You remember the story, of course you do. One of the most ancient and holy buildings on Earth, Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, goes up in flames. As pictures of the inferno are beamed around the world, adjectives rain down: it is atrocious, disastrous, diabolical.

Barely has the fire been put out before some of the richest people in France rush to help rebuild it. From François-Henri Pinault, the ultimate owner of Gucci, comes €100m (£90m). Not to be outdone, the Arnault family at Louis Vuitton put up €200m. More of the wealthy join the bidding, as if a Damien Hirst is going under the hammer. Within just three days, France’s billionaire class has coughed up nearly €600m. Or so their press releases state.

Q&A Who has given money to rebuild Notre Dame? Show Hide The race to restore Notre Dame cathedral has topped €1bn (£865m) in donations. Bernard Arnault: €200m

Billionaire businessman Arnault announced he would donate €200m through his LVMH luxury goods group just hours after his business rival Francois Pinault announced he would contribute. Francois-Henri Pinault: €100m

Pinault, husband to actor Salma Hayek, was the first to announce a major donation, of €100m through his company Artemis. L'Oréal: €200m

The cosmetics group, along with the the Bettencourt Meyers family who own the company and the Bettencourt Schueller foundation, will give €200m in total. Total: €100m

The French oil and gas major has committed €100m.

City of Paris: €50m

The city will give €50m to rebuilding efforts, according to mayor Anne Hidalgo. BNP: €20m

The banking group has said it will donate €20m. JCDecaux: €20 million

The French outdoor advertising group, known for its public bike rental systems and street furniture, will give €20m. Axa: €10m

The French insurer pledged €10m. Fimalac: €10 million

Marc Ladreit de Lacharriere, who runs the investment company, will give €10m. The Bouygues brothers: €10m

Martin Bouygues and his brother Olivier, who run one of France’s biggest construction companies, have said they will give €10m. Société Générale: €10m

The bank has pledged €10m. Île-de-France: €10m

The regional authority that includes the French capital has donated €10m. Walt Disney Company: $5m

The American entertainment group will donate $5 million, according to Robert Iger, the chairman and chief executive of Disney. Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes: €2m

The local government said it would give €2m. Capgemini: €1m

The IT services company has pledged €1m. International Olympic Committee: €0.5m

The IOC has said it will give half a million euros ahead of the 2024 Olympic games. Photograph: Lionel Bonaventure/AFP

A few folk question this very public display of plutocratic piety, but we are of course professional malcontents. Some of Paris’s 3,600 rough sleepers protest at how so many euros can be found for a new cathedral roof yet not a cent to put a roof over their heads – still, what do the poor know of the sublime? From all other seats, the applause is deafening. “Billionaires can sometimes come in really handy,” remarks the editor of Moneyweek. “Everybody is at our bedside,” says French TV celeb Stéphane Bern. Flush with cash, French president Emmanuel Macron vows the gothic masterpiece will be rebuilt within five years. Front pages scored, studio hours filled, the world moves on. You almost certainly haven’t heard the rest of the story – yet you should, because it comes with one hell of a twist.

Weeks go by, then months, and Notre Dame sees nothing from the billionaires. The promises of mid-April seem to have been forgotten by mid-June. “The big donors haven’t paid. Not a cent,” a senior official at the cathedral tells journalists. Far humbler sums are sent in, from far poorer individuals. “Beautiful gestures,” says one charity executive, but hardly les grands prix.

That prompts a newswire story, after which two of the wealthy donors, the Arnault and Pinault families, stump up €10m each. Followed by silence. Questions I put this week to the various donors and charities went largely unanswered. (Perhaps their offices are busy or emptied out by the summer holidays.)

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Notre Dame fire on 15 April 2019: ‘As pictures of the inferno are beamed around the world, adjectives rain down: it is atrocious, disastrous, diabolical.’ Photograph: François Guillot/AFP/Getty Images

But for now, let’s call this the Parable of the Disappearing Billionaires – a tale that goes to the heart of much that is wrong with modern philanthropy. Whether dispensed by the Sacklers of opioid fame, or sponsored by BP at the British Museum, it often comes on the terms and timelines of the wealthy, with the epic generosity hiding a much harder bargain.

At the time of the fire near the Seine, you could barely move for expressions of cashmere-clad concern. Take the family and foundation behind L’Oréal, who at the time declared how “touched” they were “by this drama that unites beyond cultures and beliefs [and] intend to take part in the collective effort and talents needed to meet this immense challenge, which touches the heart of our country”. As of mid-June, they had handed over a big fat zero. The same goes for oil giant Total.

“It is more blessed to give than to receive,” said Jesus. To which anyone surveying the Notre Dame debacle might advise the son of God to get a better brand manager. Because the billionaires who promised those vast sums have received all the credit while not giving more than a fraction of the money.

They have banked the publicity, while dreaming up small print that didn’t exist in the spring. As another charity executive, Célia Vérot, said: “It’s a voluntary donation, so the companies are waiting for the government’s vision to see what precisely they want to fund.” It’s as if the vast project of rebuilding a 12th-century masterpiece was a breakfast buffet from which one could pick and choose.

Meanwhile, the salaries of 150 workers on site have to be paid. The 300 or so tonnes of lead in the church roof pose a toxic threat that must be cleaned up before the rebuilding can happen. And pregnant women and children living nearby are undergoing blood tests for possible poisoning. But funding such dirty, unglamorous, essential work is not for the luxury-goods billionaires. As the Notre Dame official said last month, they don’t want their money “just to pay employees’ salaries”. Heaven forfend! Not when one could endow to future generations the Gucci Basilica or a Moët Hennessy gift shop, so you, too, can enjoy the miracle of sparkling wine, or a nave by L’Oréal (tagline: Because Jesus is Worth It).

For the super-rich, giving is really taking. Taking power, that is, from the rest of society. The billionaires will get exclusive access to the “vision” for the reconstruction of a national landmark and they can veto those plans, because if they don’t like them they can withhold their cash. Money is always the most powerful casting vote, and they have it. Never mind that much of this cash actually comes from the public, as French law grants a whopping 66% tax relief on any donation – the power is entirely private. The annual cap on such contributions doubtless constitutes a prudent reason for the big donors to stagger their generosity.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest French president Emmanuel Macron pledges in a TV broadcast to rebuild the cathedral on the day after the fire. Photograph: Ludovic Marin/AFP/Getty Images

Whether in France or Britain or the US, the rich give money to the grand institutions at the heart of our cultures to secure their social status in plaques and photo opportunities. In much the same way, they fund our political parties, then enjoy the kickbacks when they form a government. As Julia Cagé, an economist at Paris’s SciencesPo, points out, some of the same people pledging donations to Notre Dame were also among those who funded Macron’s rise to the presidency. In her recent award-winning book, to be published in English next year as The Price of Democracy, Cagé calculates that 600 wealthy people in France gave between €3m and €4.5m to Macron’s election campaign. In other words, 2% of all donors made up between 40 % and 60% of all En Marche funding. Within a few months, the new president cut taxes on the wealthy, giving his richest donors “a return of nearly 60,000% on their investment”. Just as with Notre Dame – a tiny deposit, a lot of influence and one hell of a payout.

Perhaps I and others have got this all wrong. The billionaires could, with the flourish of a pen, pay up the money in full with no conditions. Let’s see. But the irony of all this big money is how alien it is to France’s image of itself. In the middle of this decade, then-president François Hollande could boast he didn’t even like rich people. But back then the country could still console itself with the memory of les trentes glorieuses: the three glorious postwar decades of Keynesian economic management and relative equality. No more. A recent study co-authored by Thomas Piketty, among others, notes that since the era of François Mitterrand in the 1980s and 90s, there have been another 30 glorious years – for those right at the top, whose real incomes have risen at triple the rate of most of the population.

The political and cultural consequences of this face us now.

Macron can go from investment banking to the Elysée palace where he claims to be the Anti-Trump but, like his bête noire, he can’t cut taxes hard enough to help his rich friends, all the while slashing welfare benefits and school funding to make his budget stick. Charitable giving, too, has been Americanised. As Thomas Roulet at Cambridge University told me, Paris’s big donors now ape the champagne-guzzlers and influence-hawkers over on Wall Street.

The tragedy of Notre Dame came with a flatpack happy ending: of France’s wealthy dipping into their pockets to save a chunk of world heritage. But what once appeared tragic now looks grotesque: a wealthy few who are all press release and no cheque and who rely on thousands of ordinary French people to stump up instead, even while the entire economy is turned inside out to benefit those who already have the most.

• Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist