General Jean-Louis Georgelin, the retired soldier who led the reconstruction of the Notre Dame de Paris after the 2019 fire, has fallen to his death while hiking in the Pyrénées near the Spanish border.
The Archbishop of Paris Laurent Ulrich remembered the no-nonsense strategist as “one of the most devout servants” of both the Church and the French state.
“He worked with courage, tenacity and talent over the past four years,” he said.
President Emmanuel Macron wrote on social media: “The nation has lost one of its great soldiers, France one of its great servants and Notre Dame the architect of its rebirth.”
The accidental death of Georgelin, who would have turned 75 at the end of the month, should not slow his project. The new roof is going up and the rebuilt spire will soon rise above the medieval masterpiece.
“We are now reaping all we have been sowing for three years,” he told La Croix last December.
Reopening is set for 8 December 2024, later than the original deadline of the Paris Summer Olympic Games for which the authorities had hoped. But given the many delays and debates which hampered the project, it took the five-star general to lead the project from dream to reality.
Georgelin was both a former French army chief and an oblate of a Benedictine abbey, and proved a decisive manager with a tight schedule.
His first challenges were detoxifying the building after extensive pollution from the lead that had sealed the old roof and shoring up the internal walls to keep them from falling down.
He also had to balance demands for an exact copy of the old cathedral and against calls from some – like Macron – who suggested modern touches to the twelfth-century building.
After a few months in post, Georgelin told the cathedral’s chief architect “to shut his mouth”. The government reprimanded him but he kept his job, eventually getting all groups to agree.
“My role is not to be open or closed to any one option but to ensure that the best solution emerges in the end,” he said.
The pandemic further slowed the project and actual reconstruction did not begin until late summer 2021. The exterior of the cathedral is being rebuilt as before, while Archbishop Ulrich unveiled the modernist design for the altar and pews in June.
Mgr Olivier Ribadeau Dumas, archpriest of Notre Dame, has told French radio that young French Catholics, brought up as a minority in a secularised society, risked developing “a kind of victim mentality” that made them vulnerable to fringe groups.
“If you’re a victim, you might tend to focus more on identity politics and want to protest more,” he said.
“We have to be careful that we are always in contact with the world around us.”
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