The reconstruction of Notre-Dame, beyond the human and technical feat that it materializes, offers us a real lesson in management, a thousand miles from the easy seductions of ambient demagoguery. In this exceptional adventure, it is the companions of Duty who play the leading role. These elite craftsmen, masters in carpentry, masonry, sculpture, painting or roofing, perpetuate centuries-old know-how. Their work, both meticulous and grandiose, highlights an artisanal excellence that our time has too often relegated to the shadows. It is indeed time to put an end to this ancient contempt which confines apprenticeship, manual and artisanal work to byways or second-rate sectors.
This disdain has its roots in a simplistic dualism – which ancient philosophy inaugurated – between intellectual work, the supposed domain of truth and knowledge, and matter, the sensitive, domain of the body, supposed to deceive objectivity and hinder knowledge. Notre-Dame, through its majestic reconstruction, enjoins a salutary reversal and commands the banishment of this stubborn snobbery, these tenacious hierarchies, these unjust arbitrations which judge manual work less noble than intellectual abstraction.
One of the other most remarkable challenges of this project was to combine respect for ancient techniques and the integration of modern technologies (AI, 3D modeling, etc.). In this context, innovation has not sought to supplant tradition; she humbly placed herself at his service. Restoration to the original, for its part, offered a meaning to cutting-edge technologies that they sometimes lose when they become locked into an insane quest for progress for the sake of progress. Neither backward-looking nor blindly progressive, the builders of Notre-Dame reconciled the heritage of the past and the advances of modernity, thus proving that progress can be a vector of continuity. This reconstruction would therefore be an opportunity to go beyond the sterile opposition between conservatism and progressivism to invent a path where the new is rooted in the best of the past, without giving in to the nostalgia of “it was better before”.
A snub to egalitarian debasement
Even more, the restoration of Notre-Dame celebrates collective commitment in its most united form. Here, there is no need for sanitized seminars, team building, where we play Lego, where we erect frescoes, where we solve puzzlesescape games to simulate artificial osmosis. This project naturally brought together various trades, companions, architects, engineers, scientists, politicians, in an immediate and real cohesion because driven by a unanimously shared emotion: the pride of restoring a universal jewel. Once again, we see through this major event that it is not the lukewarm morality of good feelings and the silly injunctions to the collective that unite people, but rather deep emotions (pride, nostalgia, the desire to win). , the desire to fight, the fear or anguish of danger, etc.) which unite souls. Let us therefore keep in mind for the future that it is on a shared feeling and not on an injunction that true solidarity is built.
Finally, this colossal undertaking reminds us what greatness means. It elevates the spirit well beyond the transversality so often exhorted, and proves that a feeling of verticality, of going beyond, of transcendence, of admiration can still exist in a country where egalitarian platitude too often dominates. Disparities and differences are regularly ironed out with constancy and ferocity by those whom Nietzsche called “the preachers of equality”, agents of egalitarianism, clerks of resentment for whom admiration weighs, for whom superiority humiliates, for whom the genius of others remains unbearable. But the restoration of Notre-Dame de Paris is a resounding snub to the egalitarian debasement, to the leveling horizontality that the lackeys of right-thinking love, and renewed proof that grandeur and admiration keep them standing only Notre-Dame, but the entire social edifice.
* Julia de Funès is a doctor of philosophy.
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