the palace, hurling furniture and other valuables
out the windows and into the river. Behind all
that stands Notre Dame, then six centuries old.
In 1980, also at age 17, Philippe Villeneuve
saw an exhibit about Viollet-le-Duc at the Grand
Palais. He knew he wanted to be an architect—
he was already building an elaborate model of
Notre Dame—but he didn’t know you could spe-
cialize in historic buildings. Today he’s one of
35 “chief architects of historic monuments” in
France, a profession most famously embodied
by Viollet- le-Duc. Villeneuve has directed resto-
ration work at Notre Dame since 2013, and with
terrible urgency since the spring of 2019, when
a fire ripped the top off the cathedral. The build-
ing has been stabilized at last; reconstruction
is about to begin. In more ways than one, Ville-
neuve owes his current mission, the fight of hisprofessional life, to his ingenious predecessor,
Viollet-le-Duc.“He invented the restoration of historic mon-
uments,” Villeneuve said. “That didn’t happen
before. Before, people repaired them, and theyrepaired them in the style of their day.” Or they
didn’t repair them, and tore them down.
In 19th-century France, a government firstestablished institutions to grapple systemati-
cally with a question that concerns us all: Whatpart of the past is worth preserving and trans-
mitting to posterity? What duty do we owe the
creations of our ancestors, what strength andstability do we draw from their presence—and
NOTRE DAME AFTER THE FIRE 45