Between last night and today, there has been an outpouring of support for the fire that occurred at Notre Dame. The wealthiest people on earth have pledged half a billion Euros towards its restoration, social media feeds everywhere are chock full of vacation photos in front of the cathedral, and the news media has covered it to an intense degree.
We are, in a sense, reacting to this moment with an emotional outpouring, like we have to so many things in these past few years. And like we should have done in all those past moments, careful consideration is important. The history and contexts of border detentions, refugee crises, popular ethno-nationalism, and wealth inequity all have long, long histories in which a great many people tried a multitude of things.
So when people talk about mourning the loss of history that is the burning of Notre Dame, the question for me, as a pedantic history major, is: Does this grief actually recognize the cathedral’s entire history — the institution that built it, the purposes of its construction, the method and means of it, the power it represented at the time, and the global and local contexts? Or is it just sadness about the fact that it has history? Because there are crucial distinctions between the two.
Why is This Important?
People recognize that Notre Dame is important, that it is a piece of history. This is understanding that the place has cultural capital, that there is something special about this place. When you express a feeling for a cultural landmark, this is in recognition that this symbol has power and you are a person who both respects and is aware of it.
But why is it powerful? And why is it important to us to show that we acknowledge this power?
Finding out the contexts and forces that shaped and created Notre Dame, at least to me, is the work of actual knowing. There are people who care about individual buildings and battlefields but history, at least from what I was taught, is less about these individual elements than it is about the bigger systems — of economy, social class, oppression, mass cultural biases, and so on.
The cathedral, in and of itself, is one particular arrangement of stone and wood. But history asks: what are the human narratives behind this? How did people live at this time? What was the arrangement of wealth? Why was it built? Who commanded whom? And why?
This, and all the above, are the reasons why Notre Dame has a place in our imaginary and cultural milieu. It isn’t important because this particular configuration of matter is important; it’s important because people gave it meaning.
So who were the people who first gave it meaning?
Context and The High Middle Ages
As the New York Times’ paraphrase of the Wikipedia article on Notre Dame has noted, the construction of Notre Dame began in 1163 and it was nominally completed in 1345. It was intended to be, and still arguably remains, a symbol of the power of the Catholic Church and of French wealth.
Europe and the Catholic Church at this time were relatively weak in comparison to the Islamic and Chinese world. China was ruled by the latter half of the Song Dynasty (soon to be conquered by the Mongols) and the Seljuk Empire was undergoing one of many golden ages (also soon to be conquered by the Mongols). So the construction of such a large, architecturally complex building was a considerable feat. It required, at the time, a significant investment, one that could only be provided by the King and the Church. So where does a King and the Church get their money?
In the High Middle Ages, the vast majority of folks were peasants. You were either a slave, a serf/villein, a free worker, or, if you were lucky, a soldier with rank. Serfdom was nominally better than slavery because there was the pretense of being released from debt but the conditions and liberties were similar. You could be bought or sold, you served your lord and were bound to them, and you were bound by these terms for most of your very short life.
As a serf, you would have had every little bit of your production squeezed out of you. This, in large part, is what helped to fund every Crusade, palace, and cathedral built in Europe. These ‘taxes’ and ‘interest payments’ obtained by lords, paid forward to royalty, and tithed to the Church created the wealth from which each brick was paid. The slaves and workers who laid the stone, the transportation of raw and finished materials, the chiseling and mining of rock and earth, the architects and painters who planned and painted the cathedral, and all other sundry necessities came from this source. After all, it’s not as if the King or the Church were opening small businesses or funding research and development or conducting trade on a global level — there were few sources from which you derived your wealth in the High Middle Ages and that was either by means of mass indentured servitude or war.
Besides benefiting from feudalism, European royalty along with the Catholic Church also initiated nine separate greater Crusades into the wider world following the First in the 11th century, with a good number of smaller crusades into the European interior. Unlike the First Crusade, which was specifically aimed at the total annihilation of all people of the Jewish faith, these latter Crusades were directed at expelling Muslims from areas where Christians once held power in addition to conquering lands still populated by those who had polytheistic beliefs. Cities were sacked, entire populations massacred, millions of people dead, all with the goal of expanding and consolidating power. It was centuries worth of a persistent, unrelenting dictum that would amount to genocide in a modern lens. And, even in the past, these methods were arguably reprehensible in the lens of their contemporaries like Saladin or the generals of the Song Dynasty.
And there was the Inquisition, too. Or, as modern scholars have noted, multiple smaller Inquisitions that all occurred at around the same time. These, like the Crusades, were conducted by clergy in order to show loyalty and dedication to the Church and God. The intention here was not just simply to root out the non-Catholic worshipers like the Cathars and any Jew or Muslim within Church-held states — the task was also, cannily, to acquire the wealth, money, and power of the people you have ostracized or murdered. This is, after all, how powerful institutions stay powerful — by eliminating rivals and subsuming their power.
The things we hear today about Medieval torture devices have a lot of their precedence here. But while much of it was myth and legend, the inescapable fact was that this involved a mass array of human suffering, all of it unnecessary and in the service of power. And all of it initiated, condoned, and perpetuated by the same authoritative body that did the same for the construction of Notre Dame.
Does this mean that the cathedral itself is specifically guilty? No, of course not. But, as noted repeatedly above, history is not about the building by itself — it’s about power and context and social forces. And it was the power and wealth of the Catholic Church and the French nobility, in the context of a time of power-and-territory hungry Church and state that a cathedral commemorating the strength of both entities was built.
The Methodology of History
To be clear, I am not arguing that the consequence of past oppression merits an erasure from the historical record. Of course the cathedral is of great historical importance; it’s one of the most valuable primary sources available to scholars of the High Middle Ages.
When these historians construct narratives, they absolutely use and rely on the existence of primary sources.
And this work is undergirded by citing secondary sources, the interpretations that other historians have produced, op-eds about certain events in contemporary newspapers, and so on. More immediately, the links in this article serve that purpose.
In talking about all of this, my point is that the study of history by historians is a complicated, well wrought process that involves pulling a lot of different pieces together. It is not defined or justified by a single primary source. The full story, the history, includes all sides, warts and all, or else it might as well be propaganda.
Don’t get me wrong — the cathedral as valuable evidence is real. But the cathedral is not the only valuable piece of evidence that can tell its history. It is not the only indication of the time in which it was constructed nor does it contain all of the pieces of architecture and art that reflect the thinking of its time. Like statues honoring the Confederacy, it tells a very limited and one-sided version of a much bigger story.
Moving Forward
There are a lot of ugly things the Catholic Church perpetuated during the construction of Notre Dame. Likewise, the modern Catholic Church has continued to support the cathedral and still benefits from its existence as a thing of cultural import. This is, as we know, is the same church that perpetuates reproductive misogyny, the systemic sexual abuse of women and minors, infringing on queer folks’ rights, and many other intentional acts of repression.
Whether or not you care about any of this, it’s healthy to understand that the performative sadness and grief for Notre Dame is not the only interpretation and reaction to this fire. The fire that occurred concurrently at the Al-Aqsa Mosque (which I understand to be older than Notre Dame and also, within the Islamic faith, of greater import) is a salient counterpoint to this. Does it matter that the fire was smaller? In your head, as honestly as you can, which of these two religious sites carries the most emotional weight for you? And why does that hierarchy exist?
To be clear, this is not intended as a condemnation of the Catholic Church or of European history. This is simply a request for folks to be aware that there are other viewpoints and, if you are keen to it, that there’s a lot we can do in the pursuit of a better understanding of the world.
And this is also to say that this is in total recognition of the fact that we can’t regulate every last impulse we have. We’re all messy companions in this thing we call the human condition. But it’s worthwhile, I think, to at least try to always be diligent, especially when the subject is as well studied as Notre Dame, and when the subject itself means so many different things to different people.
After all, our dreams about the future should take into account the mistakes made in the past. The more we know about the past, the more diligent we can be moving forward with constructing the world we actually want to live in.