JCC Notre Dame Cathedral on fire.

Sorry Esmir but that's a strawman. The Notre Dame is not a piece of art related to cruelty. It's a monument to the power of the French Roman Catholic Church which was, for all intents and purposes, dictatorial. It does not deserve a monument.
I'm not saying anything about Christians today. I'm not saying anything about art. I'm asking people to look beyond what's superficial (high, old, ornate).

 

I'm just going to tell you you clearly don't know the entire history of the monument nor understand what Notre-Dame has come to mean for us French, and leave it at that.

 

I know the importance of history. I have an education in it. It is a symbol-- a symbol of evil and superstition for many, a view I'm sympathetic toward. Leaving aside the relative cultural value, your argument sounds exactly like the sort people use to justify letting Confederate monuments stand here in the States.

 

Places and monuments, shrines, etc and their meanings can change over time. What a place meant in the past is not necessarily what it means today.

 

I don't mind being corrected and I certainly wouldn't pretend to know better than you, so let's hear it.

 

Why can't a historic landmark have more than one meaning? It's also the setting for a novel and the backdrop for some photos I took with a Kodak Instamatic.

 

You are aware that by the time Notre Dame was built, those who tried to live like Jesus were persecuted?

 

They all do have more than one meaning. Just look at Yasukuni Shrine in Japan for instance. To some bereaved families, it is a place for their loved ones lost in war to transform into kami and reach a place of peace. To others, it is a place celebrating an imperialist Showa and class-A war criminals.

We project meanings onto spaces and places. Notre Dame is no different and the responses in this thread validate that.

 

They were filthy heretics! They deserved genocide.

 

In the Colosseum they had people killed on a daily basis. And they enjoyed watching such a horrifying show. The building served no other purpose. Yet, I hope you're glad that it's still there, so that you can visit it and admire it for its cultural value and historical significance.

 

I think the issue is that the Roman Empire is long gone; the Catholic Church is still around.

 

Going to stick to a few cliff notes on more recent history for now, I really don't have the heart to get into detail:

- It's not really going to surprise anyone that us French regard ourselves as an old country (we're old even by European standards)
- Notre-Dame, in that respect, isn't just a Cathedral among others, it's the oldest "world wonder" in our capital (and we're a bloody centralized country)
- To the point every distance from Paris in France is officially measured from its heart
- Even at the peak (and the bloodiest) of the Revolution, it was enough of a symbol that its pillage led Robespierre himself to denounce the ravages of what he called "aristocratic atheism"
- It's been a national property since November 2nd, 1789
- It fell into disrepair largely owing to France's financial troubles throughout the Revolutionary wars, First Empire and early Restoration
- Its partial reconstruction, with, most notably, the implication of Viollet-le-Duc, was controversial enough in the 1830s for said controversy to still be ongoing nearly two centuries later (the spire that fell tonight was not modeled after the original, but after Orléans' cathedral's!)
- Nowadays, in a thoroughly dechristianized France, Notre-Dame is still one of the most famous monuments and sights in Paris
- With 12 to 13 million annual visitors, it's the single most visited monument in France, and one a great many of us have visited, and everyone of us know at least by sight
- As to it being a church, we don't particularly care at this point; that one of our most fervent atheists in Mélenchon immediately demanded the planned Presidential speech for tonight to be cancelled gives an idea of how, even on the far left, Notre Dame is more important than run-of-the-mill concerns and postures

EDIT - And I just realized I didn't spare a word for Victor Hugo...

 

That, and the Colosseum is just a pile of rocks anyway.

 

My son texted me about the time we had a picnic in the park behind the cathedral when he was 8.

 

And people wonder why the A's want a new stadium in Oakland...

 

Reports are now saying they saved artwork and the Crown of Thorns.

 

Notre Dame has taken on a different meaning for the French for centuries now. Particularly thanks to Hugo and his push for restoration it has become a symbol of France's ability to endure. Yes it was created for the aristocratic church hierarchy and all, but since then it was trashed by "the cult of the supreme being" and "the cult of reason" during the Reign of Terror, but from there it became something the French restored. It is a unifying symbol of France's ability to rise from one extreme or another and find pride in a unifying symbol of human triumph.

It has not meant the old church hierarchy in centuries. What some of you are suggesting would be like celebrating the destruction of the Colosseum cause it was used for terrible acts. Confederate memorials where made after the fact and to idealize a disgusting ideology. But historical locations, world heritage sites embody actual actions, actual things of importance that are the remains of a different time. They are not memorials, they are the living breathing remains of our history in motion.

Notre Dame survived wars, pillaging, and so on and yet it endured. Not as some symbol of intolerance or of the corrupt church of France, but as a flashpoint of French history. Hugo fell in love with it not for religious reasons, but cause he saw it as the embodiment of the edifice, of this lasting monument of human labor that all who pass through France share. His point was specifically that for all of the characters' troubles, Notre Dame remained in the center of it. Even when being abandoned and left to rot for a long time, it was still shared by everyone knowingly or not. Honestly its why I personally dislike Percy Shelly's "Ozymandias" great poem, but I feel it undersells the power of the edifice. Ramses built structures that still remain today, yes surrounded by sand, and yet his people lived on through the collapse of society, his works remained as a symbol of pride and triumph for those long after, and even those with no connection to the religion and culture of Egypt. We all share the edifice cause it is true mass media, as it is unavoidable to consume if you are within eyesight of it.

To portray it as just a symbol of superstition and to enjoy seeing it burn is to spit in the face of France's history. Not honoring those who commissioned it, but rather the world that it overlooked. The events that happened within and around it. Also calling every catholic a pedo or an enabler is freaking insane. I have my problems with the church, there is a reason I left it. But show some damn respect for people's culture. Especially when it is something like this that belongs to everybody. There is a reason it was still important to anti-clerics. Cause France is if nothing else, endurance. Yes much was built by homophobes and misogynists, and much of it was maintained by those like Julie d'Aubigny. She messed with the church, was seen as debaucherous, was Bisexual, and so on. But it is people like her who embody French feminism. France's monuments belong to France to all its history good and bad.

So a place like Notre Dame means so much more than your short sighted view, it embodies something that oversaw revolution, first wave feminism, world wars, resistance, and so on. So many in France, religious or atheist, hold to the building. It is their shared history, it is a symbol of their people. Heck damages done by atheists still remain like the beheaded statues they thought belonged to French kings rather than biblical ones. Cause the edifice is subject to everyone. The celebration of the flame of reason happened there yes to mock the church, but also to claim the location for the revolution. Much like how Greeks fight proudly for their heritage and buildings like the Parthenon. You think Greek Catholics agree with Pericles' religious views? No but the building is their history and their pride. That's why they took down to Nazi flag mere days after it was put up atop the Acropolis

Yes......and it endured to the point of seeing France as it revolted, seeing it live through occupation and so on. Her point was about the confederate monuments. Those got thrown up far later in order to promote the ideology, Notre Dame existed as an active place of worship and as time passed it naturally grew along with the French people. It's not immortalizing the specific time it was built in, it is immortalizing all the lives that has lived in the shadow of the place. Symbols like it are ones people want to gain, not destroy. It came to mean France, not the specific leaders of the church who ordered it built

 

View of the inside from some minutes ago.

 

And yet those rocks mean to much to Italy and to so many beyond their borders. Structures go so far beyond simply being ruins. Plus there are pretty intact Roman structures.

 

The callousness on display here is staggering to me. I hate the Catholic Church as much as the next right thinking person, but I also mourn the loss of art, history and cultural heritage through the destruction of places of worship. Fingers crossed it's restored to it's former glory in my lifetime.

Sent from my ONEPLUS A6013 using Tapatalk

 

I wonder how many here would cheer this image

Since the cloth hall was built by royals and was used to throw black cats to purge magic. I loath that practice so much, but that was its history, but in Ypres it was still important, and to see it left as nothing but a few walls is heartbreaking. The destruction and cost of places like this are heartbreaking whether you agree with those who built and used them or not. Art is reflective of us for good or for ill, and structures even moreso.
https://brushedwithmystery.com/2012/03/04/world-war-one-photo-cloth-hall-at-ypres/

 

With regards to reconstruction, the site of our national cultural heritage foundation crashed owing to too many people trying to log in. They've put up another one, theoretically more solid.

 

Surely that must have been hours ago, not minutes.