The fire that devastated 800 years of history | Our Da …

PageI12 in France

From Paris

A fire gorge has taken over 800 years of history in the heart of Paris. During the fire, French Interior Minister Christophe Castaner said it was not certain that the entire cathedral could be "saved". But late at night, firefighters announced that the structure of the cathedral was "safe and preserved as a whole". Soon after, French President Emmanuel Macron announced the launch of a national subscription to fund the restoration.

Still early in the morning, people who met on the bridges of the capital and on the banks of the Seine to witness the slow consumption of the Notre-Dame cathedral wiped away their tears. A sense of irreparable loss, of secular injury, has plunged thousands of people into a thick silence. Catholics or atheists, there was no one who did not feel or express a piece of his life that disappeared before his eyes. The main treasure of Gothic architecture, completed in 1345, was, last night, a dark building, devoured by the flames that illuminated his wounded belly. In this silence, the bells of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart, a few kilometers away, and many other churches of the capital began to be heard as a way to reveal the main threat: the complete destruction of a cathedral that is both a nest Western culture as a source of legends.

At the beginning of the fire, it was feared that the fire would also destroy the two towers of the building, but at 10 pm (local time), this possibility was also ruled out. The struggle of the 400 firefighters deployed against the powerful firing languages ​​was a battle experienced by thousands of people.

Sometimes it seemed like the flames were going to invade the whole building, that the streams of water falling from everywhere could never stop its progress. Then, suddenly, the flames decreased and the firefighters won a new battle. "What I see is as if a part of me had burned with the cathedral," said a lady during the shooting of her phone with the coming and going of the flames. A gentleman, by his side, washed his tears with a handkerchief and said that a "little piece of the soul of Paris is fading in front of us".

All indications are that the fire that erupted around seven o'clock in the afternoon, Paris time, is "potentially linked to the renovation work" under way. With a cost of 6 million euros, the restoration of the cathedral was to end in 2022. The fire is declared precisely from there, from the center of the scaffold placed to restore the needle and the roof. This upper part was built between the 12th and the 14th century. The needle was the first to collapse and its collapse caused an immense cry of amazement among the people. It was still daylight when, at the top, the cross wavered for 93 meters and carried all the rest of the needle. Around midnight, a thick column of smoke could be seen from different parts of the French capital.

It is unclear what was the cause of the fire, all the more so as to avoid such a disaster, the electricity had been cut off throughout the area where the scaffolding structure had been deployed.

This is not the first time Notre-Dame has suffered a fire. In 1871, during the insurrection of the Paris Commune to establish a popular political reform in the French capital, the cathedral was partially burned. Throughout the French Revolution of 1789, the cathedral also suffered the ravages of the process of desecration and innumerable looting.

Notre-Dame evokes to few buildings the identity, history and magic of Paris by referring to the literary work of Victor Hugo, specifically the novel Notre-Dame de Paris (1845) and to his eternal characters, such as the Bohemian ballerina Esmeralda or the pope of the fools, Quasimodo, so nicknamed for his hump and ugliness. Notre-Dame is, with 13 million people each year, the most visited building in Europe. Every day of the week, five Mbades and seven Sundays are celebrated. The task that comes now is to save the works of art. Of course, according to the rector of Our Lady, the San Luis tunic and the crown of thorns were found in time.

Notre Dame is a popular symbol thanks to the work of Victor Hugo, it's like a DNA of the French identity where converge the Middle Ages, Joan of Arc, Charles VII, Henry IV, the Revolution French, the two Bonaparte, Marshal Petain General de Gaulle, the essence of the liberation of Paris after the Nazi occupation of the Second World War and the testimony of a whole era of political and moral power of the Church. And yet, despite its luxury and imposing architecture, Notre-Dame de Paris is the city thanks to Victor Hugo's pen and its exuberant characters. In his book, Quasimodo lived precisely in the ceilings burned yesterday. Paris looks as if a member of his body had been amputated and a story of his story. Something will be missing long on the horizon of the capital.

[email protected]