I could be so uncouth as to idiotically go below the stupid reasons why Notre Dame of Paris went up in flame… I will be so uncouth...

One can speculate on "sabotage" or “accident”. At this level of destruction, nothing is an accident. Accidents such as these only happen through carelessness, lack of attention and expediency. This is why we have insurance companies defining liability and culpability, with no-claim bonus.
In Australia, a young worker recently got killed when a scaffolding collapsed. Unsafe practices seemed to have been at the core of the problem. We shall leave this one to the lawyers. In Australian, per annum, around 150 workers die at work because....

Note: this is NOT the FIRST such restoration of old buildings in France where the building went up in flame “during the work”. Some uncouth French people have alluded to a "restoration closed-shop (mafia)"... I do not know.

So how can a country that built the Concorde and the A380, is unable to restore a cathedral without burning it down? 

Does the answer to the question lies in that modern building technique aren’t suitable for such cathedral restoration work which demands über qualified stonemasons, companion carpenters — companion charpentier-meunuisier in France is a famous restricted guild of skilled workers who have completed a rigorous apprenticeship and further training by going from town to town country-wide to be versed in the traditional often secret methods of woodworking, such as understanding wood grains, using hand tools and deep respect for the timber, plus using the more accurate measuring sticks instead of laser pointers, thus allowing for elegant adjustment imponderable instead of being tight fitted  — and roofers from their old guilds as well, rather than tradesmen (women up there on the scaffolds? you’re kidding...) in yellow vest, heavy mud boots and hard hats, and engineers with degrees from the school of saving a few bucks? 

Am I too uncouth, unless I have read somewhere in the ether that God let young Mohamed Wahab use his acetylene/oxygen cutting tool above the old dusty beams of the grand dame… This is below the belt before any police investigation.

My first conclusion was DUST. See: restoration gone wrong...?

So, here is a piece written two years ago, by a guy called MICHAEL BRENDAN DOUGHERTY for the right-wing mag National Review:

There is a lot of gloom about Europe lately. A large Islamist terror cell tried to blow up the cathedral in Barcelona a few weeks ago, an as yet uncompleted modern masterpiece. Douglas Murray’s haunting and elegiac book The Strange Death of Europe dwells on how Europe lost its faith in Christ, and then lost faith in all the substitutes for Christianity: Fascism, Communism, human rights next, probably. Murray is not quite a believer, but he writes, “I cannot help feeling that much of the future of Europe will be decided on what our attitude is towards the church buildings and other great cultural buildings of our heritage standing in our midst.”

So what is the attitude to Notre Dame? Though the French state is its owner, it will not spend the money for necessary repairs. The local archbishop does not believe that he can raise the funds to keep this astounding testament to French history and genius locally, from the descendants of those who built it.
When I read the fundraising pitch I giggled, because my stomach contorted the way it does when a plane drops a little. But, surely, the pilot is still in control. It’s just the normal turbulence of secularism. And the slightly panicked whinny in the plea for money is just a silly overreaction. The plane will steady itself, right? I’m putting it out of my head.

Then again, Notre Dame is another rock that is pointed upward — and Notre Dame is falling down. I’m moving up my plans to go to Notre Dame, and maybe I will offer a confession there. Maybe more of us should, or someday the tabloids will record our last words about Notre Dame. “F***, we’re dead!”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2017/09/paris-notre-dame-cathedral-funding-problems/


And now the French are planning to rebuilt the damaged parts with 150 millon Euros in five years… Dresden did it, why not Paris? Why not France? Would believe 1.2 billion? Macron the failed re-builder of France so far is going to give it a go, for Paris… It could be painful to watch. They will have to deconstruct the scaffolding and build a new one entirely — plus clean up the smoke affected stones. They did not in Dresden as a reminder of the war.

One could say that this author was prophetic (if there is such a beast, but a keen observer of what is, to know what’s going to happen next — science does this a lot), and he explained the problem thus:

Well, in 2017, the rites of the Catholic religion aren’t yet entirely unknown in France. But I recently discovered that, contrary to Proust, there are limits to state subsidy. The French state does own the Cathedral of Notre Dame, and knows it is a major draw for tourists to Paris. The government kicks in about 2 million euros a year for basic maintenance. But pieces of the cathedral have been falling off it for years. Major repairs haven’t been tried since Marcel Proust was a teenager. The archbishop of Paris is now seeking about 100 million euros to do the work that needs to be done. And this fund-raising campaign is aimed partly at Americans.

I giggled at the solicitation for funds. Maybe the archbishop read one of those misleading Pew surveys that tout how “religious” America is compared with Europe. Maybe Americans are suckers for this kind of pitch: By contributing to the campaign to save Notre Dame, they’ve put an imaginary down payment on that long-dreamed-of trip to Paris.



The destruction of Notre Dame is a cultural tragedy, but things won’t change really.  The roof was leaking and stones were falling. It had to be fixed, so what better way to fix it than have a bonfire and redo it from scratch, bar a few historical bits. I can't see the progressivists demanding the space to be rebuilt in a Pompidou centre style to celebrate the 21th century, so one has to be prepared that modernities don't infiltrate the rebuild. 


As an aside, the National Review is based on the philosophy of "fusionism” developed during the 1950s under the editorship of William F. Buckley, Jr. and with his associate editor Frank Meyer. 

In his book, In Defense of Freedom, Meyer defined freedom in what Isaiah Berlin would label "negative” terms, as the minimisation of the use of coercion by the state in its essential role of preventing one person's freedom from intruding upon another's. One needs small shoes.

This smells a bit of respectful anarchy… but the state should protect freedom and leave virtue to individuals. The state has only three legitimate functions – police, military and operating a legal system, all necessary to control coercion, a coercion which is immoral thus has to be restricted... 

Here with the pseudo-battle between Democrats and republicans, we’re far from this anti-coercion ideal and with about 90 per cent of the American citizenry being gun-ho and dreaming of corrupt, we cannot expect miracles, especially when Uncle Rupe manipualtes the mind of people (I had to mention Mr Murdoch in this essay, any matter what...).

Even god does not do miracles any more, otherwise the restoration team up there on the scaffoldings would have had a fire safety officer with a bucket of water.



Gus Leonisky
Former restorer of a few houses with an atheistic measuring stick.