Two years on, Notre-Dame awaits long path to pre-fire glory

On the evening of April 15 2019, France and the world watched transfixed in horror as flames ravaged Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris, fearful that the heritage landmark could be lost to humanity forever.

While the spire collapsed and much of the roof was destroyed, the efforts of firefighters ensured the great mediaeval edifice survived the night. Yet the road to restoration has been long and arduous and it is only expected to return to its former glory in April 2024, five years after the fire.

The cause of the blaze remains a subject of uncertainty, although investigators are so far rejecting any idea of foul play and focusing on a short-circuit or even a dropped cigarette as possible explanations.

Martin BUREAU AFP/File

The first task for workers on Notre-Dame cathedral has been removing hundreds of tonnes of scaffolding that were damaged in the fire.

With at least two TV dramas and one feature film in the pipeline about April 15, the drama of that night and the race to save the 850-year-old building looks set to be further graven in the public memory.

It was President Emmanuel Macron who set the five-year restoration target in the immediate aftermath of the fire, which would mean the cathedral could be visited again when Paris hosts the 2024 summer Olympics.

"We are on course to return the cathedral for worship in 2024. But there is still a lot of work," Jean-Louis Georgelin, the straight-talking former general handpicked by Macron to lead the restoration efforts, said last month.

The actual restoration work has yet to begin. Time up until now has been spent on securing the building, including the painstaking task of removing 40,000 pieces of scaffolding calcified in the fire.

This should be finished in the summer, allowing the full restoration works to begin early next year.

The aim is to celebrate the first full service in the restored cathedral on April 15, 2024, despite delays caused by the pandemic and the lead that filtered out during the blaze.

- 'No certainty' -

The drive is helped by some 833 million euros ($991 million) collected in a national and international donation campaign launched immediately after the fire, although this alone may not be enough to push the restoration over the finishing line.

Of that 70 million euros ($83 million) came from abroad, half of that sum from the United States.

Already, some 1,000 specially-selected oak trees are drying out to reconstruct the spire -- which Macron had been tempted to replace with a modern touch but will now be rebuilt as it was -- and the crossing of the transept.

The interior of the cathedral is today marked by a web of scaffolding, surrounded by nets and tarpaulins, where carpenters, rope workers, scaffolders and crane operators hurry around.

Along with hundreds of experts seeking to secure and restore the cathedral, investigators have also been at work in the probe to work out what caused the fire, sometimes using ropes to take samples high up in the building.

This phase has now been completed and a months-long process of analysis of all the evidence collected from the site will now begin, a source close to the investigation told AFP.

Several shortcomings in the security of the cathedral were identified -- in particular in the alarm system which meant that the alert to firefighters was late -- and in the electrical system of one of the elevators.

Some one hundred witnesses were interviewed in the space of a two month period alone.

But while an accident, possibly caused by a short circuit or discarded cigarette butt, remains the likely explanation, the sheer extent of the damage complicates drawing any conclusions.

"The way things stand now, it is not possible to say with certainty that we will one day be able to say what could have caused the fire," warned the source, who asked not to be named.

- 'Happy end' -

But even as investigators try and piece together exactly what happened that fateful night, filmmakers are at work on dramatic reconstructions of the events.

Streaming giant Netflix is preparing a six-episode miniseries produced in cooperation with the Paris fire brigade which will look at the impact of the fire on different people across France.

A rival English-language series is also expected based on a major investigation into the fire carried out by the New York Times.

And French director Jean-Jacques Annaud, who made "The Name of the Rose", has also started work on a feature film about the disaster which is expected in 2022 and will intersperse archive footage with drama.

"It's as if I am telling the story of a victim who is dying and the doctors don't come... Thank goodness there is a happy end."

Source: France24 - AFP

HRH PRINCE PHILIP 1921-2021

Prince Philp is remembered as the longest-serving consort in British history, who sacrificed a naval career to give steadfast support to his wife. But it easy to forget he had endured an exceptionally turbulent childhood, writes historian Philip Eade.

He was abruptly separated from his parents and four elder sisters at the age of eight, and destined never again to live in the same home as his immediate family.

In later years, while out and about on royal duties, he would gain a reputation for his quizzical ragging and, at times, startlingly blunt remarks. And to friends, his emotional reserve was every bit as striking as his bluff, no-nonsense exterior.

His tendency to hide his feelings meant that even those who knew him well were occasionally taken aback by his bouts of prickliness - presumed to be legacies of his unsettled early life.

Prince Philip was born in Corfu in 1921 eight years after the assassination of his grandfather, King George I of Greece.

He was the youngest child and only son of Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark and Princess Alice of Battenberg.

He was little more than a year old when his father was sent into exile by an army court martial following Greece's calamitous defeat in a war with Turkey.

The family's subsequent flight across the Adriatic Sea to Italy aboard a British warship, with the infant Philip sleeping in a converted orange crate, was helped by King George V of the UK, Andrew's first cousin. The monarch's determination to rescue them owed much to his regret at having failed to save another first cousin, Tsar Nicholas II, during the Russian Revolution five years earlier.

Eventually, the family settled on the outskirts of Paris at St-Cloud, in a garden cottage owned by Philip's aunt. Philip attended a small day school nearby, but in 1930 his world was again thrown apart when his mother, whom he had always adored, suffered a severe mental breakdown.

Alice, who was the daughter of Prince Louis of Battenberg (whose family name was anglicised to Mountbatten during World War One), had been born profoundly deaf. She learned to lip-read in several different languages.

Brave, energetic and determined not to let disability hold her back, she had served as a latter-day Florence Nightingale during the Balkan Wars of 1912-13, setting up and nursing in front-line hospitals.

Three decades later, during the war-time Nazi German occupation of Greece, she hid Jews in her house in Athens, earning, like Oskar Schindler, Israel's award of Righteous Among the Nations.

In the years immediately after the family's flight from Greece, however, her behaviour had grown disturbingly strange. One doctor who saw her, diagnosed her as a paranoid schizophrenic who believed that she was the only woman on Earth, and married to Christ.

Eventually, Alice's mother (Philip's grandmother) bowed to the advice of psychiatrists, and agreed that her daughter should be committed to a secure sanatorium. So she arranged - while the family was staying for Easter 1930 with Alice's uncle, the Grand Duke of Hesse - for a doctor to arrive one day while the children were out. He would forcibly sedate Alice, bundle her into a car and drive her off to a clinic near Lake Constance.

The committal of Philip's mother, on 2 May, marked the end of his family life, although he and his sisters would not have realised this when they arrived back at the grand-ducal palace that evening to find their mother gone.

Alice and Andrew's marriage had been under strain for several years but it, in effect, ended at that point. They hardly saw each other from then on, although they would never divorce.

Andrew stopped acting as her husband. He freed himself from many of his responsibilities as father too, shutting up the family home at St-Cloud and thereafter leading a rather aimless life, drifting between Paris, Monte Carlo and Germany, interspersed with sporadic fruitless interventions in Greek affairs.

He saw Philip now and again during the school holidays, but otherwise left him in the care of Alice's family, the Milford Havens and Mountbattens, in England.

Within 18 months of the family break-up, Philip's sisters were all married to German princelings, so the disappearance of both their parents was of far less consequence for them than it was for their eight-year-old brother.

First, he lived with his maternal grandmother at Kensington Palace, before moving in with his uncle, Alice's elder brother George, the Marquess of Milford Haven - whose son David would become Philip's closest childhood friend (and later best man).

For the next eight years, "Uncle Georgie" acted as Philip's guardian, turning up in loco parentis at school prize-givings and sports days. During some school holidays, he provided a home for Philip at Lynden Manor, on the Thames between Windsor and Maidenhead.

Philip only saw his mother a handful of times during the first two years of her confinement.

At the sanatorium, Alice was told her son would be going to boarding school at Cheam in England - her daughter Cecilie careful to reassure her that, although at first nervous at the idea, Philip had become "thrilled" at the prospect.

For five years, from the summer of 1932 to the spring of 1937 - by which time she had largely recovered her equilibrium - Philip neither saw nor heard from his mother at all. It was not in his nature to overstate the effect of all this. "I just had to get on with it," he later told one biographer.

"You do. One does."

Yet being separated from his mother at such a critical stage in his upbringing undoubtedly left its mark.

However fond he was of his grandmother, uncle and aunt, and appreciative of the homes they provided him, they could never make up for the family home he had lost.

When an interviewer asked him what language he had spoken at home as a boy, his immediate and rather cross retort was: "What do you mean, 'at home'?"

His apparent way of coping was to banish introspection and remain cheerful and purposeful. In the absence of his own father, various surrogates helped shape the young prince's increasingly forthright character.

The headmaster of Cheam was a cheerful clergyman and staunch disciplinarian who used a cane to punish daytime offences and a sawn-off cricket bat for those caught having pillow fights after lights out.

Philip's first beating as a new boy prompted him to ask the headmaster's wife: "Do you like Mr Taylor?" The experienced Mrs Taylor countered expertly. "Do you, Philip?" she asked. "No," answered the boy unequivocally. "I do not."

But as time passed, Philip grew to like not only Mr Taylor but also everything else about Cheam, the tough regime of which he later extolled in a preface to a history of the school: "Children may be indulged at home, but school is expected to be a Spartan and disciplined experience in the process of developing into self-controlled, considerate and independent adults. The system may have its eccentricities, but there can be little doubt that these are far outweighed by its values."

His more timid and sensitive son, Prince Charles, who had a miserable time at Cheam, may not have entirely agreed with this assessment. He also found it impossible to share his father's enthusiasm for Gordonstoun, an even more Spartan educational establishment on the Moray Firth in Inverness-shire, where Philip went at the age of 13 and eventually rose to be head boy.

Philip's housemaster at Gordonstoun, Robert Chew, was also in charge of "character building" at the school during its early years. By the time Prince Charles was sent there, Chew had risen to headmaster and Charles later shuddered when he remembered him as "a remote and austere character who adhered to the founder's beliefs with the conviction of a true disciple".

The founder he referred to was Kurt Hahn, an eccentric Jewish emigre from Salem School in Germany, where Philip had spent a year just after the rise of Hitler in 1933-34.

Hahn, the prince's most influential mentor during his time at Gordonstoun, pitted his young charges against what he declared was a five-fold decay of civilisation - the decay of fitness, the decay of initiative and enterprise, the decay of care and skill, the decay of self-discipline, and the decay of compassion.

Hahn and Gordonstoun provided Prince Philip with a much-needed sense of stability after the various upheavals of his childhood. But his later years there were overshadowed by the death of his sister Cecilie, and her family, in a plane crash on their way to London for a family wedding in 1937.

It fell to Hahn to break the news to 16-year-old Philip, who would never forget the "profound shock" with which he listened in the headmaster's study to what had happened.

Perhaps more resilient than most boys due to the various other blows he had suffered before that, he "did not break down", so his headmaster later recorded. "His sorrow was that of a man."

Six months later, Philip suffered yet more sorrow when his guardian Georgie Milford Haven died from cancer at the age of 45.

An obscure figure in most accounts of the Mountbatten family, in terms of sheer intelligence and ability and charm, Georgie was as remarkable as any of them.

At the age of 10, he set up a workshop at his father's castle, equipped with lathes, a forge and foundry. So it was no surprise that as a young naval officer, he would go on to design a system of fans, radiators and thermostats for air-conditioning his quarters. He even fashioned a device, controlled by an alarm clock, for making his early morning tea - 20 years before such a gadget appeared on the market.

His remarkable ingenuity helped fire his nephew Philip's budding interest in invention and design, and when Philip grew up, he too would be forever in search of the latest gadgets.

Many who knew Georgie had confidently predicted a brilliant career, and that he would, like his father, eventually succeed to the position of First Sea Lord. But he lacked the obsessive zeal and ambition that characterised his more dazzling younger brother, Louis Mountbatten, known in the family as "Dickie", who now stepped in and took over what remained of the job of bringing their nephew up.

Mountbatten later maintained that he had already marked Philip down as "an exceptional person", the telling moment having been "out shooting one day, when he was eight or nine. It was rough. The way he coped, told me."

Having no son of his own served to focus Mountbatten's attention on his nephew and, although Philip occasionally bridled at his uncle's often showy assumption of parental responsibility, there is no doubt that he had an important influence on him. It was Mountbatten who steered Philip away from his original intention to become a fighter pilot and towards a career in the Royal Navy.

Most crucially, it was his uncle who arranged for Philip to entertain Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret on the eve of war in 1939, during a royal visit to the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth. By this time, Philip was a cadet there.

It was on this occasion that Princess Elizabeth famously fell in love with the handsome young prince, and she never appears to have contemplated marrying anyone else.

She was only 13 at the time, however, and it wasn't until several years later, while on leave from active service and staying at Windsor for Christmas 1943, that Prince Philip, five years her senior, first showed signs of reciprocating her feelings.

The romance began in earnest soon after the end of the war, and it is generally assumed that he proposed to her while staying at Balmoral in the summer of 1946.

King George VI was at first far from eager to give his consent, not least since several of his closest friends were vehemently opposed to Philip. They whispered darkly about his "Teutonic strain" and suspected that his uncle Louis Mountbatten, a notorious intriguer, was proposing to use him as a Trojan horse to help bring the monarchy more into line with his own "rather pink" political outlook.

Mountbatten had long been viewed by courtiers as unsound on account of his friendliness with Labour politicians such as Tom Driberg - not to mention Mountbatten's notoriously left-wing wife, Edwina.

But the King's misgivings about the prospective match had far more to do with his reluctance to break up his close family unit - "Us Four", as he called them - so soon after the war, and to lose his beloved eldest daughter at such a young age.

For Prince Philip, on the other hand, the prospect of marriage to Princess Elizabeth offered the chance at long last for him to regain the family life that he had lost at the age of eight.

One of his more telling thank-you letters to Queen Elizabeth, after staying with the Royal Family, bore moving testimony to how much he relished "the simple enjoyment of family pleasures and amusements and the feeling that I am welcome to share them".

Having been deprived of these "simple pleasures" at such a young age, he was understandably eager now to start a family of his own.

His raising of that family - the Royal Family - stands alongside his support for the Queen and modernising influence on the monarchy as his most important legacies.

- Philip Eade is the author of Young Prince Philip: His Turbulent Early Life

BBC

Russian force on Ukraine border larger than any time since 2014, U.S. says

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Russia has more troops on Ukraine’s eastern border than at any time since 2014, when it annexed Crimea and backed separatist territory seizures, and the United States is concerned by growing “Russian aggressions,” the White House said on Thursday.

The United States is discussing its concerns with its NATO allies, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki told a briefing.

The Russian buildup has become the latest point of friction in icy relations between Moscow and U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration, adding to disputes over arms control, human rights and other issues.

Biden last week expressed “unwavering support” for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in his confrontation with Russia, which in 2014 annexed the Crimea peninsula and backed separatists who seized large parts of the eastern Donbas region.

U.S. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki

Russia has said its troops are no threat and are defensive, but they would remain as long as the Kremlin sees fit.

Psaki said that the United States “is increasingly concerned by recent escalating Russian aggressions in eastern Ukraine, including Russian troop movements on Ukraine’s border.”

“Russia now has more troops than at any time since 2014,” Psaki added, saying that five Ukrainian soldiers have been killed in the past week.

Psaki did not elaborate on the number of Russian troops deployed on Ukraine’s border. But it was the first time that the Biden administration has given a description of the scale of the buildup.

In March 2014, as the conflict in eastern Ukraine escalated, Western estimates put the number of Russian troops, militia or special forces on Ukraine’s border at 25,000 to more than 30,000.

Psaki’s comments followed by hours a telephone call in which Chancellor Angela Merkel of NATO member Germany demanded that Russian President Vladimir Putin pull his troops back to de-escalate the situation.

Source: Reuters