Why Did Nonbelievers Grieve for Notre-Dame?

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/20/opinion/sunday/notre-dame.html

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Since the Cathedral of Notre-Dame caught fire at the start of Holy Week, certain Parisians and their well-wishers have been buffeted by emotions they are unused to. They have found themselves passionately involved with the fate of a church.

Monday evening, as the flames still raged, the Rev. Jean-Marc Fournier, the priest who is chaplain to the Paris fire department, rushed into the cathedral and rescued the crown of thorns said to have been worn by Jesus at the crucifixion. He and his colleagues recovered a tunic that belonged to Louis IX, the sainted crusader who brought the crown back from the Holy Land. Soon Father Fournier was being called a hero by institutions not intimately tied to Catholic belief, such as the radio network Europe 1 and BuzzFeed.

Meanwhile, young people congregated on the banks of the Seine, some weeping. Certain of them sang and prayed; the progressive-leaning German daily Die Tageszeitung referred to them as pilgrims. Others appeared to be tourists and bystanders, seemingly surprised by the intensity of their own feelings.

It brought to mind Philip Larkin’s poem “Church Going,” which evokes people “gravitating” by instinct to a disused church after religious doctrine has died out. “Tears were flowing down every cheek in France,” wrote the politician Philippe de Villiers, without much exaggeration, “even the most manly, and even the most secular.”

One could be forgiven for asking: Why? For centuries French people revered their cathedrals, priests and relics. But they haven’t always: After the French Revolution, Notre-Dame was used as a warehouse. And they haven’t lately: Just 6 percent go to Mass, down from 35 percent half a century ago. Is there a latent Catholicism in France that we failed to see? Or are these only expressions of inchoate religious impulses?

Certainly people have such impulses. The Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, who raged against Muslim immigration to Europe at the turn of the century, believed she did so as a proud atheist. Yet oddly her most passionate complaint was that camping migrants had “profaned” the area in front of the Duomo, the cathedral of her native Florence, and had “profaned” the Baptistery across the street as well.

Certainly, too, the continuing relevance of Catholicism to French life has been underestimated. On Monday, President Emmanuel Macron stood before the still-burning cathedral, with fire trucks shooting jets of water against the night sky behind him. Before he consoled Parisians or French citizens, he said, “Tonight my thoughts, obviously, before anything else, are with Catholics, the Catholics of France and those across the world, especially during this Holy Week.” These Catholics, once thought a spent force in French politics, have flexed their political muscle lately, notably in their unexpectedly large protests in 2012 and 2013 against the legalization of gay marriage.

But there is scant evidence that French people have been returning to Catholicism. The pollster Jérôme Fourquet argues in his book “L’archipel français” (“The French Archipelago”), published last month, that in matters of religion the country is undergoing an “anthropological shift.” As in the United States, the size of the still-religious generation born after World War II long disguised the decline. Today, as that generation ages and dies, a demographic trapdoor opens under the religious population.

There are fewer than half as many French parish priests today as in 1992. Since the 1970s, Mr. Fourquet notes, the percentage of those who wish to be buried when they die, as the church prefers, has halved (from 53 to 27), while the percentage who wish to be cremated has more than doubled. Marie, the given name of 20 percent of newborn girls at the turn of the 20th century and of almost 10 percent when today’s 80-year-olds were born, is today practically extinct among young people.

Perhaps these French ex-Catholics, while sadly cut loose from their cultural and religious moorings, have gained access to a compensating sophistication? Au contraire. The alternative to Christianity, Mr. Fourquet shows in his book, has not been lucidity; it has been gaga conspiracy-theorizing. A third of French people 18 to 24 years old believe that airplane contrails have been seeded with hazardous chemicals and that the United States military can provoke storms, versus only 7 or 8 percent of those over 65 who believe such things. The decline of religion does not seem to have grounded people in something more true.

That is partly why the fire at Notre-Dame shook so many to the core. Objects and traditions bound up with religious belief lend a feeling of sense and stability. For believers they are a reinforcement. For nonbelievers they are a substitute. Notre-Dame is perhaps the greatest such object in Europe. It is a consoling relic, as surely as the crown of thorns that Father Fournier rescued, and this is so for believers and nonbelievers alike.

The cathedrals, for all their sacred origins, call to mind a worldly folk saying: The first half of your life, you work for your name; the second half of your life, your name works for you. Over centuries France constructed its monuments. Now monuments construct France. What would it be without them? The bitter truth is that these old things are what is most impressive and special about France, partly because they have been “consecrated” by age but also because they embody realities that many people regret being cut off from.

The fire at Notre-Dame is harrowing in a way that feels religious because it is religious: It forces us to understand France as those who created it understood it. The people weeping on the banks of the Seine must have sensed this, even if they could not put into words exactly what they were weeping over.

Christopher Caldwell, a contributing editor at the Claremont Review of Books, is the author of “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West” and a contributing opinion writer for The Times.

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