Notre-Dame Was Built—and Rebuilt—Through Private Donations
This is part of Reason‘s 2025 summer travel issue. Click here to read the rest of the issue.
Fire nearly destroyed the Notre-Dame Cathedral in 2019. Thanks largely to an outpouring of private donations, the cathedral now shines more brilliantly than it has for centuries.
My personal history with the cathedral stretches back to my first Europe on $10 a Day backpacking and youth hosteling visit in the late 1970s. Advising me to eschew faux sophistication, my boss at The New Yorker urged me to visit popular sites like Notre-Dame because “they are tourist attractions for good reasons.” He was entirely correct. It was everything a youngish first-time traveler to Europe expected of an ancient gothic cathedral: gray, a bit dingy, yet magnificent.
Owing to sheer good fortune, subsequent visits to the cathedral afforded me some very happy memories. One occurred after interviewing Friedrich Hayek in Freiburg, Germany, for Forbes in 1989. I subsequently traveled to Paris to visit friends but was at loose ends for an evening. So I decided to stroll down to the Île de la Cité to revisit Notre-Dame. When I got there, I noticed that a lot of people were quietly streaming into the shrine. Intrigued, I joined them. I was handed an unlit white candle upon entering the entirely dark interior. Cluelessly, I had stumbled upon the Easter vigil service.
Bearing in mind the frailties of memories, what I recall is that as the organ began playing, a single flame was ignited at the altar. As the choir began singing, the initial spark was touched to candle after candle spreading through the crowd, eventually illuminating the gloomy vaulted interior with flickering incandescence. Even as an unbeliever, I found the experience beautiful and mysterious.
My second sublime experience occurred in December 2015, when I was reporting from the U.N. Climate Change Conference th
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