Notre-Dame won’t redeem Macron The shiny new cathedral resembles a civic town hall

And yet, watching videos and studying photographs of the interior of the restored building, it seems as if hundreds of years of history have been somehow disinfected and washed away. Notre-Dame nouvelle seems so very shiny, so antiseptically bright, especially with its glistering procession of gilded electric chandeliers. Strangely, given the construction of its great nave began almost 850 years ago, it appears all but brand new. Those scrubbed walls and vaults. That gleaming floor. Those vibrant colours: reds and lapis lazuli blues.

While unsettling, this sense of the revamped Notre-Dame being more of a grand civic hall than a place of worship makes a certain sense. Since the French Revolution, the state has pretty much owned Notre-Dame, lock, stock and spire. Its fortunes and its appearance have oscillated with the swings of the political pendulum.

In 1793, Catholic worship in Paris was banned. The philosophical reasoning had been long in the making. “Every sensible man, every honourable man, must hold the Christian religion in horror,” declared Voltaire. “Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest,” railed Denis Diderot. These writers died before the storming of the Bastille and the ministrations of Madame Guillotine in the Place de la Révolution, yet their influence on the course of late 18th-century French politics and culture was profound.

The mob in their Jacobin caps stormed Notre-Dame. Early 13th-century statues of 28 Kings of Judea adorning the west facade were wrenched down and decapitated. The baying anti-clerics mistook them for kings of France. The interior of the cathedral was looted and then used, among other secular purposes, as a wine depot. In November 1793, a pointedly paganistic Festival of Reason was held in the nave.

“Religion,” the Franco-German philosopher Baron d’Holbach had written from his apartment in the Rue Royale, “has ever filled the mind of man with darkness and kept him in ignorance of the real duties of true interests.” This darkness would be dispelled by the bright light of Reason, although at the time there were no gilt electric chandeliers to do the job on behalf of French philosophy and the Revolutionary state.

Soon enough, Notre-Dame was auctioned off to a building merchant. This ignominious sale was cancelled by Napoleon Bonaparte when, seizing power in 1799, he disbanded the Revolutionary government. The dynamic young general had Notre-Dame redecorated for his coronation in 1804. Not that the new French emperor had any great love for the Church. While under construction in the style of a Graeco-Roman temple, Napoleon decreed that the vast new church we know as La Madeleine should be designated the “Temple to the Glory of the Grand Army”. Even with Napoleon defeated on the battleground, exiled, dead and gone, plans were made to complete the Corinthian temple as a railway terminus. It was finally consecrated as a Catholic church in 1842 when Louis Philippe I was on the throne.

It was during Louis Philippe’s reign that Victor Hugo’s Gothic novel The Hunchback of Notre-Dame was published, sparking a popular call for the conservation of medieval architecture and, especially, the cathedral itself. From 1844, the architects Eugène Viollet-le-Duc and Jean-Baptiste Lassus were charged with the complete restoration of Notre-Dame, while France underwent another revolution with the appointment of its first president, Louis Napoleon, in 1848, and crowned emperor four years later,. Funded by the government, the restoration project symbolised a remarkable turn in the cathedral’s fortunes. During the July Revolution of 1830 that had brought Louis Philippe to the throne, the damage caused to the building was so great that Parisian officials had seriously considered demolishing it.

Whether Revolutionaries, kings, emperors or presidents, Notre-Dame has certainly been something of a plaything of French rulers.. The top-down handling of the cathedral is perhaps a reflection of French cultural politics. It is a French way of doing things that has not gone away. Ever since 1958 and the birth of De Gaulle’s Fifth Republic, French presidents, as embodiments of “the spirit of the nation”, have used architecture and its conservation as a conspicuous political tool.

Think of all the “grand projects” of successive Fifth Republic presidents. There was Georges Pompidou’s modernising Centre Pompidou, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s Musée d’Orsay, and François Mitterrand’s Louvre Pyramid. These buildings established their cultural credentials, their largesse and semi-regal power, and aligned them with the very kings, queens and emperors republicanism had overthrown. Their names are attached like stone plaques to these cultural monuments. Now, there’s Emmanuel Macron’s championing of Notre-Dame.

Arguably no one did this better than President de Gaulle, who left matters monumental to France’s first Minister of Cultural Affairs, André Malraux. Novelist, art philosopher and genuine wartime Resistance hero, Malraux is the kind of minister of culture we may never see again: Not only cultured, but brave too. An agnostic, he believed in aesthetic spirituality —that through the artistry of its design and construction, a secular building can convey a sense of the numinous, while in churches visitors can experience this same spiritual feeling without professing a faith.

Significantly, Malraux gave the oration at the 1965 state funeral of the architect Le Corbusier. It was held not in Notre-Dame but in the Cour Carrée of the Louvre, the museum founded by the Revolutionary government in 1793 to display great works of French art including those confiscated from the nation’s churches. An atheist, Le Corbusier designed the pilgrimage chapel of Notre-Dame du Haut at Ronchamp. A building of great originality, its lyrical profundity haunts the hillside on which it stands. Under its shell-like roof, it shrouds an interior lit as if by some latter-day angel.

If this hillside chapel close to the Swiss border has a far greater sense of sacred mystery than the restored Notre-Dame in Paris, perhaps this should be no wonder. It is not a grand state monument. It is not presidential. This, for better or worse, and for all the heroism and craftsmanship involved in its reconstruction, is the fate of Notre-Dame. Of course, the freshly unveiled cathedral will be popular with the crowds and congregations, who will throng here from this week. Certainly, it is wonderful to hear its bells ringing across the Seine again. It just appears to be that little bit too political, too civic and, spiritually, a little cold. But that, in the end, is its purpose. Whether or not the restored Notre-Dame is enough to save or redeem President Macron, or to allow him to rise like a phoenix in years to come, is another, quite secular, matter.