When I caught the first news flash that the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris was on fire I have to confess that my immediate response was to ask, “What about the windows?” My response was understandable as that of an artist, I suppose, but it was interesting to note how many of the reactions to the event recorded in the immediate wake of the announcement were along similar lines. “What about those wonderful organs?” “Can those paintings be saved?” “This is a major treasure of gothic architecture.” Perhaps the most frequent concern mirrored my own, wondering about those marvellous rose windows.
In the light of this I was taken aback to discover this morning, when the majority of news interviews were with people well-placed in the French cultural establishment, to hear quite a different message. The church was a major symbol of French identity, and summarised in itself so much of French history. The response was a political one rather than an artistic one. Very soon my reaction of simple interest evoked by this contrast urned to one of concern.
It seems to me, on reflection, that the British and French political environment at the moment is characterised by some important similarities. The driving force behind the referendum vote to leave the EU had, in effect, little to do with the EU itself. The EU had become a symbol of the sense of exclusion and neglect of a wide stratum of the British population, and the vote was an expression of that. The risk of our present plight, of course, is that we will end up neither leaving the EU nor addressing the real economic concerns and grudges about effective citizenship that drove this movement in the first place. In that event there could be hell to pay.
Is this situation not mirrored in France? The gilet jaune movement looks very similar in some important respects to the “leave” movement in the UK. It is driven by the concerns of rural and small-town populations who have come to feel the same sense of exclusion and neglect. I can’t help asking myself what their response might be if the attention of the French political elite is monopolised by the attempt to save Notre Dame, pouring billions of euros into the project, while that stratum of society that has already signalled that its patience is exhausted is only pushed further into the background. It has been noteworthy that all of the interviews with French respondents I have seen or heard have been conducted in Paris.
Amid the relief that is understandable at the news that the damage to Notre Dame is not as bad as at first feared, perhaps we ought to pause and think of the possible wider significance of these events.