Controversy over the modern stained glass windows of Notre-Dame de Paris, history repeating itself

“We may have thought that the fight over the stained glass windows of Notre Dame had died down, but here it has flared up again. And what a blaster! With somewhat exhausting intensity and sometimes unbearable heaviness… »We can read in columns Figaro. The journalist notes that “ At a time when economic worries and the fear of war cloud the mind and suppress the sensibility, Parisian society can still be agitated by an artistic problem. The newspaper in question is dated… April 22, 1939, but it would almost be plagiarism to parallel the new controversy surrounding the construction of Notre-Dame de Paris today.

Same problem: should we replace the grisailles—those transparent windows with geometric designs created by Viollet-le-Duc—with stained glass commissioned by master glassmakers and contemporary artists? The same war on our doorstep, the same politically and economically tense era, where the question of succession seems to be a useful diversion, a symbol. And the same caricature characters from the vaudeville show.

Today’s troublemaker, Didier Rickner, stormy editor-in-chief Art Tribune – whose online petition against the decision of “The Prince” (Emmanuel Macron) to replace Grisal has recently gathered around 140,000 signatures – previously portrayed by Achille Carlier, who in his review Stones of Francedesecrate these new stained glass windows, “Provocative sparks of rich colors”, “As if led by a drunken jazz conductor”will condemn “Degeneration of the Historical Monuments Commission” and “All the clergy, [lequel] It has been almost completely devoid of any artistic education for a long time.”

Start of the competition

Clergy (yesterday Cardinal Jean Verdier [1864-1940]Defender of modern religious art, today Archbishop of Paris M^GR Ulrich), as a willow tree of modernity, in the face of conservative impulses, first by Aliette de Rohan-Chabot (1896-1972), Marquise de Maye, then at the head of the Foundation for the Protection of French Art, and these days by Merivon de Saint. Pulgent. the author Glory to the Mother of God. faith and strength (Gallimard, 2023), he criticizes “bad taste” And the effects of fashion, which stands as a pillar of the Charter of Venice, which since 1962 has established ethics in matters of restoration in historical monuments, at least on paper, by prohibiting the destruction of the existing element by the new.