‘Great edifices, like great mountains, are the work of centuries’: Honoring Notre Dame in Literary & Intellectual History

I have never been to France. On April 14, the day before the cathedral burned, if you asked me to list tourist sites in Paris, I only would have listed the Eiffel Tower and maybe that Shakespeare bookshop. My fiancé came home from work on April 15 and quipped, “today I learned that I’m the only one in my office who hasn’t been to France.” Nevertheless, emotional and philosophical reactions to the Notre Dame fire of 2019 pervaded the Internet and daily life. Despite never having visited France, references to Notre Dame’s meaning pulled me into a rich literary and intellectual history. The fact that a wide range of influential thinkers have reflected on the same building for decades is compelling in itself. I collected some of them below.

“Where would [one] find… such magnificence and perfection, so high, so large, so strong, clothed roundabout with such a multiple variety of ornaments?” -John of Jandun, Treatise on the Praises of Paris, 1323[1]

“Great edifices, like great mountains, are the work of centuries. Art often undergoes a transformation while they are pending, pendent opera interrupta; they proceed quietly in accordance with the transformed art. The new art takes the monument where it finds it, incrusts itself there, assimilates it to itself, develops it according to its fancy, and finishes it if it can. The thing is accomplished without trouble, without effort, without reaction, — following a natural and tranquil law. It is a graft which shoots up, a sap which circulates, a vegetation which starts forth anew. Certainly, there is matter here for many large volumes, and often the universal history of humanity in the successive engrafting of many arts at many levels, upon the same monument. The man, the artist, the individual is effaced in these great masses, which lack the name of their author; human intelligence is there summed up and totalized. Time is the architect, the nation is the builder…” -Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, 1831[2]

“The Gothic of Verona is far nobler than that of Venice; and that of Florence is nobler than that of Verona. For our own immediate purposes, that of Notre-Dame of Paris is noblest of all; and the greatest service which can at present be rendered to architecture, is the careful delineation of the details of the cathedrals above named, by means of photography.” -John Ruskin, leading English art critic, 1855[3]

“Frequently he planted himself before Notre Dame, to contemplate the scaffolding surrounding the cathedral which was then undergoing repair. These huge pieces of timber amused him although he failed to understand why.” -Emile Zola, Therese Raquin, 1868[4]

“It wasn’t the first time Strether had sat alone in the great dim church – still less was it the first of his giving himself up, so far as conditions permitted, to its beneficent action on his nerves. He had been to Notre Dame with [specific characters] and had found the place, even in company, such a refuge from the obsession of his problem that, with renewed pressure from that source, he had not unnaturally recurred to a remedy meeting the case… He trod the long dim nave, sat in the splendid choir, paused before the cluttered chapels of the east end, and the mighty monument laid upon him its spell. He might have been a student under the charm of the of a museum – which was exactly what, in a foreign town, in the afternoon of life, he would have liked to be free to be.” -Henry James, The Ambassadors, 1903[5]

“In the dream, on the left bank of the Seine in front of Notre Dame. I was standing there, but there was nothing that resembled Notre Dame. A Brick building toward above a high fence made of wood, revealing the extremities of its highest echelons. I stood, though, overwhelmed, right in front of Notre Dame. And what overwhelmed me was longing. Longing for the very same Paris in which I found myself in the dream. But where does this longing come from? And where does this disfigured, unrecognizable object come from? The reason being I came too close to it in the dream. The tremendous longing which had struck me here, in the heart of that which was longed for, did not press itself from the distance into an image. It was a blissful one, which has already crossed the threshold of the image and property, and knows only the power of the name, from which the lover lives, transforms, ages, rejuvenates and, imageless, is the refuge of all images.” -Walter Benjamin, 1929[6]

“In a dusty cathedral

The living God called

And I prayed for my life here on earth

So, we must love

While these moments are still called

Today

Take part in the pain of this passion play

Stretching our youth as we must

Until we are ashes to dust

Until time makes history of us” -Indigo Girls, “History of Us,” 1989[7]

“You can lie to yourself and your minions! You can claim that you haven’t a qualm! But you never can run from, nor hide what you’ve done from the eyes! [points to church statues] The very eyes of Notre Dame!” -The Walt Disney Company, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, 1996[8]

“Today we can all mourn. Whether you have been to Notre Dame or only read about it in books, you can mourn. Whether it is a sacred space to you or simply a beautiful building that commanded your awe, you can mourn. Let us mourn together… It’s essential to our humanity that we empathize with others in the damage or loss of their sacred spaces, even if those spaces are not sacred to us: a mosque, cathedral, church, grove of trees, burial ground, or any other place where men and women feel connected to a higher power.” -Spencer McBride, Historian of the Joseph Smith Papers, 2019[9]

“I visited the site for the first time in 2009. I walked up and down each isle, looking upward at the gothic architecture with amazement and wide eyes. I climbed the stairway to view Paris from its towers. I wanted to know who built it. I wanted to know who designed it. I wanted to know why it was built. Notre Dame Cathedral and the city that surrounds it explains why I now study history.” -Jonah Estess, History PhD Student at American University, 2019[10]

“There’s a comfort in engaging with ‘Les Miserables’ denuded of the songbook that made Hugo’s 19^th century story popular again among the late 20^th
century’s masses, particularly as we come to terms with what’s been lost in the fires that nearly destroyed a place many [assumed] would stand forever. The spire of Notre Dame has been replaced before; it fell in 1786. It has survived eons of natural deterioration and assaults at the hands of men, notably during the ages of Napoleon and French Revolution, two eras surrounding the main action in ‘Les Miserables.’” -Melanie McFarland, Salon, 2019[11]

I am forgetting many important reactions. To start, the sources that I cited are not particularly diverse. Please do not hesitate to add different and interesting perspectives in the comments!

[1]John of Jandun, Treatise on the Praises of Paris(1323) Quoted in Oliver Wainwright, Stuart Jeffries, Peter Bradshaw, Jonathan Jones, Fiona Maddocks, Michael Coveney and Keza MacDonald, “Notre Dame and the culture it inspired – from Matisse to the Muppets,” The Guardian (16 April 2019) https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2019/apr/16/the-culture-inspired-by-notre-dame-paris.

[2]Quoted in Constance Grady, “Why Notre Dame matters, in one Victor Hugo passage,”Vox(15 April 2019) https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/4/15/18311758/notre-dame-fire-victor-hugo-hunchback.

[3]John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, preface to the second edition (1855) Quoted in Apollo(16 April 2019) https://www.apollo-magazine.com/an-elegy-for-notre-dame-in-words-and-pictures/.

[4]Emile Zola, Therese Raquin (1868) Quoted in Apollo(16 April 2019) https://www.apollo-magazine.com/an-elegy-for-notre-dame-in-words-and-pictures/.

[5]Henry James, The Ambassadors (1903) Quoted in Apollo(16 April 2019) https://www.apollo-magazine.com/an-elegy-for-notre-dame-in-words-and-pictures/.

[6]Quoted in C. E. Yingst Twitter, @ceyoungest (15 April 2019) https://twitter.com/ceyoungest/status/1117873744414818304.

[7]Indigo Girls, “History of Us” (1989) Quoted in LD Burnett Twitter, @LDBurnett (15 April 2019) https://twitter.com/LDBurnett/status/1117894174731145216.

[8]The Walt Disney Company, The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996).

[9]Spencer McBride Twitter, @SpencerWMcBride (15 April 2019) https://twitter.com/SpencerWMcBride/status/1117931676263280640.

[10]Jonah Estess Twitter, @jonahbklyn, 15 April 2019, https://twitter.com/jonahbklyn/status/1117950461158543360.

[11]Melanie McFarland, “Watching PBS’s ‘Les Miserables’ as Notre Dame burned: A lesson in processing spectacular loss,” Salon(17 April 2019) https://www.salon.com/2019/04/17/watching-pbss-stoic-les-miserables-as-notre-dame-burned-a-lesson-in-processing-spectacular-loss/.