Notre-Dame de Paris. A secular patrimonial space, after the catastrophe

The catastrophe of Notre-Dame de Paris sparked an international out-pouring of emotion, fed by the social networks and the media; it aroused an equally sudden and considerable public generosity. In response, the French government proposed specific legislation, departing from traditional paths of patrimonial restauration in favor of a new modernization of the process. In the wake of this move, uncertainties concerning future conservation and suggested creations appear to have sanctioned the failure of older knowledge of the monument. If a romantic, more or less anecdotic image continued here and there, the ecological traumatisms the evocation of a forest that disappeared with the roof's wooden framework and the lead-particle pollution in the surrounding area seem to have prevailed in current imagination to the detriment of the historical and scholarly history of a Christian, national cathedral. The challenge today is to overcome the shared communion of the drama and to identify the patrimonial "Notre-Dame" of tomorrow.