Notre-Dame’s New Coach: Resurrecting a Cathedral and Global Ego in One Rebuild

PARIS — While Emmanuel Macron was busy explaining to pensioners why their retirement age now matches the half-life of uranium, another French institution was quietly choosing its next high priest: the head coach of Notre-Dame de Paris.

Yes, the cathedral—charred, scaffolded, and currently more steel exoskeleton than house of God—has hired a “coach.” Not for football (the American sort would be far too secular), but for the moral, spiritual, and logistical resurrection of a monument whose 2019 blaze was live-streamed to a planet already roasting itself in real time. The Vatican, UNESCO, LVMH, and a smattering of Bond-villain donors have pooled €840 million to bring Our Lady back from the ashes. Someone must manage the egos, the artisans, and the inevitable TikTok influencers who will genuflect for clout beside flying buttresses. Enter the coach: former French Culture Minister Jean-Jacques Aillagon, 75, a man whose career arc suggests he’s spent more time in committee meetings than catacombs.

Globally, the appointment lands like a well-aimed croissant in a boardroom: buttery, flaky, and slightly absurd. After all, Notre-Dame is not merely a French church; it is the West’s most successful medieval IPO. Each year twelve million pilgrims, tourists, and Pokémon Go addicts shuffle through its nave, generating soft-power dividends that dwarf most nation-states. The coach’s real mandate, cynics whisper, is to ensure the reopening—scheduled for December 2024—doesn’t coincide with another yellow-vest riot, a heat dome, or, heaven forbid, a Netflix documentary titled “Ashes of Faith.”

International implications abound. The Baltic states, ever anxious about cultural annihilation, view the rebuild as a rehearsal for the day they must reassemble their own shelled cathedrals. Japan has dispatched timber whisperers from Kyoto to advise on 800-year-old oak beams, a diplomatic flex disguised as carpentry. Meanwhile, China’s state media frames the project as proof that even capitalist decay can be refurbished—provided you outsource the craft to artisans who still remember how to use a chisel. Saudi consultants hover on the periphery, taking notes for NEOM’s upcoming “authentic heritage quarter,” a phrase that sounds oxymoronic in any language.

Back in Paris, Coach Aillagon has adopted a management style best described as “benevolent monarchy with PowerPoint.” His daily stand-ups begin with Gregorian chant played on Spotify (ads included), segue into safety briefings about molten lead exposure, and conclude with a meditation on whether the new spire should look exactly like Viollet-le-Duc’s 19th-century Gothic fever dream or include a solar-powered halo to appease the EU’s climate auditors. The workers—an international brigade of stonemasons, arborists, and one suspiciously competent AI that keeps suggesting carbon-fiber gargoyles—report morale is high, mostly because nobody wants to be the scapegoat when the president cuts the ribbon.

Dark humor lurks in the scaffolding. The cathedral’s reliquary still claims to hold Christ’s crown of thorns, a relic whose authenticity is roughly as verifiable as Elon Musk’s Mars timeline. Yet tourists will pay €15 to squint at it through bulletproof glass, proving once again that faith, like cryptocurrency, runs on collective hallucination. Meanwhile, the fire’s real relic—the 300 tons of melted scaffolding that fused into a molten bird’s nest—has been quietly recycled into souvenir paperweights sold in the gift shop. Nothing says “never forget” like a chunk of catastrophe on your desk next to unpaid utility bills.

As Notre-Dame rises, so do questions about what, exactly, we’re resurrecting. A medieval monument? A nationalist pacifier? A backdrop for future Assassin’s Creed levels? Coach Aillagon insists it’s “the soul of France,” which sounds lovely until you realize souls don’t show up in GDP figures. Still, the world watches, half-hopeful, half-horrified, recognizing its own reflection in the soot-streaked rose window: magnificent, fractured, and desperate for a comeback story that doesn’t end in flames.

Come December 2024, when the bells toll again, expect synchronized press ops, tear-stained choirs, and a discreet merchandise tent. Humanity will celebrate the miracle of restoration—never mind that we’re the same species currently strip-mining the Amazon to make novelty phone cases. But perhaps that’s the point. In an age when everything sacred ends up on a tote bag, even resurrection needs a coach. And if the coach fails, well, there’s always fire insurance.