Notre-Dame de Paris: Argument About Contemporary Stained Glass Windows

RTL reports, in fact, that Archbishop Laurent Ulrich of Paris, in a letter sent the day before the December 8 presidential visit to the recently rebuilt cathedral spire, indicated his “wish” to see the State order “a series of six stained glass windows for the side chapels south of the nave.”

President Emmanuel Macron responded: “I fully agree. We will launch a contest.” The president explained that the experts—those of the National Heritage and Architecture Commission (CNPA)—“had been consulted.”

A Project Already Refused in 2020

However, these experts do not remember having been consulted, nor having given their agreement. In July, Archbishop Ulrich had had an audience with the CNPA, but about liturgical furnishings. “At the end of the audience, Archbishop Ulrich had alluded to the stained glass windows, saying that perhaps one day the question would be broached,” one of the members of the commission recalls, but “no one understood that as a formal request.”

This is especially true since the same commission declared itself, in 2020, against a large project that aimed to reconfigure the interior of the cathedral, invented by the diocese and then abandoned. The project planned for luminous connected pews and, already, a request for contemporary stained glass windows for certain chapels.

Facing outcry, the minister of culture at the time, Roselyne Bachelot, had outright refused: “The grisailles are classified as historic monuments, and thus it appears that they cannot be replaced.” She had invoked the Venice Convention, which rendered the removal of these stained glass windows for replacement by modern works absolutely impossible.

An Online Petition

Posted online this weekend on the website La Tribune de l’art, a petition denouncing the lack of “any regard for the heritage law or Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris” has already gathered more than 7,000 signatures. The windows “were not touched or even damaged by the fire, and which are classified as historic monuments in the same way as the rest of the building,” explains the petition’s creator, Didier Rykner.

Although classified as historic, the windows currently in place would be removed and exhibited in a future museum on the work. It is enough that the State, owner of the walls, decides it, the only condition being that they not be destroyed. As for exhibiting them, the idea “is absurd. After all, these stained glass windows [...] are only of interest in situ, as an integral part of the architecture,” we read in the text.

A Contest for Contemporary Artists

“Msgr. Ulrich has come out in favour of stained-glass windows that are certainly contemporary in style, but also ‘figurative,’ preserving a part of traditional Christian art ‘that meditates on faces and figures,’ in his own words,” The European Conservative reports. The head of state, in his response, explained that a contest would be offered in order to produce these “figurative” stained glass windows.

The article from The European Conservative concludes: “These latest developments confirm, if confirmation were needed, that the main threat of disfigurement to the cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris comes not from the French state but from the initiatives of the diocese, as shown by the questionable choices of liturgical furnishings to be installed in the renovated church made a few months ago.”