Notre Dame reminds us of France’s glorious, complex past

For a country that prides itself on its secular status, and as the nation that gave the world rationalism and the Enlightenment, France remains surprisingly attached to its religious buildings and its Christian heritage. That is the conclusion many would have drawn from the re-opening of the Notre Dame cathedral on Saturday, five years after it was devastated by fire.

President Macron delivered a speech inside the restored Catholic cathedral, in which he declared that ‘the bells of Notre Dame that have accompanied our history are ringing again’. By making such a speech where he did, as the head of a state that adopted an official policy of laïcité in 1905, he risked provoking outrage. But this was too important an occasion for the president to pass up.

The coverage in the French press has been suitably rapturous. ‘Rebirth’, ‘The Soul of France’, ‘Magnificence and Majesty’ are just some of the headlines to have decorated the front page of the centre-right newspaper, Le Figaro, in recent days. ‘The cathedral of kings, people and poets’, trumpeted its front-page editorial on Saturday, ‘an occasion of jubilation for those who believe in heaven and those who scarcely believe in it’.

It’s not difficult to understand this mood. France desperately needed some good news right now. It has been in an almost permanent state of crisis for years, with a narrative of national decline being a constant theme. This is not just about more immediate concerns, such as public debt, immigration, pensions and Islamist terrorism. French commentary is also far more solemn and profound in its scope than in the Anglosphere. In the French media, there is permanent debate about France itself and its values being in danger of vanishing.

The crisis has become even more acute recently. Last week, the French government collapsed and prime minister Michel Barnier was ousted, making him the shortest-lived holder of that post since the foundation of the Fifth Republic in 1958. France’s two hard-left and hard-right factions, headed by Jean-Luc Mélenchon of France Unbowed and Marine Le Pen of National Rally respectively, both refused to accept his prescription for government spending cuts.

France is now caught in a bind. It must implement austerity if it is to adhere to EU rules on national debt. Its current budget deficit is set to exceed more than six per cent of GDP this year, more than twice the amount permitted by Brussels. The crisis in France is set to continue.

So what better time for France to celebrate its glorious past, for the nation to cast its gaze to that symbol of stability and continuity, and one that suggests rebirth: Notre Dame, now risen from the ashes? It matters little that the head of a secular state should have darkened its doors. In fact, it’s rather fitting. The building is a monument to France’s complex history as much as it is to Catholicism.

Notre Dame is the spiritual heart of France, and the site where ancient and modern converge. In 1793, at the height of the French Revolution, it became the site of the Festival of Reason, where the multitudes were encouraged to mock the old state religion and worship the new one (the cathedral was also renamed the Temple of Reason). But the revolution – certainly in its purest spirit embodied by Maximilien Robespierre – did not last, and eventually an engrained culture and tradition re-emerged. This threw up a brand new despot and brand new monarch, Napoleon Bonaparte, who crowned himself Emperor in Notre Dame in December 1804.

In France, nationhood and religion, despite their frequent antagonism, remain entwined. France is rare in having a patron saint, St Joan, who was actually from the country she came to represent. It is a country where the most extreme nationalists have often been the most extreme Catholics (and anti-Semites), with Le Pen’s party under its previous leader and incarnation, Jean-Marie Le Pen and his National Front, epitomising this unhappy tradition.

Macron’s gesture was fitting for a nation whose very sense of itself is riddled with contradictions and opposites. In the British imagination, the French are a nation of poets and philosophers given to profound, philosophical musings and ways of abstract thinking beyond the wit of we plodding, empiricist Anglo-Saxons. Accordingly, we are prone to stereotype the French as a people given to bewildering theories that lurch into impenetrability and nonsense. Think the writings of Jacques Derrida and Jean Baudrillard.

Yet France is also the nation that gave us the founder of rationalism, René Descartes, and Voltaire, that icon of humanism. This is the land of cold logic and reason – and, furthermore, pragmatism and science. Existentialist philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty complained in 1948 of ‘the French cast of mind to hold science and knowledge in such high esteem’. Like the physicist and inventor Pascal, Descartes was a significant figure in the history of mathematics, and France is also a nation of engineers, architects, aviators and car-makers. This is a land that takes pride in its brawn as well as its brains.

So it was no contradiction, ultimately, that the head of the secular French state should have been centre-stage at France’s most revered religious building, giving thanks to the muscle and toil of the men who have restored this monument. ‘Once again, the bells of Notre Dame have sounded’, said Macron. ‘Notre-Dame de Paris has been returned to you. You have made this happen.’

Let’s hope that France, too, can be rebuilt and can rebound from its current crisis.

Patrick West is a spiked columnist. His latest book, Get Over Yourself: Nietzsche For Our Times, is published by Societas.