Regis Perruchot, a 50-year-old Paris native, remembers being scared by Notre Dame’s gargoyles as a child.
Americans probably recognize the ghoulish sculptures more from Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame, but the French know them firsthand. One does not visit Paris without going to the cathedral in its epicenter.
“The most important thing to know is that when you enter the cathedral, it’s very dark,” says Lynne Kogel, a retired art history professor from Michigan. “Your eyes have to adjust. As you go deeper in the cathedral, the light from the windows begins to pour out on you, and you go from darkness to light, which,” she added, “is a theological statement.”
The significance of the 850-year-old Catholic cathedral extends beyond religion. Kogel has taken all six of her grandchildren there, but now, no American or French child will see it the same way again. After Notre Dame caught fire on Monday, its roof and 295-foot spire went up in flames.
Giulia Caulfield, a culinary student in Paris, didn’t hear about the conflagration until nearly midnight on Monday. “We didn’t even know until we got off work,” she said. Her kitchen is more than two miles away, but as she walked outside, she could smell the smoke. When she made her way toward the cathedral, it was still smoldering.
If you ask a Parisian about Notre Dame, they’ll tell you it’s much more than a religious space. When I spoke with her about the multifaceted significance of the cathedral — religious, architectural, musical, cultural, artistic — French professor Marie-Claire Morellec said it is “the heart and soul of France.”
Morellec, who is now chairwoman of the French department at Hillsdale College, grew up in France. She used to visit the cathedral to light a candle for her father, who was in Paris during the year of its liberation from the Nazis.
Anne Theobald, also a French professor at Hillsdale, says she noticed the cathedral’s resilience after its stone was cleaned in one of many renovations. “I remember thinking about how amazing it was that something so old could not only survive all those years, and all the pollution of the city, but that it could be restored,” she said.
For Kogel, who has French ancestry and has studied the religious history of stained glass windows, the cathedral’s iconic rose windows and its contribution to music crystallize its significance.
“The first polyphonic music was developed at the music school at Notre Dame,” she said. In the 12th to 13th centuries, composers working in the cathedral developed new forms of sound together. With polyphony, Gregorian chants expanded as composers wrote concurrent melodies. The musical innovation, Kogel said, “holds many truths simultaneously instead of choosing one or the other.”
Polyphonic music sounds like Notre Dame itself, which bears the story lines of hundreds of years of history, from the weddings of monarchs and to the wounds of foreign invasions. The cathedral is the literal heart of Paris, in that it sits in the middle of the city. The square before Notre Dame is kilometer zero, the starting point of the distance between Paris and anywhere else in France.
Victor Hugo, whose novel on the cathedral is credited with its 19th century revival, said of Notre Dame, “Every surface, every stone of this venerable pile, is a page of the history not only of the country, but of science and of art.”
Perruchot, who once was so frightened by the Gothic gargoyles sitting atop the cathedral, takes a different view now. “For me, it’s not only a religious building, as I’m not Catholic, but a very important part of the Parisian landscape,” he said. “A part of the great pride I have living in the beautiful city.”
French President Emmanuel Macron has pledged to restore Notre Dame, whose interior remains largely intact despite its exterior damage.
“Of course, Notre Dame has to be rebuilt,” Perruchot said. “I cannot imagine my beloved city without this wonderful church that is really part of our Parisian soul.”
