Churches catch fire. They are subjected to aerial bombardment. They sink beneath floods, they are bulldozed. They are struck by lightning, shaken by earthquakes, and buried by volcanic ash. In the wake of such events, a number of possibilities present themselves. As sacred buildings – often ones attributed with great cultural and aesthetic significance – they are rarely abandoned to the forces that ravaged them. Even if they are left as ruins, they are shored-up, often garnished with a garden, to function as a memorial to the catastrophe. Sometimes, the ruins are adapted or added to, thereby retaining a material trace of the events that had destroyed them, as in the case of Coventry Cathedral, or the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtnis-Kirche in Berlin. Or they are rebuilt in their entirety, as with the Frauenkirche in Dresden, which was reconstructed after the reunification of Germany (the East Germans had left it as a ruin for 50 years – things change, even in the afterlife).

The case of Paris’s cathedral presents little difficulty in this regard, at least in some quarters. “We’ll rebuild Notre-Dame even more beautifully,” says Macron, and shortly afterwards the French government announced a competition to design a new spire. While this may sound like a characteristic piece of presidential hubris, I can’t say I ever thought it the most beautiful cathedral in the world. The rose windows, yes, great, but they have been saved, and the parts that were destroyed were largely recent additions, it seems. So beautification may indeed be possible. Why not reach for the stars, like M. Macron?