“Of course you have to charge for access to Notre-Dame Cathedral, and not 5 but 20 or 30 euros”

Rachida Dati has joined the cohort of voices demanding that access to Notre-Dame de Paris be paid. While the renovated cathedral will be reopened with great fanfare on December 7 and 8, five years after a devastating fire, the Minister of Culture is offering a ticket for 5 euros (The Figaro of October 24). The sum could bring in 75 million euros per year, she assures, redistributed to the thousands of churches in France in poor condition.

Of course we have to post this post. Not for 5 but for 20 or 30 euros. Not just at Notre-Dame, but at the cathedrals of Chartres, Bourges, Reims, Strasbourg and Amiens. We must do it, because our public finances are in a disastrous state and the preservation of heritage is a bottomless pit. Three quarters of the 42,000 churches in France are found in municipalities with less than 3,000 inhabitants which do not have the means to maintain them. Not acting means believing in miracles.

It’s not enough to snap your fingers to get money. At Notre-Dame, yes, as the cathedral no longer has much to do with a place of prayer. It attracts a thousand times more globalized tourists than faithful people. There were 12 million or 13 million per year before the fire, in April 2019 – it was already the most visited site in Europe. There will be 15 million after December 8, 40,000 people per day, who will be able to reserve a time slot on a platform set up at the end of November. We imagine the Barnum, the Louvre or Versailles more incandescent.

Monuments weakened by tourism

Twenty to thirty euros are possible, because, according to a well-documented mechanism, the further away the visitor comes, the more he accepts without complaining to pay the high price in front of an exceptional site where he will never return. The ecological emergency also justifies a surcharge: 95% of tourists concentrate on less than 5% of the planet’s sites and weaken the elected monuments.

The diocese of Paris is not among these concerns. Resolutely opposed to the priced cathedral, which blocks the project immediately, he argues that money does not go well with religion, that the distinction between the tourist and the believer is impenetrable and that being won by the divine is unpredictable. No doubt. Let us say, however, that if you wish to pray in peace, dozens of churches in Paris, inhabited and deserted, are much more appropriate.

It is especially convenient to want to keep it free when the maintenance of the building is not your responsibility but is the responsibility of the State, owner of 87 cathedrals in France. Moreover, in Italy, Spain or the United Kingdom, where the places of worship belong to it, the Church is pragmatic, introducing a ticket of 10 to 30 euros for some sites where tourists flock en masse. This is the case at the Milan Cathedral, the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, ​​the Cathedral Mosque of Cordoba and St. Paul’s Cathedral in London.

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