This is nothing short of a miracle. There was disruption on every level in the run up to the Games: roadworks, metro stations closed, massive fences thrown up across every pavement, the filthy pollution in the Seine. As for the audacious opening ceremony: how safe could a 6km-long floating stage and a roving ceremony through the middle of a capital city be? Alain Bauer, a respected police and terrorism expert, sent shivers down everyone’s spines when he declared that “such ceremony on such a scale is criminal madness”.

With their inimitable petulance, Parisians planned to flee the follies. If something was going to go horribly wrong, they didn’t want to witness it first-hand. “I will be like an ostrich with my head in the Normandy sand for three weeks,” my neighbour joked as he left just after Bastille Day.

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Was he right to make his exodus? Perhaps, we thought, as residents of the “grey zone” on either side of the Seine were told they could only access their homes with a QR code. Shops, cafés and restaurants emptied — and closed. My local café remained open but only so its manager could complain all day long about the lack of consumers to the few remaining die-hards like myself… and claim compensation after the Games. It felt just like lockdown.

As if our patience hadn’t been tried enough, we then had to contend with rail “sabotage”, stranding nearly a million passengers, and an attack on fibre-optic cables, creating mobile and fixed-line outages across the country. While Russians were initially suspected, leaks from the investigation showed the culprits might have been homegrown. “The modus operandi is that of far-Left groups,” said the Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin. That same weekend, he announced that dozens of activists from the self-styled eco-warrior group Extinction Rebellion had been detained on suspicion of fomenting violent actions against the sporting competitions.

Astonishingly, none of this actually derailed the opening ceremony, which was a wild and idiosyncratic combination of the universal and the quirky, including Lady Gaga, Céline Dion, drag queens and a “naked blue smurf” who, we learnt later, was meant to portray the Greek God Dionysus. But as British commentators sneered — The Times  called it “a damp squib” — the French were “dazzled” (a happy 86% of them according to a poll). Never had an opening ceremony been done like this, on such a scale. That night, a reset button was pressed in France. There would be a before and an after Paris 2024.

Before Paris 2024, shortly before the Olympic chaos landed, French voters caused chaos themselves in the first round of a snap election. Only to then distance themselves from Marine Le Pen’s hard-Right party in the second. There was some relief as a coalition of the Left and centrists were victorious. But we were left with an overriding feeling of uncertainty. France has become such a divided country, with two very vocal and disruptive political extremes, that it has become almost impossible to imagine politicians rising to the challenge for the sake of national harmony. President Macron declared a political truce during the Games. We would deal with this later.

And then the heavens opened, along with the Games, and with it came a new joie de vivre. As Raphaël Enthoven described it: “Collective happiness, shared jubilation, Paris both deserted and full, a sublime opening ceremony, triumphant athletes, French champions who love their President, the far-Left suddenly silent… Ah, if only the Games could last forever.”

Obviously French victors have helped the French mood. But another thing has cast a compelling spell. The Olympic decors are breathtakingly beautiful. The beach volley beneath the Eiffel Tower built for the 1889 Exposition Universelle, the fencing under the glass dome of the Grand Palais built for the Exposition Universelle of the following year, the triathlon athletes diving from Alexander III bridge into the Seine, the BMX competitions on the 18th-century Place de la Concorde, the cycling races going up and down Montmartre, through the Left Bank boulevards, the equestrian competitions in Versailles. “There is a perfect harmony between those historical settings and the Olympic achievements of the world’s greatest champions,” wrote Pierre Chausse in Le Parisien. “Long ago Parisians stopped believing their city was among the most beautiful in the world. It’s as if the Games have reignited their love for their city.

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International broadcasters concur. NBC Sports published its figures for the first week of the games showing that 4.5 billion minutes had already been streamed, more than the entire Tokyo Games of 2021. Warner Bros Discovery reached in two days more visitors to its platform than for the entire 2021 games. And the Paris Games has sold 9.1 million tickets so far, already breaking the record held by Atlanta 1996.

Paris is, indeed, both deserted and full. The grumpy and worried have left in droves, leaving the sport fans who are simply happy to be here. Tourists and locals alike, those left roam the streets with one thing in common: they can’t stop beaming and marvelling at everything. The Parisians who have remained out of curiosity have unexpectedly fallen back in love with their home. Optimism is a heady feeling. France should always remember what it feels like. It will come handy when we form our next government.

There always was an element of amicable combat in French education, of course; it encourages intense engagement. Teachers have been considered and trained as the foot soldiers of the Republic since the 1880s. With the birth of the Third Republic, education was wrested from the hands of the Catholic Church and made free, mandatory and secular. During their training years, teachers were nicknamed the “Black Hussars”, since they wore a black uniform and looked decidedly serious.

Their task was to spread rational thinking, esprit critique, the values of the Enlightenment — and to root out religious intolerance and superstition from their classes. In every village, across France, they gained status, offering a counter-power to the local priest. Their aim was clear: to emancipate young minds that had been too long controlled by the Church. It wasn’t easy.

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Today, still, teachers are seen as playing a crucial role in French society by educating future citizens, by teaching them to reason and think critically. Many French teachers consider their work a public duty, which they carry out with determination, conviction and sometimes a heightened sense of sacrifice. Samuel Paty was among them, before he was brutally murdered by an 18-year-old Chechen Islamist on 16 October.

His assassination has revealed the many failures of an institution and its people, but it has also prompted a new determination to tackle the roots of religious separatism — which has been gaining influence in France since the 1980s. A recent poll conducted by the IFOP institute for the Jean Jaurès Foundation, on the sixth anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo attacks, shows that “religion has seeped through State Education in a way that is now affecting teachers’ work and lives.” Teachers and their managers tend not to confront it with the resolve and courage of their predecessors. This is indeed one of the most shocking findings of this poll: for fear of ruffling too many feathers, scared for their personal safety, many teachers in France resort to self-censorship.

Fatiha Agag-Boudjahlat, who teaches History and Geography in Toulouse, is an anomaly: an educator willing to publicly declare her political opinions. In her essay “Le Grand Détournement”, which gained her the Laïcité Award in 2019, she argued that a semantic aberration was slowly undermining French democracy. Little by little, she wrote, concepts and words have been turned upside down, or “deviated” from their meaning, by relativists of all hues: tolerance is being used to justify intolerance, antiracism to validate essentialism, and feminism to claim, for instance, that religious garments are a new form of freedom for women.

Agag-Boudjahlat has suffered for her outspokenness. Last week, she was granted protection from the Education Ministry, after receiving aggressive criticism for a Facebook post. In it, she rejoiced that the overwhelming majority of her pupils had embraced a homage to Samuel Paty that her school, like almost every other in France, had organised for 2 November. The nation was still reeling from the History teacher’s decapitation a fortnight earlier, and only a handful of pupils, Fatiha said in her post, had not wanted to take part. Born abroad, they and their parents had not yet assimilated the values of the Republic, but she hoped they soon would. Her message was positive, clear and moderate.

And yet, two teachers’ unions associated with VISA, a violent “antifa” organisation, produced a flyer calling for her to be sanctioned; worse, they labelled Agag-Boudjahlat a racist and far-Right sympathiser. Such libellous behaviour is now a common ploy used by the far-Left in France to intimidate and silence universalist and secular voices such as hers.

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“I am the child of poor Algerian immigrants,” Fatiha told me:

“My seven brothers and I have done very well thanks to France. What is beautiful in France is the political concept of a Nation. And what Islamists and their fellow travellers can’t stand is the success story of people like us. School in France is a place of greater safety, a haven from dogma where you are given the tools to question the world and think for yourself.”

She senses “the condescendence of the far-Left activists, often of privileged background, who would like her, and children of immigrants like her, to always feel victimised, full of resentment towards France”. This in turn plays into the hands of Islamists “who hate the emancipation French education gives its children.”

When she speaks, Fatiha reminds me of the quiet passion and forceful clarity of my History teachers when I was at school in 1980s Paris. The strength of her argument lies in its intelligibility: she does not use the deceitful jargon of ideologues. Everybody from the age of 7 could understand her when she talks of what makes a nation, and how individuals of different origins can embrace a common destiny and common values.

And yet France has changed a great deal since Fatiha and I were at school. The edifying new reality is this: 49% of teachers (and 62% of teachers under the age of 30) censor themselves, in order to avoid tension in their class. This is 13% more than in 2018. A majority of teachers, 59% of them, say they have witnessed aggressive behaviour either in their classroom or at their current school due to religious separatism.

The animosity takes many forms. It crops up during lessons on secularism or gender equality; during cultural school trips, when pupils refuse to enter a place of worship that is different from their own; at the canteen, where they refuse to eat what’s on offer or simply refuse to eat at the same table as other pupils of a different religion. Agag-Boudjahlat is angry at fundamentalist parents who provide complacent medical certificates stating that their daughters are “allergic to chlorine” simply because they don’t want them appearing in swimming suits. “We must save those girls. Knowing how to swim can be life-saving!” she says.

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The poll shows that such occurrences have increased by 10-15%, compared to 2018. “Certain topics and classes sometimes clash with the absolutist prism of Religion on subjects such as body representation, Darwinism, democracy, values of the Republic,” comments Iannis Roder, director of the Education Observatory at the Jean Jaurès Foundation, and himself a secondary school History teacher. Today, many pupils and their parents don’t just question the moral and intellectual authority of teachers — which can be healthy; they simply refuse authority in the same way they refuse to accept facts.

So teachers find themselves having to negotiateand dither in passing on knowledge. The weekly magazine Marianne reported last week the experience of two History teachers who did not want to be named. One is 34 and has been a teacher for seven years in the Seine-Saint-Denis département, north of Paris. She confided of “fear, or rather unease is a daily feeling.” “Caution” is what defines everything she does or says, especially when she knows she will have to talk about current affairs. “We are constantly walking on eggshells. We also have to anticipate the pupils’ reaction and that of their even more hardliner parents.”

Another History teacher, aged 41, told the magazine:

“my pupils are little informed, their arguments are usually weak, but their virulence is constant. Recently, we were talking about the Armenian genocide. Two pupils of Turkish origin asked me to withdraw what I had said and to apologise. They had the support of most of the class, and said I offended their culture. I simply stated that I was talking about a historical fact, nothing more.”

If many French teachers are afraid to teach today, it is because they feel unsupported by their managers. The chain of command has too often been replaced by a chain of renunciation. Those teachers who still see themselves as foot soldiers of the Republic are left to defend themselves, becoming easy prey to fundamentalist parents and social networks’ relativist culture. After Samuel Paty’s class on Freedom of Speech, a pupil who wasn’t there spread lies, her Salafist parents organised a hate campaign on social networks, a radicalised imam got involved, and ten days later an islamist from Normandy travelled to his school outside Paris with a set of knives.

And yet, many History teachers like Agag-Boudjahlat soldier on. “One of the things I try and teach my pupils,” she says, “is that there are facts and that there are opinions. Of those, there are many different acceptable and respectable opinions. I tell them that nobody is defined by their opinions alone, that an opinion is not an identity, and even more importantly that opinions can evolve.”

Despite the culture of fear, malaise and self-censorship, its most extreme realisation — the traumatic assassination of Samuel Paty — has encouraged some teachers to report parents and pupils who are undermining their work, or threatening them. Cases of religious radicalisation are increasingly being flagged up to the authorities. The fight is going to be long and difficult though; Agag-Boudjahlat worries that too many of her colleagues are either indifferent, ignorant or even complacent. Foot soldiers they are not. It is now for the Republique and its citizens to support and protect teachers who simply wish to do their jobs — to teach facts, and allow a range of opinion. In other words, to be true to Voltaire’s teachings of tolerance.

Luckily, The Wedding at Cana by Veronese could be rolled around a cylinder. So could Jacques-Louis David’s The Coronation of Napoleon. But Delacroix’s Crusaders, Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa and all the Rubenses were too fragile and had to be hauled away on a special open truck made to transport the set designs and murals of France’s state theatre company, the Comédie Française. The Raft of the Medusa, weighing nearly one and a half tons, stood in the open-air truck covered only by a giant blanket.

Masterpieces were categorised in order of importance: a yellow circle for very valuable ones, a green circle for major artworks and a red circle for world treasures. The white case containing the Mona Lisa was marked with three red circles. In a letter to the curator who was in charge of travelling with the painting also known in France as La Joconde — and who did not yet know the full burden of his responsibility — Jaujard broke the news by telling him: “Old friend, your convoy will be made of eight trucks. I have to tell you that the Chenu truck which will be departing from 5 rue de la Terrasse, with the plate number 2162RM2, contains a case with the letters MN written in black. It is the Mona Lisa.” Leonardo da Vinci’s finest work was travelling in an ambulance specially fitted with elastic-rubber-sprung suspension.

A convoy of 203 vehicles transporting 1,862 wooden cases set out one morning in late August to eleven castles in France — where they would wait, anonymous and secure, for what would come. Grand châteaux on the Loire, such as Chambord and Cheverny, were used, but Jaujard also requisitioned more inconspicuous and privately-owned estates conveniently ‘lost’ in the French countryside, far from any strategic locations. Every convoy had a curator and staff attached to it. Their mission: to look after the art collections in their new homes for as long as was necessary. Whole families were displaced and relocated. For those dedicated museum employees, it was an adventure that would last more than five years.

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Did they ever ask themselves what the world treasures they were guarding with their lives were worth? The most expensive painting ever sold at auction, Salvator Mundi, attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, was bought for $450 million in 2017. What would the most famous painting in the world, the Mona Lisa, be worth if France sold it? A rhetorical question? Not for French tech entrepreneur Stéphane Distinguin who estimates its value at €50 billion (£44.7 billion) and thinks the French State should sell it to fund post-Covid recovery. His thinking is as simplistic as his maths:

“As an entrepreneur and a taxpayer, I know that all the billions spent in the covid crisis are real and will necessarily cost us. An obvious idea is to sell off a valuable asset at the highest price possible, but one that is the least critical as possible to our future.”

Mr Distinguin is wrong on two counts. Even if sold for €50 billion, the Mona Lisa would offer only a brief financial respite from France’s huge post-Covid public debt. It would certainly not cover all the losses. Besides, to say that the Mona Lisa serves little purpose in our future is to be blind to the ageless, universal and immaterial quality of art.

This doesn’t mean of course that artists or cultural institutions can’t support war or pandemic efforts. After Albert Uderzo, co-creator of Asterix, died in March, his widow announced she would auction five original drawings estimated at €100,000 (£90,000) each to support health caregivers and French hospitals. The sale will be held in Paris on 26 May.

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Likewise, the Mobilier National, the office responsible for furnishing official buildings in France, which owns 130,000 precious rugs, ceramics, desks, chairs, chandeliers, said it would hold an auction on 20 and 21 September. For sale will be 100 art objects dating back to the 19th century — and of little heritage and historical value. All the proceeds will contribute to the national effort to support hospitals.

Those initiatives should be encouraged. However, to suggest that France should do away with its most precious and totemic possessions, simply because they are worth billions and could stopper a financial hole, is a step too far.

The Mona Lisa tells stories that keep people warm in moments of crisis or during national catastrophes. Its sheer existence — the fact it has survived hundreds of years of wars and tumult — helps us live through tough or strange times. It is not just a work of great beauty and a masterpiece from history’s most celebrated artist, it is also an inspiration. In fact, in the national imagination, certain inanimate objects such as the Mona Lisa take a life of their own. They are family.

The French take pride in knowing that it was a French King, François I — an artistic visionary and an intrepid young sovereign — who saw genius in Leonardo da Vinci. At the time, the Pope had abandoned the artist, and everybody in Florence was looking down on Da Vinci. France, a great patron of the arts, gave the old Leonardo a grandiose shelter to freely create in the 1510s, until his death in 1519.

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When I started writing my book Left Bank: Art, Passion and the Rebirth of Paris 1940-1950, I knew I had to start with the Mona Lisa, and how she escaped from the hands of the Nazis thanks to the brave and visionary Louvre director.

The Louvre finally reopened to the public on 10 July 1945. Its first post-war exhibition was called, simply, ‘Great Masterpieces’. Its collections repatriated from their hiding places, the French public realised that not one piece had been damaged, thanks to their saviour-in-chief, Jacques Jaujard, and the thousand anonymous keepers defended them. This was an emotional reunion.

So, too, had been the return of a well-wrapped-up acquaintance three weeks earlier. The photographer Pierre Jahan had been allowed to take pictures of a moment that would immediately travel the world and make headlines: the opening of a white poplar case marked with three red dots. Waterproof layers of protection were carefully removed, one by one, until the last one, a thin sheet of fire-retardant fabric woven from asbestos fibres, appeared. It was then torn open, revealing the face of the Mona Lisa. She had come home, finally.

When the Louvre, the most visited museum in the world, reopens after Covid-19 is tamed at last — hopefully not in six years time as during the Second World War — many French visitors will no doubt feel emotional too. Those emotions are part of a nation’s history. They are priceless.

After almost a year racing against time to stabilise and consolidate the 850-year-old medieval structure, chief architect Philippe Villeneuve and his army of workers were only a few days from a crucial and perilous operation when they had to lay down their tools. The cutting of the 500 tonne scaffolding, which melted during the fire of 15 April 2019, would have to wait — probably for a few months.

For those in charge of the “building site of the century,” as Notre-Dame’s site has been branded by the French media, the weeks and months of inactivity ahead are going to be fraught with anguish. It has always been feared that the giant, metallic lacework of scaffolding could collapse onto the vaults and crash down into the nave. The weather forecast will be scrupulously analysed as storms and high winds could prove particularly damaging.

Still, since dawn broke in pink hues over the Seine on 16 April 2019, the day after the terrible fire, timid hope has prevailed in the heart of Paris as to Notre-Dame’s providential resilience, our ability to eventually mend her injuries and restore her to full glory. So many endearing, almost miraculous, details have contributed to restore our spirit since that day.

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It started at 2am, when General Gallet, head of the Paris fire brigade, made another inspection of the cathedral. There were still six contained fires here and there, and it would take a couple of days to extinguish them all. “Inside the nave, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a white patch among the charred debris lying on what remains of the altar,” he confided to me. It was in fact a large, beige, leather-bound book, open, its pages covered with thick dust. “As I got closer, intrigued, I could make out a word through the dust: espérance [hope].” The lectionary, a collection of scripture readings, had survived the destruction. It was open to the hope of resurrection, a few days ahead of Easter.

A few hours later, Parisians and the world started hearing how the stained glass windows, dating back to the thirteenth century, had survived the fire; how the bees of Notre-Dame, living on the roof of the sacristy, had been spotted going in and out of their hives; and how the Grand Organ had suffered only minor damage.

What about the famous fourteenth-century Vierge à l’enfant (Virgin with infant), also known as ‘Notre-Dame de Paris’? Was she still standing by the south-west pillar of the transept, in what was now a zone interdite (no-go area)?

Would the Virgin who had personified Notre-Dame de Paris be found as lovely as she had been left — so elegant, with her melancholy, mysterious smile and her child playing with the fold of her coat? Since 1818, the year she was gifted to Notre-Dame, the tilt of her lip has made her stand out among the thirty-seven Virgin Marys represented in the cathedral. “Pretty and yet so bizarre, with her joyous smile on such melancholic lips!” wrote the French decadent writer Joris-Karl Huysmans in 1898.

“Seen from one side, she smiles at Jesus, almost mockingly [. . .] Seen from another, this smile vanishes. The lips, pursed, may be heralding tears. Perhaps, by achieving opposite feelings in Our Lady, peace and fear, the sculptor meant to express the joy of nativity and the distant pain of the suffering of the cross.”

The chief architect was stunned: the Virgin with Infant, but also every piece of art — every painting, every statue — was intact, slightly dusty but not even blackened with soot. The fall of the spire at the crossing of the transept had created a flue effect, like a chimney, and sucked out most of the smoke. Remarkably, the rest of the vaults had held, as planned by their medieval creators. Vaults were designed very precisely in order to protect a cathedral from fire. Arches, ribs, empty space had admirably played their part.

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Of course, Notre-Dame’s regeneration goes far beyond architectural considerations. It presents a formidable opportunity for France to ask itself challenging questions. Big traumas always lead to fundamental questioning and offer renewed opportunities.

And the chance to confront, at last, and resolve problems which have blighted the reputation of Notre-Dame for decades: endless queues of tourists on the parvis blocking Parisians’ passage; inept and time-consuming security checks at the gates; the unattractiveness of cheap souvenir shops inside the cathedral — the list of such unpleasant practicalities is long. What is needed is a complete overhaul, and the possibilities are plentiful.

Why not, for instance, utilise the vacant carpark underneath the parvis to organise an access point to the cathedral for tourists, with shops and facilities? Some of this space could be used for the archaeological crypt, which needs a complete review. Why not create a museum in the partly unoccupied Hôtel-Dieu, the former hospital at the heart of Paris standing right across the parvis — as in Milan, where the museum of the Duomo, situated a few steps away from the cathedral, offers an opportunity to understand and learn about its history? So many of Notre-Dame’s works of art from across the centuries have been scattered around France in different museums for lack of a dedicated space in Paris, about which many historians have been campaigning for decades.

As for the spire, the international competition for a new flèche, launched the day after the fire by the French prime minister, now seems a distant memory, buried in the drawer of ‘good intentions but bad ideas’. The latest thinking is to ask the French people to vote on Notre-Dame’s future spire which, by all accounts, should be rebuilt identically.

There is one moment in particular that many Parisians are looking forward to; it is one that architect Philippe Villeneuve often dreams about. When the spire collapsed on 15 April, the copper rooster perched on its tip fell 96 metres to the ground. Instead of disintegrating like the rest of the spire, made of wood and lead, it just whirled in the air like an incandescent ball and remained in one piece. At dawn, Villeneuve found the battered rooster lying in the gutter of rue du Cloître Notre-Dame. Inside, the relics of Paris’s patron saint Genevieve were intact. He understood then that his work of nursing Notre-Dame back to her former glory would only feel complete when he placed the rooster back on the new spire. Paris awaits.

Agnès Poirier’s book, Notre-Dame: The Soul of France, was published on 2nd April by Oneworld.