Five years ago, Notre-Dame de Paris, an emblematic monument of the capital, went up in flames. This hellish event left its mark, both in France and abroad. Nathalie Heinich publishes Our Lady of Values (PUF) in which she looks back on this global catastrophe, based on the emotional effects it aroused. She uses the terminology of the historian Pierre Nora, making this incident a “monster event”. She analyzes the causes of the unifying emotion provoked by the tragedy, showing the heritage burden of the cathedral, without avoiding the controversies linked to the reconstruction of the building.
Marianne: What is a “monster event” and how was this fire one?
Nathalie Heinich: It was Pierre Nora who invented this term about these events so exceptional that they become events among events, becoming a landmark for millions of people who will remember what they were doing on April 15, 2019 at the end of the day, when they learned that Notre-Dame de Paris was on fire. Such an improbable accident, on such a universally admired monument, emblem of one of the most attractive cities in the world and symbol of the munificence of Catholicism – this could only arouse intense collective emotion, which not only affected believers , but also all those who are sensitive to heritage.
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But the evidence of this emotional outpouring should not prevent us from trying to understand its causes, and this is what we sought to do in this collective work, resulting from a multidisciplinary workshop dedicated to the putting into practice of model for analyzing value judgments that I proposed in Values. A sociological approachpublished by Gallimard, in 2017, and in The Value of People. Proofs and tests of greatnesspublished in 2022 by the same publisher.
