Opinion | A Cathedral for a Fragile Age

Kilometer Zero: Notre-Dame de Paris, the place from which distance in France is measured, the reference of a people, the starting point and endpoint, the “epicenter,” as President Emmanuel Macron put it. That is why so many people, religious or not, were in tears as the great cathedral burned. A part of themselves, their bearings, was aflame.

Ransacked during the revolution in an anticlerical frenzy, restored and rebuilt during the 19th century after tempers cooled, site of imperial coronation, national liberation and presidential funerals, Notre-Dame became the nation’s soul, the place where France could reconcile its turbulent history, the monarchical and the republican, the religious and the secular.

The centuries proved ecumenical. Time made the cathedral everyone’s, in France and beyond France. “A mine of memories,” said Claire Illouz, an artist born and raised in Paris. “For us all.”

What is Paris after all? Beauty. The horror of it lay in watching beauty burn, the delicate spire toppling into an inferno of 800-year-old beams. Here was the best of humankind, as powerful an expression as exists of the sacred, going up in black smoke.