Two weeks ago, in the early evening hours of a mild Paris night, the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris burst into flames. The images of bright orange flames cast against a steel-blue sky, eating up the very outline of one of the most recognizable buildings in the world, bought the fire a ticket on the evening news and the front pages of newspapers across the globe, even in a media-saturated news cycle where even the most alarming developments have to fight for attention. While the fire was not entirely unexpected in a building almost a thousand years old, still largely constructed of wood and subject to near-constant renovation, it still galvanized the public, and it was with great relief that the fire was finally extinguished after a heroic effort by a fire department that had long drilled for just such an eventuality.
The damage to the cathedral, while devastating, could have been far worse. The central spire was all but destroyed, as was much of the roof and a significant portion of the upper floors, but most of the structure remained intact; and while many works of art and Catholic artifacts were lost, the majority were saved. There were few injuries and no fatalities. The French government stepped in immediately, and massive expenditures were earmarked for repairs to the building. For all that, though, it was still alarming to see, at a time of great political and social turmoil, when peoples’ minds are very much in a pre-eschatological mode, one of the most permanent fixtures of our shared history melting like a candle before our eyes. The nature of Paris’ skyline, largely free of the clusters of massive skyscrapers that wipe out the horizon in so many mega-cities, made it seem especially dire.
What was most shocking, though, was the reaction it engendered throughout society as the images were beamed out to an anxious world. The combination of a news cycle that never stops and the rise of social media made it unthinkable that we would not see a range of polarizing opinions about this catastrophe, but some of what came out of it was genuinely shocking to those of us with a tendency to think that a continuity of culture might be something worth preserving. Part of it was attributable to the fact that the fire took place at an extremely busy moment, and in one of the most bizarre coincidences in recent memory, another fire broke out at the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, a site just as holy to Islam as Notre Dame is to Catholicism. The fire was very minor and did much less damage, and it was extinguished within ten minutes, but given the cultural moment, there was no way that the two would not be compared, and judgements passed down based on the reaction of total strangers to each.
Naturally, much of the reaction was ideological and entirely predictable. Rumors that the fire must have been set by the Islamist terrorists that right-wing reactionaries believe are constantly swarming around Paris waiting to wreak havoc started literally within minutes of news of the fire hitting the wires; this theory, absurd on its face, was dismissed before the sun rose by the city authorities, but it was already around the world twice by that time. The usual strains of whataboutism were out in full force, not only in comparisons with the Al-Aqsa fire (though the two events were in no way comparable in scope, severity, or repercussion), but in misguided finger-pointing at the destruction of other icons, at the water crisis in Flint, at the plague of mass shootings in America, at environmental degradation and decay. This is one of these tedious arguments that assumes all sorts of nonsense, such as that people aren’t interested in events that they’re incapable of doing anything about, that everyone has to make loud noises about everything that concerns them, and that nobody can care about more than one thing at once. Prevalent as these reactions were, they can be safely dismissed out of hand as unserious and immature.
More concerning, though, were worries over the expense of repairing the damage, and who would pay for it, and at whose expense might that money be spent. The idea that a country should not want to preserve one of its most noteworthy heritage sites (and a source of not inconsiderable tourist revenue) is ridiculous, but at a time of increasing austerity and deprivation — especially in France, saddled with a failed neoliberal president and wracked with the mouvement des gilet jaunes protests — it is good to ask pointed questions: Who will pay for the repairs? To whom will they be answerable? Who will assess the costs? Will these repairs be prioritized over much more crucial expenditures that need to be made to help the working classes suffering under unjust economic policies that funnel money and resources up towards the billionaires who have pledged to pay for them? These are all important questions that demand answers, beyond juvenile fuck-the-Pope posturing.
But then again, as a socialist, shouldn’t we make sure to remind people that the Pope should get fucked? Notre Dame is an irreplaceable cultural monument, the work of craftspeople and artists over nine centuries, that transcends any ideology or religion. Whether or not we need to acclimate ourselves to the sight of our great symbols vanishing in front of us, it is a supreme work of the human mind and spirit, and even the relatively minor losses borne during the fire are gaps in our cultural heritage, “Western” or otherwise, that can never be filled. On the other hand, it is also inextricably a work of the Catholic Church. It cannot be stripped of its political and social meaning. Every euro that is spent on its repair is a euro that will not be spent elsewhere. And it is not wrong to wonder what our attitude should be about who owns our culture, who sustains it, and who decides who will have access to it and what command it has on our common wealth.
During the Paris Commune, that miraculous explosion of the peoples’ imagination, Notre Dame almost suffered another catastrophic fire. Radical anti-clerical forces, determined to purge the toxic influence of reactionary priests from the city, set out for Our Lady with the intention of burning it down; but they were met there by an armed contingent of artists and craftspeople — no less dedicated to the Commune’s radical vision than the arsonists — who insisted that destroying the cathedral would be a tragic error and an insult to the very concept of art. Guy Debord called this confrontation a critical problem that would be faced by socialists in a direct democracy: “Were those artists right to defend a cathedral in the name of eternal aesthetic values,” while others wanted its destruction to “symbolized their absolute defiance of a society that was about to consign their entire lives to silence and oblivion?” Debord favored the latter, and, quoting Saint-Just, warned that those who make revolution by half only dig their own graves. I have always wondered what side I would be on. Would I pick up the torch, and cry for the annihilation of a symbol of centuries of oppression and cruelty, siding with the arsonists against the haughty power of the Church? Or would I be with the artisans, manning the steps of the cathedral with rifles and clubs, insisting that art was meaningful and important and vital to a city’s cultural life no matter what motivated its creation?
I didn’t know the answer when I first head that story. I didn’t know when I visited Notre Dame. I still don’t know.