Or, La mort des cathedrales…
None other than Marcel Proust, writing in Le Figaro in 1904, worried about the future fate of the beautiful cathedrals that dot the French landscape. He wrote (translated from the French, obviously):
“Suppose for a moment that Catholicism had been dead for centuries, that the traditions of its worship had been lost. Only the unspeaking and forlorn cathedrals remain; they have become unintelligible yet remain admirable.”
There was, at the time, a raging political and religious debate over “the Briand bill,” a parliamentary proposal which imperiled the fate of French Cathedrals — those “first and perfect masterpieces” of Gothic architecture.
The author of Recherche Le Temp Perdu (In Search of Lost Time, or Remembrance of Things Past) was fearful that “France would be transformed into a shore where giant chiseled conches seemed to have run around, empied of the life that inhabited them and no longer bring an attentive ear to the distant murmer of the past, simply museum objects themselves frozen.”
The frozen future is here. It’s coming to America.
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