Notre Dame inspired the love and help of Americans after a fire

“After the French, the Americans have been by far the biggest donors,” Michel Picaud, president of the Friends of Notre-Dame de Paris, told AFP ahead of the cathedral’s reopening next month.

The group, founded in 2017, saw donations soar two years later, following the devastating fire that ripped through the cathedral on April 15, 2019.

To date, the organization, headquartered in the northeastern US state of New Hampshire, has raised a total of $57 million from 45,000 donors, with Americans leading the way.

Top donations included $10 million each from the Starr Foundation, one of the largest U.S. foundations, and the Marie-Josee and Henry Kravis Foundation.

When you add up donations to other groups that support Notre Dame, including New York’s French Heritage Society — which received a $2 million check from the family of cosmetics icon Estee Lauder — Picaud estimates that Americans contributed $62 million to the restoration fund.

Built more than 600 years before the Eiffel Tower, the cathedral on the Ile de la Cite in Paris is “one of the greatest treasures in the world,” according to former US President Barack Obama, who visited it with his wife and daughters in June 2009 , said on Twitter.

Obama was, of course, one of the long lines of American presidents to visit the cathedral. Future President Thomas Jefferson visited the country in the 1780s while serving as ambassador to France.

Medieval art

Although the United States is a relatively young nation, its museums are full of medieval masterpieces. The Metropolitan Museum of Art even reassembled cloisters from four French abbeys on a Manhattan hill now known as The Cloisters.

“For Americans, Notre Dame of Paris is a physical symbol of a pre-modern European history that does not exist on American soil; like a powerful ‘lieu de memoire’ it evokes an imagined nostalgia for a rich and complex culture of the past,” Meredith Cohen, professor of medieval art and architecture at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), told AFP.

“Americans also love Victor Hugo, who made Notre Dame famous through his books and writings about it, as well as his vivid description of revolutionary Paris in ‘Les Miserables,'” which was hugely successful on Broadway and in film versions, she added to it.

References to the cathedral run deep in American culture, from the earliest black-and-white films to recent animation.

Quasimodo superstar

Hugo’s 1831 novel, “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” was adapted into a film in 1923 and became a silent film classic. Other versions followed, most notably a 1956 film starring Anthony Quinn Quasimodo and Disney’s 1996 animation.

The cathedral also appears in numerous Hollywood films, including Vincent Minnelli’s “An American in Paris” with Gene Kelly; Stanley Donen’s “Charade” starring Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn; the Woody Allen film “Midnight in Paris” starring Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, Carla Bruni and Marion Cotillard; and even the popular Pixar animation “Ratatouille.”

Professor Michael Davis, a specialist in French Gothic art, says: ‘First and foremost, the facade provides an instantly recognizable image not only of the cathedral itself, but also an image reminiscent of the city of Paris, the nation of France, the Middle Ages, the Catholic faith.”

A deep affinity

The fierce fire that ripped through the cathedral five years ago caused a worldwide wave of shock and concern. Major TV networks paused their programming and sent their star reporters to Paris.

As the flames devoured the structure’s wooden framework, then-President Donald Trump became so concerned that he suggested in a tweet that French authorities consider deploying “flying water tankers,” like those used to fight forest fires. The French civil security agency said this was a bad idea.

The emotions were shared by many Americans.

“If the millions of visitors to Paris and France have seen one Gothic cathedral, it is probably Notre Dame, and the fire of April 15, 2019 has undoubtedly activated the memory of that encounter and the connection with the cathedral,” Davis said. board member of the Friends of Notre-Dame de Paris.

Former World Bank Managing Director Bertrand Badre, another board member, paid tribute to the “generous and immediate” response from US donors.

“They spoke from their hearts and we received some very moving testimonies,” he told AFP.

Cohen of UCLA agreed.

“Americans generally have a great affinity with Paris and the vast culture of France… with its philosophers, artists and fashion houses, as well as the food and wine culture that Julia Child made famous in America,” she said.

“All of this becomes connected to Notre Dame.”

© 2024 AFP