The Washington Post

Europe

Billionaires raced to pledge money to rebuild Notre Dame. Then

came the backlash.
By James McAuley
April 18

PARIS — The eventual reconstruction of Notre Dame is now a foregone conclusion. Within hours of
the fire that destroyed much of the cathedral on Monday, donors pledged more than $1 billion to
restore the Parisian icon to its former glory.

Even before the smoke had cleared, luxury goods magnate Francois-Henri Pinault announced his
family would donate 100 million euros ($112 million) to the effort. Not to remain on the sidelines, his
rival Bernard Arnault — the chief executive of LVMH and the richest man in Europe — pledged twice
that amount on Tuesday morning. The Bettencourt Meyers family, which controls L’Oreal, quickly
matched that pledge. And Patrick Pouyanne, chief of executive of French oil giant Total, offered
another $112 million.

Officials are still assessing the extent of the damage, so the cost of Notre Dame’s reconstruction
remains unknown, but these and the many other donations coming in should pretty well cover it.

In the meantime, the cascade of cash that materialized overnight to save the cathedral has raised
eyebrows in France, still in the throes of a crippling protest over rising social inequality and whose
leader is regularly decried as the “president of the rich.”

“Of course, I find it nice, this solidarity,” said Ingrid Levavasseur, a leader of the yellow vest
movement that has protested inequality in a series of often violent Saturday demonstrations since
mid-November. The stream of donations essentially confirmed the movement’s broader social
critique, Levavasseur said.

“If they can give tens of millions to rebuild Notre Dame, then they should stop telling us there is no
money to help with the social emergency,” Philippe Martinez, head of the CGT trade union, said on
Wednesday.

The cash flow has also furrowed brows abroad, with critics emphasizing that destroyed landmarks in
non-Western locales — like the ancient sites destroyed by the Islamic State in Syria — have hardly
inspired such a global groundswell.

“In just a few hours today, 650 million euros was donated to rebuild Notre Dame,” South Africa-based
journalist Simon Allison tweeted. “In six months, just 15 million euros has been pledged to restore
Brazil’s National Museum. I think this is what they call white privilege.”
Rio de Janeiro’s National Museum was incinerated in a fire in September.

Inside and outside of France, the unease has centered on a perceived disparity between concern for
the fate of beautiful monuments and concern for the struggles of real people, which can be more
difficult to sell to donors.

In February, for instance, the United Nations launched a record call for $4 billion in aid for Yemen, in
the midst of a humanitarian crisis. “Almost 10 million are just one step away from famine,” Secretary
General António Guterres said in his pitch at a donor conference in Geneva. In the hours after his
call, roughly $2.6 billion in pledges came in — a feat in itself. But still well short of the goal.

Notre Dame offers a striking contrast: No one was killed, no one is starving, but philanthropists
probably provided the full amount — if not more — instantaneously and unprompted.

There was initial speculation that billionaire donors were contributing to Notre Dame to receive a
generous tax break from the state. Typically, the French government allows corporations a 60 percent
tax deduction on donations made in the realm of culture.

“Billionaires should pay taxes,” tweeted economist Julia Cage, “not give when they feel like it,
benefiting from enormous tax breaks.”

Amid mounting criticism, some of the big donors defended their contributions. Both Arnault and
Pinault said they were not looking for tax benefits.

Arnault told shareholders that his family holding company had already hit its ceiling on tax
deductions for charitable donations.

“It’s an empty controversy,” Arnault said. “It’s pretty dismaying to see that in France you are criticized
even for doing something for the general interest.”

The Pinault family similarly released a statement saying: “The donation for Notre-Dame de Paris will
not be subject to any tax deduction. The Pinault family considers that it is out of the question to
burden French taxpayers.”

Pinault’s wife, actress Salma Hayek, praised on Instagram the family’s “personal and heart felt
participation in the reconstruction of Notre-Dame de Paris.”

“My husband and father in law are two generous french citizens, who sincerely understand the
importance of this spiritual, cultural and historical treasure from Paris to the world,” Hayek wrote.

Caroline Fourest, a French feminist and writer, said she thinks she understands the collective
outpouring over Notre Dame, even though the nation’s mourning is different than after major
terrorist attacks — at the Charlie Hebdo newspaper and the Bataclan concert hall in 2015, at the
Bastille Day celebrations in Nice in 2016 and at a Christmas market in Strasbourg last December.

“There are similarities, mostly in the sense that we found a real communion, which was the case in
Paris after the attacks,” Fourest said.

“It’s not the same loss or the same anguish, because no one died,” she said. “But with Notre Dame, we
were afraid of losing a part of the beauty that makes living in Paris so sweet. There’s a sadness there.”

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James McAuley
James McAuley is Paris correspondent for The Washington Post. He holds a PhD in French history from the University of
Oxford, where he was a Marshall Scholar. Follow 

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