IN CASE you missed it: the architect who oversaw restoration of Notre Dame Cathedral in 2013 and was chief architect of France’s historic monuments says the ancient oak timbers of the cathedral could not have ignited and burned so quickly without “a lot of kindling:”

“Oak that is 800-years-old is very hard – try to burn it,” Mouton said. “Old oak, it is not easy at all. You would need a lot of kindling to succeed… It stupefies me.”

Asked to present an explanation for how the blaze spread so quickly and with such strength, Mouton asserted that there were no additional precautions that could have been taken to ensure such a “quick” incineration could be prevented.

“In the Nineties, we updated all the electrical wiring of Notre Dame,” Mouton said. “So there is no possibility of a short circuit. We updated to conform with the contemporary norms, even going very far – all the detection and protection systems against fire in the cathedral.”

Mouton also revealed that there are two watchmen on duty around the clock who monitor for any chance of fire, adding that the technical and security measures taken to protect monuments like Notre Dame are unprecedented. [Source]

The New York Times blamed the fire on Mouton. This video supposedly shows the effect of a blow torch on old oak. Hmm, the fire may have been a case of “some people doing something.”

In related news, a Harvard University professor told Rolling Stone the fire represents “liberation:”

[N]otre Dame has also served as a deep-seated symbol of resentment, a monument to a deeply flawed institution and an idealized Christian European France that arguably never existed in the first place. “The building was so overburdened with meaning that its burning feels like an act of liberation,” says Patricio del Real, an architecture historian at Harvard University. If nothing else, the cathedral has been viewed by some as a stodgy reminder of “the old city — the embodiment of the Paris of stone and faith — just as the Eiffel Tower exemplifies the Paris of modernity, joie de vivre and change,” Michael Kimmelmann wrote for the New York Times.

Don’t miss new comments by the reader John added to this previous entry on Notre Dame. John writes:

In some ways the majority of people become co-conspirators in some sense by putting their heads in the sand and effectively helping them to cover these things up.

Lord Acton wrote of the French Revolution:

“The appalling thing in it is not the tumult but the design. Through all the fire and smoke, we perceive evidence of calculating organization. The managers remain studiously concealed, but there is no doubt about their presence from the first.”

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