may not know their names, but we will remember their work.
Omnes gentes! Alleluia!
This edifice predates the printing press and the Reformation which brought Scripture to the masses. It is likely most of the laborers who built this church neither read the Bible nor spoke Latin.
Laudate Dominum!
And yet these craftspeople dedicated their lives to setting stone on stone with the hope that one day, long after they return to dust, people will see it towering over Paris and look up to the heavens. The mere existence of this building is an ongoing act of worship.
Laudate Dominum!
They built this cathedral for God. But they also built it to inspire me. I am so profoundly lucky to be alive right now.
Omnes gentes! Alleluia!
We are all so lucky to be alive right now.

I fell out of this state of contemplation to wipe tears from my eyes from three Laudates ago.

I wouldn’t call this a spiritual experience, nor a prayerful one. But the ever-changing ship of Notre Dame undeniably transported me from its nave to somewhere else. I was singing a 40-year-old hymn with a 500-year history of being remixed in a 2500-year-old language that unites the 2000-year-old Christian world while standing in an 850-year-old nave crafted, reshaped, and preserved by generations of artisans. I was standing feet away from where kings and emperors were coronated and wed, from where the tides of revolution began to sweep Europe towards democracy, and from the pews where centuries of faithful worshippers sang their hopes and fears to the heavens.

I saw myself standing at the front of a line running through all this, back to the day in 1163 when the cornerstone of this building was set. And rather than feeling small and insignificant in the face of it, I felt this was where I belonged. Notre Dame de Paris was one of the first buildings I knew by name—and now my tiny, singular moment there was part of its history. It was an experience of interconnectedness across time and culture which cannot be done justice with words. It was watching my hometown sail past as my flight turned around for a landing at O’Hare. It was standing in the United Center joining 20,000 Blackhawks fans yelling and cheering over the Star Spangled Banner.[9] It was a feeling bigger than the French people, class divides, Catholicism, or even Christianity, yet small enough to penetrate the cracks between my doubts, struggles, and apathy and reach me in a way no other nave in the world ever did or ever could.

It was the building even more than the Taizé music that spoke to me. Victor Hugo called Notre Dame “a vast symphony in stone.” That Sunday, I heard the stones cry out in song. Sometimes I can still hear them echoing.

 

Epilogue
Notre Dame de Paris was born on an island shaped like a cradle, or perhaps like a boat—the two most fitting symbols to represent its entire history of birth, destruction, and rebirth. To the infant Moses, the two were one and the same; all that mattered was whether his vessel could carry him across the waters. Whatever the future holds for Notre Dame, I want it to keep carrying people across the waters. I want people to feel their place in history when they step inside. And I want those with the privilege of steering Notre Dame through time to make choices enabling those things to happen, not hinder them.

Building materials are only one answer to what makes the Ship of Theseus the Ship of Theseus. Ultimately, what matters to me is the continuity of the building—the narrative attached to the materials that at any given moment comprise Notre Dame. It is appropriate the noun “building” is the same word we use for the process of creating one, even after it is supposedly finished. The original architecture plays an important role in maintaining that continuity, but I don’t think the meaning of the building begins and ends with it. The true value of a cathedral is measured in stories told, photos shared, memories made, lives enriched. Notre Dame becomes more precious every year it ages and gifts millions more people with experiences like mine.

The last morning my family was in Paris, I got up earlier than my parents to spend my last few hours in the city venturing out alone. I chose to spend that time climbing the stairs to the bell towers at Notre Dame. Unbeknownst to me, I would return with some of the very last tourist photos ever taken of the roof before it was destroyed. As I stood between the belfries looking at the doomed spire, I remember thinking to myself with such certainty, “I’ll be back here one day to see the rest of the cathedral. If I only had more time.”

Even on an unforgettable two-week trip abroad, it is so difficult to fully appreciate in the moment a sight or an experience for the gift it is. Every day, there is some risk I will wake up to the news that Notre Dame suffered a catastrophic collapse and was completely destroyed. The tragedy of the fire at Notre Dame is the crushing reminder that even great cathedrals, like us, are beautiful, ephemeral containers of multitudes never to be taken for granted.

I find comfort in this uncertainty by reminding myself the very form of its structure is a symbol of both deliverance from danger and constant reinvention—a ship with oars in the form of flying buttresses, literally balancing the vessel and keeping it upright. Notre Dame is a living, breathing reminder that what is struck down can be raised anew, transfigured and transformed. This message of hope and renewal is preached by its walls and its bishops, played on its great organ, sung by its people, and carried in the hearts of those who come to seek passage on this great ship. May we all have the opportunity to witness its next voyage.

 

Further Reading:

Notre Dame History

Repair Efforts and Structural Risks to Notre Dame

Destruction of Cultural Heritage

Design Competition

Reporting on the Fire

Miscellaneous

Weird Tangents That Never Made It Into The Piece

Footnotes:

[1] That’s St. Stephen for Anglophones.

[2]I always figured “cathedral” and “Catholic” would have related etymologies in some way, but “cathedral” actually comes from the Latin word cathedra, meaning “seat.” Specifically, a cathedral is the church where the bishop of a particular diocese holds his seat and presides over Mass. It’s a church hierarchy term, not an architectural category. A cathedral doesn’t necessarily have to be huge, made of stone, and feature bell towers and flying buttresses. Nor is such a majestic building necessarily a cathedral.

[3] The Vatican, though it holds vast wealth, has no financial stake in the building and has remained mostly uninvolved in the repairs.

[4] My favorite fact that didn’t make it into this piece is the etymology of gargoyle, which comes from the old French word gargouille, meaning “throat,” and is related to the Greek gargarizein, meaning to gargle. It’s not a scary Gothic word to describe a monster, but a word to describe its function: to send water off from a roof through the mouth of a grotesque creature.

[5] It’s also unclear to me whether the design competition ever formally existed in the first place. I couldn’t find any reporting on its rules, deadlines, or criteria.

[6] This happens to be a very common scene for central portal tympanums around France and the world. The one at Amiens is practically identical.

[7] I’m not sure if this was legal, but the practice of exporting French buildings outside the country was banned shortly thereafter.

[8] Of course, their guesses were extremely conservative, leading to an exceptionally heavy, overdesigned building.

[9] Organs are yet another way sports arenas are quite like cathedrals.

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