Will the world's most visited cathedral become a paying one?

Photo: Louise Delmotte Associated Press Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris will welcome visitors again starting December 8, more than five years after the fire in April 2019.

It was at the foot of the Virgin and Child leaning against the southeast pillar of Notre-Dame de Paris that the writer Paul Claudel, who had no religion until then, had the revelation of his life and was converted. Would he have crossed the portal if the entrance had been paid for? ? No one will ever know.

But what we do know is that three weeks before the reopening of the cathedral that burned down in 2019, the Minister of Culture, Rachida Dati, wants to make the entrance to the cathedral, which welcomes 12 million visitors each year, charge a fee. With an entrance fee of 5 euros, the cathedral would bring in 75 million euros per year, she says. Funds that could be devoted to the renovation of the 3,000 to 5,000 buildings that, according to a Senate report, are in urgent need of renovation and 500 of which are currently closed.

The supporters of this proposal cite as examples the Duomo of Milan, Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence, Westminster Abbey and St. Paul's Cathedral in London, Canterbury Cathedral, the Sagrada Família in Barcelona and even Notre-Dame Basilica in Montreal. In short, France would be, in this respect, becoming an exception.

But this proposal is far from unanimous. The archdiocese opposes it with a firm refusal. For him, access to Notre-Dame must remain entirely free, for believers as well as non-believers. He is far from being the only one.

The law of 1905

For the Paris MP Jean Laussucq, it is above all a practical question. “The idea of ​​the Minister of Culture is quite simply that the national and international influence of Notre-Dame could generate funding to renovate religious heritage that is often less known and less valued. It is a way of creating solidarity between very well-known monuments like Notre-Dame and those that are much less so.” A simple voluntary contribution, he says, will not be enough. The MP does not rule out that such a measure could also be applied to other cathedrals such as Reims, Chartres or Strasbourg. But he specifies that entry will always remain free for the faithful during masses and at certain times.

But that is without taking into account the 1905 law, which regulates relations between the Church and the State in France. This entrusts the ownership and maintenance of churches to the municipalities and cathedrals to the State in exchange for the guarantee of their full accessibility. It stipulates that “the visit of the buildings and the exhibition of the classified movable objects will be public: they will not give rise to any tax or fee.”

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According to an article of the property code, it is nevertheless possible to charge for visiting part of the buildings, as is already the case at Notre-Dame for the towers and the treasury. However, according to lawyers, it is impossible to charge for visiting the entire building without amending a law that is otherwise extremely sensitive. The law also enshrines the full autonomy of religious figures in these places of worship. For example, it was in the name of freedom of worship that, during the COVID epidemic, the Council of State overturned a circular from the Ministry of the Interior prohibiting certain liturgical gestures.

A museum like any other ?

As paradoxical as it may seem, it was a communist and atheist senator, Pierre Ouzoulias, who appeared to us to be the most ardent defender of free access to Notre-Dame. “A church is not a banal museum like any other,” believes the man who was also co-rapporteur of a mission on the state of religious heritage. “It is a common good that must be preserved. Not everything can be systematically paid for. There is something immoral about transforming a place like Notre-Dame, which is part of the heritage of humanity, into a place of commerce.”

Recently, the senator asked the Minister of Culture how one could distinguish a tourist from a believer, and a believing tourist from a non-believer. He did not get an answer. According to him, the sacred is not just a matter of religion. “There is something sacred in Notre-Dame. It is a place of spirituality. We must return to what Victor Hugo and before him Abbé Grégoire wrote about heritage when they explained that it was the heritage of the entire nation and that as such, we were all owners. When you are an owner, you do not pay to enter.”

Opponents also fear that even if the minister mentioned an entrance fee of 5 euros, it will be increased and reach the 37 euros that must be paid to enter Westminster Cathedral. Elected officials also doubt that the sums collected will always be devoted to heritage. It is not uncommon in a country as indebted as France to see a tax diverted from its original purpose. To do this, says Jean Laussucq, a separate fund entirely devoted to religious heritage would have to be created. Which is far from convincing Pierre Ouzoulias, according to whom this argument is only a pretext that will quickly be forgotten.

The “desacralization of the world”

This debate is not about to die down. In the daily newspaper L’Opinion, columnist Jean-Michel Salvator denounced “the egotistical attitude of the diocese”. According to him, “the Church of France and the Diocese of Paris have a hard time dealing with temporal reality”.

On the contrary, columnist for Figaro Laurence de Charette sees this as a new manifestation of “the desacralization of the world”. She quotes the great writer André Frossard who, he said, had “entered a chapel in the Latin Quarter at ten past five in search of a friend” and had left “at fifteen past five in the company of a friendship that is not of this earth.”

The former bishop of the diocese of Basse-Terre in Guadeloupe, Jean-Yves Riocreux, estimated in Le Progrèsfrom Lyon that for Notre-Dame, there were no “tourists”, only “visitors from five continents”. Pierre Ouzoulias is keen that the passer-by who strolls in Paris can enter Notre-Dame whenever he wants and bring his children there without counting. “When you separate a building from its original use, you can end up with something that no longer has any life. There are entire cities like that that are transformed into museums and some Parisian districts are starting to become museumized places. I don’t get much pleasure from walking around there.”