When the cathedral of Notre-Dame went up in flames in 2019, few people believed Emmanuel Macron could fulfil his promise to restore it by the end of this year. Yet he succeeded in mobilising donors, and a small army of restorers and craftsmen to put back together in five years a medieval masterpiece that had taken almost centuries to originally complete.
Today’s reopening ceremony should have been a triumph for Macron comparable only to de Gaulle’s te deum in Notre-Dame at the liberation in August 1944, or Napoleon’s self-crowning there in December 1804. France’s youngest head of state since Napoleon III expected his own apotheosis today.
