Just two years ago, French Ministry of Culture officials dismissed the plight of the aging, 856-year-old Notre Dame cathedral, saying “France has thousands of monuments” and that the Paris church wasn’t their most pressing concern. “It will not fall down,” one official mused.
Care for Notre Dame has been neglected for centuries. While the French state now owns the structure, the Catholic Church took no better care of it. Built between 1163 and 1345, by the time of the French Revolution it was crumbling and given no special thought.
In 1905, the French state formalized the separation of church and state, a process begun in the 18th century by the Jacobins during the French Revolution, who confiscated Catholic Church lands and rededicated Notre Dame as a temple to the Cult of the Supreme Being, a deistic concept in vogue during the revolution. However, in 1801, Napoleon Bonaparte reversed that move and courted the church’s support once more, recognizing Catholicism as one of the French state’s religions — the others being Judaism and the Lutheran and Calvinist branches of Protestant Christianity.
Under the 1905 law, the French state owns Notre Dame, and the Catholic Archdiocese of Paris leases the building for free. However, that’s led to a century-long dispute over whose responsibility it is to maintain the structure. The French Ministry of Culture furnishes the archdiocese with $2.28 million a year for upkeep of the church, but Notre Dame staff told Time in 2016 that this barely covered running costs and the most basic repairs, and that it wasn’t sufficient for any kind of concerted reconstruction.
Those problems were myriad even before Monday’s fire, which totally gutted the structure and destroyed its roof, including the spire. During the 19th century, a wave of restoration energy following the publication of Victor Hugo’s novel « The Hunchback of Notre Dame » in 1831 saw the stripping away of centuries of grime from the church’s facade, but also used low-quality stone and cement to repair the many holes, cracks and other missing pieces all around the building.
