Notre-Dame de Paris, West Façade, 1950s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Notre-Dame de Paris, West Façade, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Notre-Dame de Paris, West Façade, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-6438E8

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Eight centuries of Gothic ambition crowd the frame, and parked in front of it, with complete indifference to the contrast, are half a dozen postwar French sedans — Citroëns and their contemporaries — doing what Parisians did in the 1950s, which was treat the Île de la Cité as a parking lot. The cathedral's west façade still wears the accumulated soot of the industrial age, dark enough to read as almost black against a summer sky, the cleaning campaign that would eventually restore it to pale limestone still a decade away.

The spire Viollet-le-Duc rebuilt in the nineteenth century rises between the towers, confidently occupying a skyline it would hold for another sixty years. Whoever took this picture was doing what every tourist with a new color camera was doing in postwar Europe — documenting proof that the great things had survived — and the cars queued below it are their own kind of document: a civilization that had just finished destroying itself, now going about its business.

The pedestrians crossing in front of the portals are too small to read as individuals, which is probably right. Notre-Dame has always had that effect on people standing in front of it.

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