Paris (AFP)
A Te Deum will be celebrated on April 16, 2024 in Notre-Dame de Paris, exactly five years after the fire that ravaged the cathedral, General Jean-Louis Georgelin promised on Monday during the preview of the historic film of animation "Notre-Dame de Paris, the test of centuries",.
Speaking before the screening of this feature film largely shot in 3D, the president of the new public establishment responsible for the restoration of Notre-Dame thus wanted to clearly indicate his firm will to meet the five-year deadline set by the French President Emmanuel Macron for the reconstruction of the building.
"Mgr Patrick Chauvet, the rector of Notre-Dame, who was somehow the first victim of the fire, has lost his cathedral and is impatiently awaiting the Te Deum which will take place on April 16, 2024 to celebrate the work that has been done ", he argued before hundreds of guests in the Bettencourt auditorium on rue Mazarine, in the Latin Quarter.
General Georgelin made a point of thanking the chief architect of the historic monuments Philippe Villeneuve to whom he asked to rise in the midst of applause.
Previously the two men had talked in a relaxed atmosphere, while the general had aroused strong criticism, in particular from the Minister of Culture Franck Riester, for having declared that Mr. Villeneuve had better "shut up" whether or not to restore the arrow to the identical.
The general also greeted "the companions who work on the site in bad weather conditions" and "the traders (of the district) who suffer a lot from this site".
This 96-minute film, written and directed by Emmanuel Blanchard, was shot before the fire, but includes some images of the destruction and the fire.
The actress Sophie Marceau lent her voice to the cathedral, to which she tells in the first person how she was born, and the many vicissitudes that she has endured in eight centuries.
The film, which will be broadcast in France on Wednesday evening on France 2, emphasizes the artisanal and architectural prowess of the first hundred years and the period of Victor Hugo and the architect Eugène Viollet-Le-Duc. It shows the difficulties of the bishop of Paris Maurice de Sully (1120-1196) in getting his project breaking with Romanesque approved.
He describes the revolutionary fury against this masterpiece assimilated to the monarchy. And he presents Viollet-Le-Duc as a great architect, but who, under the pretext of rediscovering the purity of medieval plans, sometimes reinvents them with numerous additions.
The Notre-Dame fire on April 15 sparked extraordinary mobilization in France and around the world: € 922 million in donations and pledges were confirmed, for a total of 320,000 donations.
© 2019 AFP