“This cathedral is a happy metaphor of what a nation is and what the world should be,” said President Macron. Yet, in an obvious mismatch, the unity and harmony of the restored Notre Dame de Paris, the collective achievement of thousands of craftspeople, builders, firefighters, engineers, architects, clergy, funders and administrators, is as different as could be from the fractious state of politics in France, whose most recent prime minister resigned in the week before the cathedral’s reopening.
What is true is that the achievement of the restoration, more or less within the five-year span improbably promised by Macron amid the still-cooling embers of the 2019 fire, is an example of a French ability to get grands projets done, when they put their mind to it, with ruthless efficiency. It’s of a piece with the country’s extensive TGV train network, or the confident way in which past governments scattered crystalline modernity – the Louvre pyramid, the Pompidou Centre, the Eiffel Tower – around the venerable fabric of Paris. Something to do, maybe, with centralised power, the authority of the president, a history with a Sun King and emperors.
