No, the courts have not cleared the way for the contemporary stained-glass windows at Notre-Dame de Paris

Some readers are worried that the courts have supposedly “cleared the way for contemporary stained-glass windows for the cathedral” of Notre-Dame, as the headline of an article in Le Parisien puts it. For those who will be able to read it, the article itself is much more cautious, but some people read only the headline, especially when the newspaper is subscriber-only. Let us therefore clarify what this is about.

No, the way is not clear. The two legal proceedings are still ongoing, and both rest on strong arguments, even if for the moment one of the appeals has been lost, on the merits. Even then, it was lost only at first instance. Let us recall that the courts — and the administrative court is no exception — allow appeals, and that the association Sites & Monuments has appealed. If it were to lose this appeal, it would then go before the Conseil d’État. Yet this first procedure is based (see the article) on an unanswerable argument : the public body was created to conserve and restore Notre-Dame. Since the removal of the stained-glass windows is neither a conservation nor a restoration operation (indeed, it is the exact opposite !), it cannot act as contracting authority for it. The court even dared to claim that the definition of what restoration is could not be found in the Heritage Code!

The second procedure concerns the substance of the matter, namely the legitimacy of the works (and not the competence of the contracting authority). Here again, the arguments are irrefutable. It was the subject of an interim application, which allows work to be suspended for two reasons: because of urgency, and because there are serious doubts as to the legality of the act. If the interim application was rejected, thus allowing the works to continue, it is solely because the interim relief judge considered that there was no urgency. The judge did not rule on the possible absence of serious doubt, since there was no need to examine the substance of the case if urgency had not been established.
One may debate this question of urgency. The works have begun, but the public body and the prefect claim that they would be “reversible”, since what has been done — namely replacing the stained-glass windows by Viollet-le-Duc with those by Claire Tabouret — could be undone by reinstalling the stained-glass windows by Viollet-le-Duc through the reverse operation.
While this remains theoretically possible, one can imagine the cost of these successive building campaigns (removal and installation, followed by removal and reinstallation, not to mention the cost of conserving the stained-glass windows by Viollet-le-Duc between the two operations). That alone should justify suspending the works. But evidently the question of cost is not considered a valid argument in interim proceedings.

The most likely outcome now, despite the petition that has just exceeded 350,000 signatures, which we encourage you to continue signing and sharing, is that the stained-glass windows will be installed. This will then make it necessary to remove them in order to reinstall those by Viollet-le-Duc if the association Sites & Monuments ultimately prevails. It is not as though France were burdened with debt and incapable of ensuring the conservation of its historic monuments!
The person responsible, at worst for this act of vandalism, at best for this squandering of public money, and we shall never repeat this often enough, is Emmanuel Macron, with the complicity of the Archbishop of Paris, Laurent Ulrich. For our part, we shall fight to the very end against the removal of the stained-glass windows by Viollet-le-Duc. And even if, by some misfortune, all legal appeals were to fail, we shall continue on La Tribune de l’Art to call for a reversal of the decision, so as to restore Notre-Dame to its historic pre-fire state.