ROGER FRANKLIN: ON NOTRE DAME CATHEDRAL
It was one purpose of those who dotted Europe with soaring, vaulted spaces to inspire awe and banish with gospel and creed the lingering animism of the peasantry, the belief in the omens and portents of earlier pagan creeds. Today those monuments to vanished faith draw little but the tour-bus reverence of tourists and their Nikons, plus advocates of a new barbarism.
Six years ago, historian and Marine Le Pen supporter Dominique Venner splattered the altar with his brains in a bizarre protest against France’s legalisation of same-sex marriage.
In 2017 it was an angry Muslim crying ‘Alahu Akbar’ and ‘this is for Syria’ who bludgeoned the cathedral’s security guards with a hammer before being felled by a bullet.
Now comes fire and the certain knowledge that while the immediately promised rebuilding might faithfully replicate all that was and has now been lost, the end result will be but a facsimile of what is today ash and rubble — a building to be revived for the tourist magnet it became, not for what once inspired it.
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