While French parliamentarians play at sorcerer’s apprentice, with Far Left and Far Right united to force the resignation of Michel Barnier’s government, 1,300 artisans gathered in the nave of Notre-Dame cathedral around President Macron and the Archbishop of Paris Laurent Ulrich for one last inspection visit of le chantier du siècle, the construction site of the century.

An army of craftspeople were being thanked for their work and service to the nation, and to the world. In some cases, they left everything behind to take part in ‘something higher than themselves’, as Damian Pinardi, a Scottish-Argentinian carpenter who came to help his French counterparts, explained. They first consolidated the cathedral so she would not collapse, an operation that took almost two years, and then they nursed her back to life, tending to her every scar, healing her wounds, reconstructing wherever necessary or simply restoring her to her former Gothic and Neo-Gothic splendour. With the hundreds of firemen who saved her on the night of the fire on 15 April 2019, those 1,300 artisans, supervised by five-star general Jean-Louis Georgelin and galvanised by Macron, are the anonymous heroes of French history, just like Notre-Dame’s anonymous architects and builders were in the 12th and 13th centuries.

However, even before Macron stepped inside the cathedral, and with him the first cameras to enter the restored cathedral, the leftist daily newspaper Libération couldn’t help being sarcastic. Caricaturing Macron as a saint in a stained-glass window on its cover, Libération mocked the president for wanting to address the artisans from inside the cathedral live on world televisions, criticising his ‘reappropriation’ of the artisans’ work. What a strange way to look at it when, without the French president’s determination to see the restoration of Notre-Dame achieved in five years, after a devasting fire, Notre-Dame would not have risen from the ashes at all. It had taken the young energetic architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc 25 years to restore the sculptures mutilated during the French Revolution and redesign and rebuild the spire between the early 1840s and late 1860s. If we had left it to France’s parliamentarians, Notre-Dame would have crumbled before they had even reached any sort of agreement on its fate.

Luckily for France, there are occasionally strong and talented personalities who save the day. For alongside the best artisans, you need an inspiring figurehead. For instance, Victor Hugo. Without him Notre-Dame would not have survived the 19th century. Hugo not only saved the cathedral by tirelessly raising awareness about the terrible state of historical monuments in France, but he also shaped our view of this Gothic masterpiece through his novel, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, one of the first worldwide multimedia phenomena. Since its publication in 1831, his novel has been produced ten times on stage for theatre and ballet, a dozen times as a musical and another ten times on the big screen since the beginning of cinema (my favourite versions being with Charles Laughton and Maureen O’Hara as Quasimodo and Esmeralda in 1939, and Anthony Quinn and Gina Lollobrigida in 1956). The restoration and reopening of Notre-Dame this weekend is assured to inspire another generation of artists who will continue Hugo’s legacy through the next century.

Interestingly, and although the cathedral was the main heroine of his novel, Hugo only described the place in broad brush strokes, like a theatre set. He seemed in fact more interested in her mass, in her very idea, in her symbolism than in her details. ‘On the face of this old queen of our cathedrals, beside each wrinkle you will find a scar,’ Hugo wrote. For him, Notre-Dame was in fact a living creature, half queen, half chimera. The most fascinating chapters in his novel are the ones he added in the second and definitive edition of 1832. In Book Five, the second chapter ‘This Will Kill That’, is a direct address to the reader in which Hugo explains how the printed word killed architecture. His thesis: from the beginning of history until the 15th century, architecture had been the book of mankind, from standing stones (representing letters of the alphabet), dolmens (syllables), groups of dolmens such as those at Carnac and Stonehenge (sentences), to whole buildings like the Egyptian pyramids, history’s first ‘books’. For Hugo, the invention of printing marked the death of architecture, which had culminated in Gothic cathedrals, the last and greatest books of stones.

This is an intriguing and fascinating thesis, one perhaps that explains our affection for Notre Dame, humanity’s last and greatest of book of stones which is, as the great French medievalist Georges Duby wrote in The Age of the Cathedrals: Art and Society 980-1420, ‘not so much the works of individuals as of societies; the fruit of whole peoples in labour rather than the inspiration of men of genius; the deposit left by a nation; the accumulation of centuries’.

The group portrait of the 1,300 artisans in the nave of Notre-Dame taken at 16 metres high from the grand organ, could not have been more to the point. Great things are achieved by joining forces for a higher cause. A thought French parliamentarians should perhaps meditate.