Watching perhaps the most visceral act of live destruction on TV since 9/11, it was hard to find the right words. But that didn’t stop the media reaching for the wrong ones.After all, what better time to push your political agenda?
Do they think that just because they didn’t use the word ‘Brexit’ that no one noticed the insinuation? Since, unless there are, provably, people in England who are boasting “We don’t care about that old cathedral burning, we are not European anymore,” that is exactly what this is.
The New York Times made it all about the Yellow Vests, on account of Emmanuel Macron having to cancel a speech addressing the movement due to the conflagration, writing “France is burning.”
“An anguished, restless nation has struggled to cope with the monthslong uprising and with the frayed social safety net that spurred the protests. Generations that had come to rely on this social safety net, as a matter of national pride and identity, see it going up in smoke,” wrote Michael Kimmelman.
“On Monday, so was the cathedral, which for centuries has enshrined an evolving notion of Frenchness. The symbolism was hard to miss.”
The Washington Post went with “the fall of Notre Dame is a body blow to Paris and all it represents.”
“Through all of these nightmares, there has been one constant, collective refrain. This was the comforting reality — or at least the comforting belief — that somehow, through it all, Paris was indestructible. The idea that Paris will always be Paris felt truer nowhere else than in front of Notre Dame,” wrote the local bureau correspondent James McAuley.
Notre-Dame statues in a workshop where they were undergoing restoration at the time of the fire. © GEORGES GOBET / AFP
Of course, McAuley and others are making a bigger, more abstract point, but there is an argument against this type of sentiment too.
Can’t a fire, which has destroyed one of the most famous buildings in the world after standing for 800 years, be tragic in itself? Can’t we just mourn what was an almost universally sad moment in peace? Does it have to represent something else? Why the need for the pretentious language, the forced metaphors, the additional meaning where there is enough happening in front of our eyes.
When a disaster of historic magnitude takes place – and this exactly what it was, in the most literal sense – it is a natural social instinct to draw importance from this, to relate to others with a reaction to a shared experience. And it is churlish to judge people for what, trolling and politicking apart, was a clumsy but well-meaning expression of human spirit.
But if you have to say something at all, a suggestion: what if instead of straining for that big thought, on such occasions we recollect something personal.
Yes, your story of visiting the Notre Dame may be identical to that of the 13 million tourists who go there each year, and indeed students have been eating lunch on the bench outside for centuries. But at least that will be honest and sincere, and a genuine tribute to the cathedral itself.