Notre-Dame de Paris in 2020: Between Endangerment Sensibility and Cultural Heritage Task Force

Abstract:The Notre-Dame disaster caused a worldwide emotional response, fueled by social networks and the media; it also generated a sudden and considerable public generosity. In response, the French government has devised a specific law, one in favor of an unprecedented modernization for restoring heritage, combined with a task force under the supervision of a retired army general. Subsequently, the uncertainties of its conservation, or of a future creation of a spire, seemed to sanction the bankruptcy of the ancient intelligence of the monument. If romantic imagery, more or less anecdotal, has been repeated here and there, and if the scholarly memory of a Christian and national cathedral has been exploited by media, the ecological traumas—the evocation of a disappeared forest with the framework and the lead pollution around it—seem to have prevailed in the public imagination. The challenge today is to go beyond a communion in the drama of a loss in order to identify heritage, its uses, and its change in a future society.