Was the Notre-Dame fire really a catastrophe?

[Synthesis of an interview originally conducted in Turkish]

The day after the fire, I was a guest of Mehmet Akif Ersoy on Manşet, on Habertürk TV. The images were still vivid, and the host, voicing the collective dismay, opened the broadcast by asking me to trace the genesis of the monument to understand what we had truly lost.

Notre-Dame is the most celebrated Catholic monument in France, rising in the heart of the city on the Île de la Cité—a site that had already hosted earlier churches. The current edifice began to rise in the mid-twelfth century, at the very dawn of the Gothic era. Saint-Denis, considered the cradle of this style, lies just outside Paris; the Romanesque architecture that preceded it possessed heavier forms, rounded lines, and massive masonry. The construction of Notre-Dame dragged on for nearly a hundred and seventy years, and even then, the work could not be declared complete: subsequent centuries would impose their own inevitable additions.

“Among those additions, is there also the famous spire we saw reduced to ashes?”

Precisely. The spire devoured by the flames was a nineteenth-century timber structure clad in lead. To define it as a work of carpentry is by no means an exaggeration. And, truth be told, it is certainly not the worst calamity to have befallen this edifice. The worst, in fact, had already occurred. During the French Revolution, a systematic hostility towards places of worship emerged; for a period, Notre-Dame was transformed into the Temple of Reason, its sculptures were defaced, and some of them now lie in fragments at the Musée de Cluny. Herein lies the stark line of demarcation between fatality and intention: in 2019, a roof burned; in the final decade of the eighteenth century, a building was deliberately mutilated.

The Notre-Dame we admire today we owe largely to a nineteenth-century restoration at the hands of Viollet-le-Duc, made possible, in reality, by a novel: Victor Hugo’s masterpiece revealed to the public the wretched state in which the cathedral languished. Sometimes, what saves a work of art is another work of art.

Returning to the realm of interventions, the Romantic vision (championed by Ruskin) demands that a building be granted the right to age, whereas Viollet-le-Duc theorised the restoration of an “ideal state of completeness”. The contemporary approach, born of the Italian tradition, lies in the middle: to conserve the original fabric while rigorously integrating necessary modern interventions.

“And the treasures housed within? Were they saved?”

The vast majority of the artifacts are not as ancient as one might believe. Many date back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the furnishings are predominantly twentieth-century. As far as the images have allowed us to judge, setting aside the collapse of the roof, the architectural fabric and the stained glass have not suffered devastating damage. I am not so perturbed as to claim that eight hundred and fifty years of human heritage have been lost.

Faced with my somewhat analytical detachment, Ersoy good-naturedly provoked me regarding the emotional reactions of the public, recalling how often people cry scandal over restorations (bitterly citing certain clumsy interventions on historical buildings in Anatolia).

Public indignation typically stems not from knowledge, but from habituation: one mourns the image to which one has grown accustomed. Of a recently restored castle in Turkey, it was said that it resembled SpongeBob; I went to inspect it in person, and the truth is that its pre-intervention state also resembled SpongeBob. Habit and historical value are not synonymous.

The host then raised the pragmatic question of costs and timelines for the reconstruction.

In the aftermath of the blaze, the Pinault family announced a donation of one hundred million euros. They are no strangers to this kind of patronage: in Venice, they transformed the Punta della Dogana and Palazzo Grassi into hubs of contemporary art. Procuring the resources for an edifice of such magnitude will certainly not be the most arduous task.

This fire will not demote Notre-Dame from any itinerary; on the contrary, it will heighten its allure. People will flock there to compare the ‘before’ with the ‘after’. In 532, the previous Hagia Sophia burned to its foundations, and it is precisely from those ashes that the edifice we admire today was bequeathed to us. It is worth bearing this in mind while observing a much younger cathedral that has “only” lost its roof.