NOTRE DAME: THE SOUL OF FRANCE (PB)

Why was the world moved upon seeing images of Notre-Dame in flames? In answer, Agnès Poirier turns to the defining moments in Notre-Dame’s history: the laying of the corner stone in 1163, the conversion of Henri IV to Catholicism, the coronation of Napoleon, Victor Hugo’s nineteenth-century campaign to preserve it, the Liberation in 1944, the 1950s film of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, the state funeral of Charles de Gaulle, and the gilet jaunes today. Nothing short of a cultural war is already brewing between historians and militants, the devout and secularists. It is here that Poirier reveals the deep malaise at the heart of France.