The French government wanted a modernist redesign of Notre-Dame, according to its former culture minister, with President Macron’s wife pitching a new spire resembling male genitalia.
Roselyne Bachelot-Narquin, who served as Minister for Culture under Prime Minister Jean Castex and, by extension, President Emmanuel Macron from 2020 to 2022, claims in her autobiography that the government wanted to make some sort of modernist statement in the rebuild of the fire-damaged 800-year-old cathedral, The Times reports.
“When I got back to the ministry, the office was in a state of stress: the Élysée Palace was dreaming of an ‘architectural gesture’ and was accusing me of just doing what I please,” she wrote, referring to the French president’s official residence.
Bachelot, who appears to have been insistent on as faithful a reconstruction of the Catholic cathedral as possible, said she did “not regret this insubordination” after Brigitte Macron, the French president’s controversial wife, showed her a proposed design “topped with a sort of erect phallus with its base surrounded with golden balls” at a meeting.
With much of the global architecture establishment actively hostile to building in traditional styles, decrying this as “pastiche” and insisting all new buildings must appear “contemporary”, there was a concerted effort to try and foist modernist aesthetics on Notre-Dame as the restoration of its damaged exterior and destroyed spire was discussed in the wake of the 2019 fire.
Architects proposed despoiling the cathedral with such features as a glass roof, a steel spire, or even a minaret — a tribute to Muslim Algerians in the country — in the wake of the blaze.
The allegedly conservative Telegraph newspaper in the United Kingdom published an article saying “it would be a travesty to rebuild a badly damaged Notre Dame as a facsimile of the original” instead of pursuing “bold and uncompromising modernity”, while a Harvard professor in America went so far as to say the destruction of a Christian building “so overburdened with meaning… feels like an act of liberation“.
The French government initially encouraged such fantasies, with Macron’s prime minister saying they would “ask the question of whether we should even recreate the spire as it was conceived [or] as is often the case in the evolution of heritage, we should endow Notre-Dame with a new spire” — but public pressure and, possibly, internal lobbying by Bachelot eventually saw them commit to a faithful restoration of the cathedral’s exterior.
The building’s interior may not be safe, however, with leaked plans for a Disneyland-style woke reimagining of the cathedral emphasising diversity and climate change causing controversy towards the end of 2021.
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