Thread on the ages of Notre Dame, from Alistair Horne: "In the popular concept of the early Middle Ages, a church was likened to a ship steering for harbor...pic.twitter.com/xWiWjWgXHw
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"...and what could be more appropriate than Notre-Dame's extraordinarily dominant position on the Seine, athwart the stern of the Ile de la Cité, ...
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"Indeed, such was to become the city's coat of arms, with the singularly appropriate Fluctuat nec mergitur (She is tossed on the waves but is not overwhelmed)." [...]
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"As in Roman days, under Sully the parvis de Notre-Dame became the true centre of Paris, the heart of France, with all distances of main roads measured from a bronze plaque set in the middle of it. ...
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"From the cathedral's seminaries, in the course of the 13th and 14th centuries along, came no fewer than six popes. But the reputation of Sully's monumental edifice has fluctuated hugely over the ages. ...
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"Two centuries after its inception, streets neighboring it were designated by the prévot (provost) of Paris as an area for prostitutes, the warren of mean hovels becoming a bastion of vice, bawds, whores and ponces[sic]. ...
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"Other great religious structures like Saint-Denis, Rheims and Louis IX's magical Sainte-Chapelle took over many of its functions. ..."
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"The cathedral itself suffered centuries of neglect and dilapidation, and the revolutionaries of 1789 in their wild orgy of republicanism threatened to raze it to the ground ...
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"Napoleon Bonaparte restored it so that he could be crowned emperor amid its ancient symbolism, in December 1804, but its ravaged, dead walls had to be draped with hangings and baldachins to provide the required sumptuousness. ...
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"Six years later he would marry Josephine's successor, Marie Louise of Austria, there. ...
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"Two decades later, Victor Hugo lent Sully's 12th-century handiwork new romantic life in his creation of the figures of Quasimodo and the hapless Esmeralda in his great eponymous novel ...
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"Most of what one sees of Notre-Dame today, however, is the legacy of the 19th-century gothic medieval restorer -- or vandal, depending on the point of view -- Viollet-le-Duc, creator of the walled city of Carcassonne that is so romantically ...
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"...exciting when seen from a distance, so phoney close up. ...
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"Even the 28 Kings of Judah on the great western facade, destroyed by revolutionary zealots, are reproductions of Sully's originals. ...
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"Then, seven years after Viollet completed his work, Notre-Dame was threatened once again with destruction, this time by the Commune in 1871, when pews were actually piled up in the center of the nave and soaked with petroleum. ...
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"Notre-Dome, however, was to outlive them all." (From Alistair Horne's "Seven Ages of Paris", Random House, 2002) (END)
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