Fire of Notre-Dame de Paris: the story of a collective emotion and pain

Every day, David Abiker scrutinizes the print and the web and decrypts the news.

Press and editorialists tell the story of a collective emotion and pain

Edits on the front of our emotions in front of the drama. Starting with the newspaper La Croix whose photographer has captured the moment when the arrow of Notre-Dame collapses and this title "The heart to ashes". This is the same moment chosen by the Figaro to evoke "The disaster" when the Midi Libre speaks of the "Tragedy of Paris". "Our Lady ravaged", title West France. "The Unthinkable" chooses Telegram. "Unthinkable" is the word to say the recollection, the sneering and the incredulity vis-a-vis images which each return to the bases of the relation which it maintains with this building.

"It's a common friend who has gone missing," Michel Klekowicki in The Republican Lorrain. "Notre-Dame is part of ourselves", analyzes François Verna in La Marseillaise while Yann Marec for Midi Libre speaks of "the pain of those believers who enter Holy Week and probably feel immense pain, a pain that affects to what is most profound in man, this little thread that connects earthly life to a divine belief, is necessarily a wrench, "he says.

But no need to be a believer to feel these emotions. As after the storm on the park of Versailles, as after the sacking of the triumphal arch, "the French have shown their attachment to their heritage," says Bertrand Meinnel Picard Courier.

"It is perhaps here the keystone of this collective feeling that is at stake, the unwavering attachment that the French bring to their past and that creates a national unity without fault", notes Dominique Garraud in Charente Libre who evokes the historical function of this great lady almost millennia. A millennial past but also a recent past.

Laurent Bodin in Alsace recalls that it was the bells of Notre-Dame who rang the Liberation of Paris as they sounded after the attacks of November 13, 2015. The editorial writers thus tell this morning the cultural foundations of a popular pain. Religious, patrimonial, historical but also literary. In the Free Charente, Dominique Garraud quotes Victor Hugo, who in Notre Dame de Paris nightmares a cathedral deserted, inanimate, dead, skeleton that the spirit has left.

In Le Figaro, Etienne de Montety refers to the poet of the national feeling Charles Peguy who loved in Notre Dame "the one who is infinitely noble, infinitely courteous, infinitely mother, infinitely joyful, infinitely painful".

We can also mention Sylvain Tesson who borrowed the endless staircase of a Notre-Dame tower dozens of times as a re-education after his accident. But no need to have read Peguy, Hugo or Tesson to be attached to him.

In Le Parisien Today in France, Jean-Baptiste Isaac sees in Notre-Dame, the faithful companion of lovers of Paris in fine weather as in the mist of winter and the glowing glow of a setting sun. The Parisian-Today in France which explores the spans of a popular culture that clings to the gargoyles of our childhood memories. Prévert sang Notre-Dame by co-writing the screenplay of the film from the novel with Gina Lollobrigida in Esmeralda and Anthony Quinn in Quasimodo. It was in 1956, would come 40 years later the hunchback of Notre Dame by Disney and of course the musical whose hits invaded the karaoke.

But perhaps it is necessary to go back to a more tender age to find the cathedral in buried memories. In a rhyme nursery for the little ones of which the publisher and chronicler to the Vie François Huguenin remembers with emotion on the site Catholique Aleteia "The towers of Notre-Dame and the steeple of my country": it is this old popular song, "With my girlfriend", which comes back to her memory, as he sees again the incredible images of the collapse of the spire of the cathedral of Paris.

No need to scrutinize social networks this morning to see that everyone in their own way, editorialist, tourist, Parisian, provincial, foreign, onlooker, believer, history enthusiast or great reader has, in the words of La Croix, " the heart to ashes ". Notre-Dame de Paris is in the headlines of France and the world, she is there, in the national novel as in the family album. This is the best guarantee of his eternity.