Why Notre Dame Cathedral captures hearts and minds worldwide

PARIS (OSV News) — In a side chapel not far from the relics of Paris’ patroness St. Genevieve in the Church of Saint-Étienne-du-Mont, an easel holds a simple poster requesting prayers under the title “Notre Dame de Paris.”

“Let us pray for the people of Paris,” it reads. “Let us pray for the Paris archbishop, left without a cathedral.”

The exhortation signals the local impact of the 2019 fire that devastated the Cathedral of Notre Dame — Our Lady — of Paris and its spiritual significance in the life of that local church. The fire, however, elicited a global outpouring of horror and grief — and then restoration donations exceeding $920 million from 150 countries — that highlights the role the cathedral itself occupies in the public imagination, including among the nonreligious, experts and historians said.

Standing on an island in the oldest part of one of Europe’s most visited cities, Notre Dame Cathedral sits prominently on Paris’ skyline. Since the completion of its famous western facade in 1250 — more than 600 years before Paris’ other prominent landmark, the Eiffel Tower — the church is seen by many as an icon for the city itself.

“It’s Paris that makes Notre Dame so special,” said Meredith Cohen, a professor of medieval art and architecture at the University of California, Los Angeles. But, she explained, it’s not quite as simple as that.

The Middle Ages — the period between the collapse of Rome and the Renaissance — had long been painted as the “dark ages,” but that thinking pivoted in the 19th century, said Thomas Burman, the director of the Medieval Institute at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. The period after 1200 especially became viewed as a time of impressive “artistic flowering,” he said.

A common way to illustrate this era is through its great Gothic cathedrals, including Notre Dame, which are among the “great monuments of human civilization,” he said.

Located about six miles north of Notre Dame, the Basilica of Saint-Denis, restored to its current design between 1137-1148, is considered the birthplace of Gothic architecture. Construction for Notre Dame began in 1163, placing it among the earliest Gothic cathedrals.

“Cathedrals are always used to depict the grandeur of the high Middle Ages,” he said. “These are all held up as signs of this very wealthy, very sophisticated, very artistic period in the history of Europe, and so there have been generations of students educated in this way. So nobody teaches the Middle Ages without showing lots of images of stained-glass windows, without talking about the basic features of Gothic architecture. Notre Dame is a classic instance of Gothic architecture.”

What sets Notre Dame apart, he said, is that other — and even better — examples of Gothic cathedrals, such as the cathedrals in Amiens and Chartres. France, and Cologne, Germany, aren’t in a tourist mecca like Paris. Add to that Paris’ building codes, which mean there are few tall buildings in its city center.

“Thus the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame really show up,” Burman said.

For Burman, the global interest in Notre Dame’s recent rebuilding also reflects “enduring fascination with the Middle Ages,” indicated by the “medieval-esque” popular culture of books, movies, TV series and video games such as “The Lord of the Rings” and the “Game of Thrones.”

After extensive restoration, the cathedral is set to reopen to the public Dec. 8.

On the evening of April 15, 2019, the fire engulfed the cathedral’s spire — a 19th-century addition — and most of its timber-framed roof. Falling embers, debris and smoke damaged the interior as heroic efforts were made to save important artworks and artifacts, including the relic of Christ’s crown of thorns.

To have completely lost Notre Dame would have been like “ripping out the heart of Paris,” said Michael Davis, professor emeritus at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts.

On that Holy Monday in 2019, thousands of people lined up the streets of Paris to pray that their beloved cathedral would be saved amid a horrific view of flames and smoke rising around its spire.

“At Notre Dame, crowds of pilgrims and visitors will be able to experience his presence and unconditional welcome, in the beauty of a work of art, a celebration, a church song. … This is what we are working on with great zeal,” Archbishop Laurent Ulrich of Paris told OSV News in April.

“Today, Western society is distraught, often desperate. In this context, the restoration of Notre Dame is a tremendous sign of hope. Paris is going to get its cathedral back, and that does not just concern Catholics. The hope it represents must inspire all those who will be thrilled by the reopening,” the cathedral’s rector-archpriest, Father Olivier Ribadeau Dumas, told OSV News April 10.

Notre Dame has been saved before — not by firefighters but by literature. The international success of Victor Hugo’s 1831 novel “Notre Dame de Paris 1482” — restyled as “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” — was key for inspiring efforts to restore the dilapidated cathedral after — and in spite of — the French Revolution, several experts said.

The book “enshrined the cathedral as almost a kind of document or chronicle of the history of France, of science and the arts, and that history is really kind of inscribed on its stones in every way, and that its this real emblem of France,” said Davis, who sits on the board of directors of Friends of Notre-Dame de Paris, a nonprofit organization raising funds to restore the cathedral.

At the time Hugo wrote “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” Gothic architecture had lost its cache and was being demolished to make way for newer styles, said Thibault Schilt, a professor and program coordinator of French and Francophone Studies at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Meanwhile, the anti-Catholic fervor of the French Revolution persisted. With the book, Hugo (who, decades later, would also write “Les Misérables”) wanted to remind the French that Notre Dame “was a jewel, and that it needed to be protected and revered, and that it needed to be respected,” said Schilt, who grew up in France.

The book was published in English in 1833. “Both in France and abroad, it contributed to its renaissance in the minds of the people,” Schilt said. “It made them realize that it was a very special cathedral. And it is so easy to fall in love with it, because it has all of these gargoyles. It’s so quirky.”

More important than the ballets, plays and films the book would inspire, it prompted the architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc to undertake the restoration of Notre Dame itself. That coincided with the heyday of the “grand tour,” another key factor in enduring affection for Paris and its cathedral, Schilt said. By the mid-1800s, the long-standing standard European tour for primarily English aristocrats had begun attracting Americans. Paris was a main attraction.

Cohen agrees on the importance of the 19th century to public fascination with Notre Dame.

“Notre Dame and its fame really comes from the 19th century, after the French Revolution and a lot of the destruction of the city,” said Cohen, who specializes in the history of medieval Parisian architecture. “Post-revolution, transformations, urbanization happened to open up the cities. And that’s when the modern city was born, with the big avenues and Impressionism and all that — modernity — and it coincided with the Industrial Revolution, too.”

That progressive movement stirred in France “a collective kind of nostalgia for the Middle Ages, for the past — the past that’s quickly slipping away because of those major transformations,” she said.

While the post-Revolution destruction of Gothic architecture, especially churches, was a way for revolutionaries to demonstrate a break with the Catholic Church, the country’s Gothic cathedrals have come to be treasured because they represent “a particularly French history,” Cohen said.

Beyond France, “Notre Dame has become a kind of symbol that just transcends some of its historical importance,” she said. “People love Paris. They love it because it’s Paris — food, art, culture.” So, she said, when Notre Dame was burning, it was, for many, as if Paris itself was burning.

Cohen sees a silver lining in the fire, in that the restoration could draw people’s attention to the significance of historic architecture. “I hope it inspires them not just to go to Paris,” she said, “but maybe to study the history of these 1,000-year-old buildings.”

– – – Maria Wiering is senior writer for OSV News.

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