COMMENT: Notre-Dame de Paris has historical as well as religious significance. Its destruction unexpectedly interrupted a people’s relation to its history and past.
The fire that destroyed a large part of the cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris — a symbol of the French nation — was seen by all in the country, left, right and centre, as calling for national mourning and unity. President Emmanuel Macron vowed to rebuild the famous 12th-century Gothic church within five years. French and international donors immediately pledged large sums of money to help rebuild it.
It was striking that both religious and secular people in France and abroad were affected by the incident. Notre-Dame de Paris has historical as well as religious significance. Its destruction unexpectedly interrupted a people’s relation to its history and past. A part of its heritage and identity had become inaccessible in that moment. I suspect that that was partly the reason for its traumatising effect.
The incident also evoked the powerful and unsettling symbol of a blazing church. This symbol, more than any other, conveys the contradiction that characterises modernity. Modernity begins as a time of mourning and loss, of alienation and exile, at the same time as it loudly proclaims the march of progress, of liberation from oppression and of greater enlightenment for all.
At another level, the poet is describing modernity as a desacralised age, an age that lives under a sky that is “ironic” and “cruelly blue”, limpid and empty. The modern world is a world from which the gods have fled and in which human life has in consequence been deprived of meaning and value. Everything looks sham and kitschy in the capitalist environment of the middle of the 19th century. Everything in the present symbolises the loss of meaning for life.
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