“Notre Dame is our history, our literature, our profound destiny”. With these words, pronounced while the fire that hit the Parisian cathedral was almost subsided but still ongoing, the French president Emmanuel Macron summarized the meaning of a monument which with 12 million visitors a year is the second most visited in 'Europe and what in 1991 it was declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO. But well before this date, and before it was even built (the works lasted almost two centuries, from 1163 to 1344), the 69-metre-high Gothic cathedral located precisely in the heart of the French capital, on the Ile de la Cité, had already become a symbol of French history.
What remains today of the monument we knew and that many of us have had the opportunity to visit? The wooden structure was reduced to ashes, but the sculpture atop the spire representing a rooster, containing three holy relics, she was saved. The rose windows, dating back to the XNUMXth century but restored several times, they too were saved. The largest has a diameter of 21 meters and represents Old Testament figures surrounding the Virgin. The southern one is 13 meters high and depicts Christ surrounded by saints, apostles and angels.
Inside the cathedral of Notre Dame the most precious relics have been saved, such as the Crown of Thorns which would have been placed on Christ's head during his crucifixion; a nail from the Passion of Christ, a piece of the Cross and the tunic of Saint-Louis. A series of XNUMXth and XNUMXth century paintings they were not damaged by the fire, but by the smoke: they will be transferred to the Louvre, another symbol of French culture, where they will be protected, dehumidified and restored.
HISTORY
In the Middle Ages, Notre Dame is the undisputed symbol of French Christianity: it is in Notre Dame, for example, that the crown of thorns attributed to Jesus Christ is kept, a relic brought by Saint Louis, king of France, back from the crusade of 1248. And it is to keep it that the Sainte-Chapelle was built, considered another jewel of gothic architecture. But there is not only religion: Adam and Eve appear on the façade, man and woman, icons of humanism. Neglected in the Renaissance, Notre Dame then returns to the fore – despite himself – during the French Revolution, who considering her a symbol of power, inflicted her first important wounds.
Catholicism no longer being the state religion, Church assets were sold or looted and Notre Dame was not spared: seen as a symbol of the Ançien regime, it is targeted by revolutionaries and part of your treasure disappears. The statues of the kings of Judea on the western facade are decapitated as if they were statues of the kings of France (and what remains of them is devastated almost a century later, in 1871, during the short season of the Paris Commune). There is a first fire, but with less dramatic consequences than that of On Monday April 15. Stripped down, with bare naves, the cathedral during the first years of the newborn Republic even became a large wine warehouse.
The definitive profanation comes a century later, when according to the French law on the separation between church and state of 1905, the building becomes the property of the French state, like all the other cathedrals built by the Kingdom of France, even if its use is assigned to the Catholic Church. This transition is relevant even today, given that the restoration works that caused the devastating fire were carried out (for about a year) under the responsibility of the State and partly financed by it. The controversies are inevitable, also fueled by the fact that the ministry collects 4 million a year from the ticket office of the towers, but pours only two for maintenance.
Maintenance that would in itself last ten years, while now there is talk of decades to rebuild announced by Macron: pending definitive clarification of the causes (the accidental trail prevails), the damages will then have to be counted, while the solidarity campaign international which raised over 600 million in just a few hours. They will not be enough, but it is already something and the immediate mobilization recalled what 23 years ago concerned a symbol of Italian culture, the Teatro La Fenice in Venice, hit by arson and rebuilt in 2003.
Going back to the XNUMXth century, the history of the Parisian cathedral is inevitably also linked to the figure of Napoleon. It is there, in the cathedral now two-thirds destroyed by flames, that Napoleon crowns himself by putting on the crown with his own hands, and puts it to the empress, leaving the Pope in the guise of an extra. The gesture, immortalized by David, breaks the tradition of sovereigns who preferred the cathedral of Reims and also makes Notre Dame a symbol of temporal power.
In the twentieth century, already proven by the aforementioned events, Notre Dame undergoes the first major restoration: the architect Viollet-le-Duc it gives it back the splendor of the past, with an operation that will however arouse some criticisms. The architect is considered a genius, he is the one who gave Notre Dame the face we all know, but his reinterpretation of the past is at least subjective: for example, the 54 gargoyles, ornamental sculptures that represent monstrous animal figures.
Speaking of literature, it is precisely to those ornaments that the hunchback Quasimodo clings in famous novel by Victor Hugo which takes its title from the cathedral. Popular literature thus joins the story, further strengthening the symbolic meaning of the cathedral. In "Notre Dame de Paris", set in the Middle Ages, it is told of Esmeralda, a bohemian gypsy unjustly accused of murder, and of the hunchback Quasimodo, who rings the bells and falls in love with her, offering her refuge in the cathedral. The success of the novel thus somehow rehabilitates the cathedral desecrated by the revolution. All of France, as President Macron said, is summed up in Notre Dame.
