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Money talks (but do we understand what it says?)
What the flood of financial support for the rebuilding of the Notre Dame (and the reactions to it) tells us about ourselves
Fires at famous landmarks understandably get a great deal of attention. But the dramatic images of the blaze at the Parisian Notre Dame cathedral seem to have touched many people in ways that other such disasters do not normally do. The only reported casualty was one of the 500 firefighters who was injured, so it was not the human toll, but the material damage to the building that was the reason for the extraordinary emotional reactions. This was evidenced by the speed with which money was being raised to finance the restoration of the stricken church. But this raised some questions too. How come?
While fire was still raging, some of France’s richest families were already pledging hundreds of millions of euros. It was hard not to notice how incongruent it all looked in a city that has, for many months, seen people in yellow vests calling for lower fuel prices and higher wages for the millions of citizens struggling to make ends meet. An old building catches fire, and within two days more than a billion euros (£860 million, $1.2 billion) is donated to fix it.
