Notre Dame: Why Paris’s Gothic masterpiece will always be the people’s cathedral

Cathedrals like Notre Dame have always welcomed people, even when their own communities have rejected them, when they are outcasts in spirit as well as body – in need of sanctuary. That, after all, is what Victor Hugo’s novel, Notre-Dame de Paris, is all about. They are places of both belonging and anonymity, big enough to hold a world of difference.

The great Gothic cathedrals of northern France – “those grand and beautiful people’s churches of the 13th century”, as someone once called them – were built by the people for the people, the products of great communities rather than great kings.

The community of Paris in the middle ages, which contributed to the construction of Notre Dame, was a truly international one, with scholars, craftsmen and merchants from Italy, England, Scotland, Flanders and Germany all living, working and worshipping together. Notre Dame was the product of that brilliant mix.

Those cathedrals of the 13th century were more than monuments to God though. More, even, than the romantic byproduct of a coming together of working people to build, as the early socialist writers saw them. They represented an expansion of an otherwise awful faith; one of judgement and punishment; of patriarchal hierarchy and rule; but one that also embraces humanity in all its forms and promotes forgiveness, equality, tenderness and love. So many of those early Gothic cathedrals were dedicated to the very human figure of the Virgin Mary.

I am no Christian, but Notre Dame means something to me. It’s not just the beauty of the sculptures on its west front or the glass of its justly famous rose windows; its soaring heaven-like spaces lit by shafts of azure, gules and vert are places of movement, mass movement, people thronging, teeming, singing, marvelling on an Easter morning or just an everyday torrent of camera-happy tourists gazing in wonder.

From west to east it was constructed on a single level, no hierarchy of nave and presbytery. No steps, no platforms, no stone or wooden veil between the people and their mystery. Its was a truly egalitarian vastness, built to accommodate people, to hold them and embrace them for an hour or so, to help them lift their minds to something literally more than the mundane. Notre Dame was built for dreamers, for us all to be dreamers.

Far-right propagandists might try to seize this near catastrophic tragedy to whip up hate, as some already have, while pundits on the left are already decrying the waste of money and resources being pledged to reconstruct what has been lost. But both are blind to what Notre Dame really means.

Forget the making of saints, kings and emperors. Forget for a moment the unquantifiable cost of a building versus a human life, the rallying cries to arms and all those symbols of nationhood that make people mad, and consider just how levelling these great cathedrals were and are: anyone, from pauper to king, was, is and will be welcome, to sit in quiet contemplation, to listen to choirs and mighty organs, to join their voices in praise of something beyond them, to observe the rich carvings and richer painted glass full of the story of humanity, and to ponder how short the human span is and how long human achievements can last.

Notre Dame will survive, it seems. It might not be the same – its timbers and lead and spire will be new; some, perhaps much, of its glass will have to be replaced – but it will outlive these generations and those to come, at least until European civilisation falls, and maybe as a ghost beyond that.

If I felt tearful watching the images of the great church in flames, it was because I feared such a loss, that everything we have taken for granted, the peace we have enjoyed, the prosperity that comes with it and the love that Our Lady of Paris represents, will one day be burning on the horizon. And what brings us together will have vanished.