By Monica Showalter
Just days after the far-left took the most seats in the French National Assembly elections, the 500-foot spire of great French cathedral in Rouen has been set on fire.
According to the New York Times:
A tarp covering the spire of a cathedral in Rouen, France, that inspired the artist Claude Monet caught fire on Thursday, city officials said.
The cathedral, Notre-Dame de Rouen, about 70 miles northwest of Paris, was evacuated, and emergency services were at the site, local officials said on X.
“All of the public resources have been mobilized,” the city’s mayor, Nicolas Mayer-Rossignol, wrote on X, adding that the fire’s cause was unknown.
Caroline Dutarte, a Rouen official, said that only a tarp covering the cathedral’s spire had caught fire and that the blaze was under control. She said the tarp had been in place around the spire because the cathedral was undergoing renovation work.
Here is how grand the structure is:
The great French Impressionist master, Claude Monet, was so fascinated with the light on the building he painted it more than 30 times.
Here is a Wikipedia-curated series of public domain pictures showing the incredible variance:
Wikipedia notes:
Apart from its religious significance, Rouen Cathedral—built in the Gothic style—could be seen as representing all that was best in French history and culture, given that it was a style of architecture that was admired and adopted by many European countries during the Middle Ages.
So to see this cathedral on fire, so soon after radical leftists rioted and created mayhem to celebrate their ‘victory’ in the French elections, is more than a little disturbing.
The cause as yet is unknown, and maybe it was just a careless cigarette butt or some kind of lightning strike. But when you’ve got the left out starting fires to celebrate its newfound power, you can’t dismiss that anti-Catholic and anti-traditional French elements of the left were at work. According to the electoral maps of Le Monde, Rouen is situated in a leftist department called Seine-Maritime, within the historic province of Normandy, which voted for the far-left. It would be loaded with Catholic-haters among the gay and other progressive groups within, even the haters of the traditional Latin Mass.
The Le Monde electoral map shows that it’s surrounded by countryside that voted for Marine Le Pen’s conservative National Rally party which is quite the opposite.
If that isn’t disturbing enough, the area has also been subject to Jihadi attacks from West-hating Muslims. In 2016, a French priest, Fr. Jacques Hamel, had his throat slashed while saying Mass in nearby St-Etienne. The funeral mass for the slain priest was held at the same Rouen cathedral.
What’s more, art is under attack, by radical environmentalist groups of the left, who have been throwing food and breaking glass and gluing themselves to famous works of art. Rouen’s cathedral is all about art, in itself, and in Monet’s very well-known masterpieces.
Rouen seems to be particularly vulnerable to attacks given the agendas of the left and the Muslims, all of whom celebrated their victory in this week’s election by burning things.
We still don’t know who did this, but I doubt I am the only one wondering why there seem to be so many cathedrals catching fire these days in France.
Cathedrals are big, and dominate town and city skylines through France and most of Europe. Rouen, along with Notre Dame, are among the most iconic, the best known, the most noted. Does it make sense to dismiss that forces aligned with destroying Western civilization — the haters of art, of religion, of tradition, of the West itself — might just be seeking to destroy the skylines of the great French cities in order to remake them in their own hellish images?