Musée de l’Œuvre de Notre-Dame: an opportunity for the Hôtel-Dieu

The regrettable affair of the Viollet-le-Duc stained glass windows (sign the petition) should not detract from a remarkable decision by the French President of the Republic, which cannot be overstated: the decision to create, at last, the Musée de l’Œuvre Notre-Dame that everyone has been calling for, and also the decision to locate it in the Hôtel-Dieu building next to the cathedral (ill. 1 and 2), which is historically linked to it.

1. The Hotel-Dieu seen from Notre-Dame
In the foreground, the site (we hope) of the future museum
Photo: Joseph Hunkins (CC BY 2.0)

See the image in its page

The only resistance to this choice seems to be from Assistance Public-Hôpitaux de Paris, also called AP-HP (the public institution that manages hospitals in Paris), which sadly demonstrates once again how hostile this body is to heritage issues. Among the AP-HP’s countless feats of arms was the demolition of a nineteenth-century town house on the carrefour Duroc, with a promise that it would be rebuilt, which was never kept (see article), and other demolitions carried out on the Necker hospital site (see article), the transformation of the Laënnec hospital into a private enclave in the middle of the protected sector of the 7th arrondissement (see articles), the closure and storage of its museum in the Hôtel de Miramion, sold to the private sector (see articles), and the threats hanging over the former La Rochefoucauld hospital (see articles)...

The resistance to installing this museum in the building - which has recently been listed as a historic monument (inscription), and which deserves to be "classé" - is actually incomprehensible, as it goes against the very interests of the AP-HP.
Let’s summarise the situation: part of the hospital will remain in service, but it will only occupy around the north-east quarter of the building. The Novaxia project was to have been set up in the south of the building, while for the time being there are no plans for the…