The New Dark Age

1 January 2025 — The Postil Magazine

Notre-Dame de Paris in the age of Mar-a-Lago

Philippe-Joseph Salazar

Satan is, by tradition, the Persuader of worldly things, and the fallen Angel “whose light surpassed all others” (Thomas Aquinas). He certainly would have rejoiced at the “reopening” of Notre-Dame de Paris: propaganda and light displays were au rendez-vous. Setting aside the Sunday high mass that would deserve a rhetorical treatment on its own, the marketing-driven inauguration of Paris’s archepiscopal church offers an occasion to ponder and wonder about historical manipulations.

To begin with the expression, “Notre-Dame” is a lazy American news media moniker which wishes to make it the absolute “Notre-Dame,” which it is not and never was. This cathedral never held any prominence in French culture as far as cathedrals are concerned. Notre-Dame de Reims (Rheims, if you are purist, or an aviation enthusiast) does. Notre-Dame de Chartres, does. But Notre-Dame de Paris ? Hardly.

Indeed when, in 1913, Henry Adams let the American Institute of Architects “give publicity before the world” of his masterpiece Grand Tour of French mediaeval civilization, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, if the “carefully studied” refinement of Notre-Dame de Coutances—“one shall seek far before finding its equal”—stunned him, the crowning of French mediaeval religious art was undoubtedly Notre-Dame de Chartres. He commented that the Parisian master builder “was certainly consumed by jealousy at the triumph never attained on anything like the same scale” at Chartres. Adams’s instant best-seller confirmed a commonplace at the time: Notre-Dame de Chartres was “the” cathedral. However, barely a year later, another cathedral overtook Chartres in “publicity before the world,” Notre-Dame de Reims. In 1914, the Germans bombarded it, and nearly burnt it to the ground. The international outcry caused by this willful shelling of the sainted building made headlines around the world, especially in the United States. Massive funds were collected to repair the outrage. Germany ceased to be considered a civilized country. One image became an instant icon : the severed head of an angel was found smiling through the rubble, and soon the print media labelled it the “Smiling Angel of Rheims”: a severed head bearing a smile intimated love among the ruins of hate, the triumph of humanity over barbarism. Reims joined Chartres in the public imagination of “the” cathedral. Paris did not feature. Never did, until the recent restoration, the culmination of a slow and relentless process of making Paris’s cathedral into a key propaganda element of an otherwise vulgarly secular, anti-clerical even, republic.

It was Victor Hugo who gave Notre-Dame de Paris a place in popular literature, with his eponymous novel (1831), then fed by numerous movies (down to a recent Disney production) that made it, generation after generation a household name in the United States and England, in particular. Still, it was the mute hunchback, the gitane girl Esmeralda, and not “Notre-Dame” itself that captured filmic imagination. That rather run-of-the-mill cathedral, by standards of Gothic architecture, was never celebrated for its rose windows (nice enough, but second-rate compared to Chartres’ astounding marvels), nor for its architectural perfection (Reims reigns above all Gothic cathedrals in Europe), while until the destructions of the French Revolution and a Republican ban on relics, the most precious ones, of Christ Himself, were not preserved there. As for the much talked about flèche, the spire, it is not an original: what tourists could see, if they cared, prior to the arson was a mid-19th century fake, and what it is today is a reproduction of that fake. The mediaeval spire was of modest height and was dismantled in the 18th century. All that is well known but worth repeating.

Now, mentioning the date of Hugo’s novel, 1831, consider Delacroix’s contemporary painting, world famous today, La Liberté guidant le peuple. It is about the Three Glorious Days of the 1830 Revolution, that failed to re-establish the Republic and led to later massacres (such as that of rue Transnonain). Delacroix depicts le peuple in revolt, on a barricade, the same people who have been ransacking the cathedral palace. Notre-Dame is seen in the top right corner. There is no spire. But the towering figure of Marianne, the nickname for the Republic, and later reprised, in a less heroic nudity, for the Statue of Liberty, reduces the diminutive, smoky, belfries of Notre-Dame to a footnote. Liberty triumphs over religion. But post-arson State propaganda made everyone believe the fire had destroyed a jewel of Gothic art. Not quite: what fell was a later 19th-century contraption, a sort of Disneyland of neo-Gothic revivalism. Of course the roof was damaged, but inside carpentry, however intricate, is by definition hidden, but a spire is in full view.

As for the fire, what really happened is still shrouded in bureaucratic and political arcana, then I suggest it must have been set by Satan. Who else? If you are a devout catholic only the Prince of the World and the great advocate for human foibles could have done it: whether it held the hand of a Muslim zealot, a disgruntled unionised worker or simply a negligent electrician is irrelevant. A hidden hand was at work. Conspirationists may have now a field day pointing out that the new altar is a Catholic version of the black stone Kaaba of Islam, or an evil designer take on a Henry Moore sculpture. It is certainly out of sync with the sand blasted arches and ogives, not restored but defaced; but it makes a statement and that is what matters today in terms of “messaging.” Yet, all the perfumed oils rubbed onto it by the archbishop on the Sunday following the “wow” event, at consecration, will not sweeten this aesthetic crime (to paraphrase Lady Macbeth). The medium, the altar, is the message: Notre-Dame de Paris is modern, hyper-modern, transmodern.

Another historical element waxed over by State propaganda is revealing of the commercial nature of the current regime in France, and of the gullibility, and perversity, of the media always ready to relay lies stamped by verisimilitude (like movies that claim following “history” but re-arrange facts). That cathedral played no role in French history until Bonaparte decided to be crowned there in 1804—even then it was quickly refurbished with theatrical screens, to hide its derelict walls behind panels painted in the latest fashion of the nouveau riche regime. Afterwards, the cathedral fell into further disrepair. Now, to understand better why Bonaparte’s coronation was a fake of magistral proportions, and a stupendous success too in terms of propaganda, consider that royal coronations never took place in that cathedral, and in that diocese.

The first reason is that the archdiocese overseeing Paris for more than a millennium was Sens, whose church was the first European cathedral in the Gothic style, later raised to dazzling splendour by archbishop and patron Tristan Salazar. Sens was the seat of one of the six Lords Spiritual of the Realm, status, rank and privileges the lesser titular of Notre-Dame de Paris never aspired to, and never tried to, although Louis XIV raised Paris to an archbishopric and a dukedom (of Saint-Cloud, note)—he and the Court attended mass at the Royal Chapel of Versailles. Notre-Dame did not feature in royal, devotional pageantry.

The second reason to explain the 1804 coronation fake, moving now from bureaucracy to mystery, runs deeper. Kings were, mostly, anointed at Reims cathedral. Since the 9th century, the Frankish and then French, always male, monarchs, alone in Western Christianity were crowned as sacrés (“sacred”) owing to their anointment with the Holy Ampulla brought down to earth by the Holy Ghost for the baptism of Clovis on 25 December 496. Such was the French belief, akin to the American belief in the “self-evident truths” of the 1776 Declaration of Independence. Ideology is self-evident. Notably the word “coronation” in English reflects a reality different from the French royal anointment. English monarchs may be “anointed,” but this imitation of the French ritual carries no “sacredness.” And the formula “deo gratia” is merely a turn of phrase. Nor were the Holy Roman Emperors deemed “sacred.” French kings were considered as partaking of a sacred domain, unknown in other European monarchies. They were, for that reason, “thaumaturgic,” able to perform miracles. However, Notre-Dame de Paris never was the setting for such dynastic mysticism.

So, what of David’s painting? The title of the canvas is Le sacre de Napoléon, utter fake news, clever propagandist appropriation: Bonaparte could not be “anointed” (sacré), as were kings, hence to call it a sacre was, and still is, a fallacy. It was clever marketing, a labelling made to impress remaining monarchs. It escaped no one when the painting was exhibited in 1808, that it did not depict Bonaparte being crowned, but him crowning his first wife. Bizarre, indeed. All that in Notre-Dame de Paris. But the fake news title still holds. Said differently, it was pictural sophistry on a grand scale.

Indeed, the pompous, Hollywoodian, peinture d’histoire as live news, engineered by David and its team, was possibly the first large scale propaganda painting. It was the early equivalent of tableaux of the Supreme Soviet lined up on the grandstand of the Red Square. Totalitarian, or bombastic regimes, or democratic regimes that seek to efface their failures by projecting images of gravity and control, tend to produce the same sort of sophistical aesthetics. In fact, if the Soviets were good at brushing out personages who fell in disfavour, or under a hail of bullets, David smartly did the reverse by plugging in or travestying who was there, who was not there, and who did what, or did not. It took him four years to achieve what can be done today at a click. But, in hanging a fake décor over the Gothic walls, he invented the blue or green screen (green being the Napoleonic image de marque) before even cinema thought about it. David was the first cinematographer—even Bonaparte exclaimed: “Look at it, people are alive, they talk, they move !”—and he treated Notre-Dame de Paris like the MGM backlot. He beat Ridley Scott to it.

To sum, Notre-Dame de Paris’s latest incarnation belongs to a recent history of manipulations, what Gore Vidal famously called “screening History,” except that, with David, the screening was already done at the time of the event. The latest turn in this transformation of an unexceptional Gothic cathedral into “Notre-Dame” (no modifier, but absolutely “Notre-Dame”) is in keeping with its two-hundred years old marketing as prime property of the powers of the day.

Devoid of the sacrality of Reims and the mysticism of Chartres, it serves today to put on display, for an international audience utterly unaware of what we have described, and that could not care less as long as it is “festive and has a wow factor.” It serves also to shore up the tainted dignity of its clergy whose two previous archbishops were mired in scandals. That Notre-Dame de Paris is now without a cardinal is telling enough. Charitably, Pope Francis stayed away.

This latest event shows also that, step-by-step, the cathedral has been appropriated by the secular power of the day as one of its marketing locales. Here, it helped a flailing government get some traction in terms of international visibility. Perhaps DJ Trump will decide to erect a replica at Mar-a-Lago, with more gilding and more stained glass windows than all cathedrals, or Vegas hotels, put together.

Someone is laughing, hanging from a gargoyle: not Satan, prince of LED illuminations and propagandist of verbosity, but the famous hunchback, snarling at the motley crowd of schismatics (William of Wales), heretics (Zelensky), philanderers, polygamists, unbelievers, idiots, fashion victims, and tourists. “Ananke,” fatality, Victor Hugo saw etched on a wall of the cathedral, prompting him to write his novel. Indeed, the heroic figure of Marianne marching forth, and away from the belfries (sans flèche) in Delacroix’s painting may be a fatal warning of things to come. She has read a new graffiti and it says: “Mane, thecel, phares.”

French philosopher and essayist Philippe-Joseph Salazar writes on rhetoric as philosophy of power. Laureate of the Prix Bristol des Lumières in 2015 for his book on jihad (translated as, Words are Weapons. Inside ISIS’s Rhetoric of Terror, Yale UP). In 2022, the international community of rhetoricians honoured him with a Festschrift, The Incomprehensible: The Critical Rhetoric of Philippe-Joseph Salazar. He holds a Distinguished Professorship in Rhetoric and Humane Letters in the Law Faculty of the University of Cape Town, South Africa. His latest book, Contre la Rhétorique, has just been published.