Agnès Poirier's Notre-Dame: The Soul of France ignites the cathedral's history before the fire
By Kate Mazade
Moments of impact sear into our memory, and none so much as when a building falls. Those who saw the ground swallow the failed Pruitt-Igoe, felt time freeze when the tower buckled on September 11, or heard silence roaring when the spire gave way will never forget. Even though experienced in slow motion, the collapse is quick — a millisecond compared to the millennium of confusion that follows — the years spent trying to figure out how and, perhaps unexplainably, why this happened.
It has been just over three years since the Paris sky blazed over Notre-Dame. And despite investigation and reason, it still makes no sense. But Agnès Poirier's memoir of Our Lady of Paris helps.
Published in 2020 by Oneworld Publications, Notre-Dame: The Soul of France is all-at-once heartbreaking, historical, and hopeful. French journalist and author of Left Bank: Art, Passion and the Rebirth of Paris 1940–50 (2018), Poirier recreates the impact of April 15, 2019 in aching emotional detail when the roof of the world's most famous cathedral burned crimson.
Notre-Dame fire, April 1, 2019. Photo by manhhai, via Flickr.
She then flashes back through 850 years of Parisian history: from the first church stones laid in the 12th century to the Bourbons' absolutism, the rejection of the church in favor of Reason to Napoleon's decadence, the shadowed creature in the belfries to Viollet-le-Duc's untrained restoration, Hausmann's razing to the 1945 liberation of France; culminating in the current discussions of restoration. Each period of strife and celebration climbed like mercury in a thermometer until fever struck and the roof ignited.
Façade of Notre-Dame, March 15, 2019. Photo by author.
And yet Notre-Dame’s history and design is only part of her significance. Her power lies in how many people have tread her stone floors, gazed up at her vaulted ceilings, and wished — through prayer or secular hope — that somehow, seeing this building will change their lives.
Even more than a history, Poirier's book is a profile of the people who have come into contact with Notre-Dame, from stone masons who carefully fitted chunks of rock into place to soot soaked firefighters who braced as those chunks crumbled.
"Notre-Dame is one of mankind’s greatest architectural achievements, the face of civilization and the soul of a nation. Both sacred and secular, Gothic and revolutionary, medieval and romantic, she has always offered a place of communion and refuge to everyone."
This book is like Poirier says: a place of communion and refuge. With immaculate attention to detail and empathy, she unravels the complex history and tries to shift through the debris of the fire's immediate aftermath. Her descriptions place the reader within the cathedral's history, watching as the colored glass was leaded into the rose window and crying through smoke to see if it would withstand the heat. Reading it is like standing on the Île de la Cité, comforted in the community of those who claim attachment to Notre-Dame.
Rose window, March 15, 2017. Photo by author.
I've come to understand that buildings only have three actions: rising, falling, and belonging. They're built, and they come down. And in between those states, buildings are passed from person to person through ownership, habitation, and use.
It’s during construction that buildings start to belong to people. But when they inevitably come down — through impact and billows of dust or in a slow decline into obsolescence — we start to realize that buildings were never ours at all, but the reverse.
Notre-Dame never belonged to us — or to Paris, or to France, or to the world — but it is we who belonged to Notre-Dame.