Weeks before its scheduled grand reopening after a devastating fire, Notre Dame has become embroiled in an escalating row over whether to charge future visitors a fee to enter the 12th-century gothic masterpiece.
France’s culture minister, Rachida Dati, proposed this week that tourists visiting the Paris cathedral, known as “the soul of France” and one of the world’s great architectural treasures, should pay a €5 entrance fee to help preserve the country’s crumbling churches.
But while visitors to the most notable cathedrals in neighbouring countries, including Spain, Italy and Britain, routinely pay for the privilege, France’s Roman Catholic church is fiercely opposed to the idea, and experts have warned it could even be illegal.
Notre Dame is due to reopen on 8 December after narrowly escaping total destruction in April 2019 when flames tore through its wooden rafters and lead roof, toppling its monumental spire and prompting a mammoth five-year restoration project.
President Emmanuel Macron said at the time that the cathedral, visited by 12-14 million people a year before the fire, was “our history, our literature, our collective imagination – the place where we have lived all our great moments, our wars and our liberations. It is the epicentre of our life.”
But Dati told Le Figaro newspaper that, across Europe, people “have to pay to visit remarkable religious edifices”, adding that she had “suggested a very simple idea to the archbishop of Paris: a symbolic fee for all tourist visits to Notre Dame.”
The scheme could raise up to €75m (£62m) a year, which would be “completely dedicated to a grand preservation plan for France’s religious heritage”, she said. “Notre Dame would save all the churches of France. It would be a magnificent symbol.”
France’s interior minister, Bruno Retailleau, welcomed the idea, telling France Inter radio that if “€5 can save France’s religious heritage, that’s a good thing, whether one believes in heaven or not: quite simply, this is our landscape.”
France’s national heritage charity, the Fondation du Patrimoine, has described the state of many of the nation’s chapels, churches, abbeys and cathedrals as “very worrying”, with about 5,000 at risk and nearly 500 in such poor condition that they are closed to the public.
Guillaume Poitrinal, the body’s president, said it was “delighted to see that politicians are finally beginning to understand the threat to our religious buildings: €75m a year could help prevent them from disappearing altogether.”
Many European cathedrals charge tourists. Tickets to Milan’s Duomo cost €10 to €30 (for a fast track pass and terrace access by lift, rather than the stairs), while St Mark’s Basilica in Venice is a more modest €3 (plus €10 for the bell tower).
In Spain, the Mosque-Cathedral of Cordoba costs €13, Seville Cathedral charges €12 and the Sagrada Família in Barcelona €26. Canterbury Cathedral in the UK costs £17, Westminster Abbey £30 and St Paul’s £25.
For notable cathedrals in cities popular with tourists, the income can be substantial: the Sagrada Família, Antoni Gaudí’s masterpiece and the largest unfinished Catholic church in the world, raised more than €125m from its almost 5 million visitors in 2023.
France’s Catholic church, however, remains strongly attached to the principle of free access for all, whether worshipper or tourist, although some cathedrals do charge visitors to enter certain parts of the building, such as bell towers, crypts and treasuries.
Churches and cathedrals must be able to “welcome all, unconditionally – thus necessarily free of charge – regardless of religion, belief, opinions and financial means”, the diocese of Notre Dame said in a stern statement.
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It added that given Notre Dame’s design, establishing a system that distinguished between tourists and people coming to the cathedral for private prayer would be “extremely complicated in terms of its practicalities”.
It insisted it was open to “other schemes that do not consist of taxing visitors to the cathedral”, but said a universal €5 entrance fee would “inevitably lead to people declining to visit a building that by its nature should be wide open to all”.
The government’s suggestion could also run into legal difficulties under France’s 1905 secularism law, which separated the church and the state, transferring – among other things – the ownership of religious buildings from the former to the latter.
The law states that church visits “cannot be subject to any tax or duty”. Churches may charge visitors to enter certain rooms, for example, the bell tower, as Notre Dame itself did (for €17) before the fire, “but you cannot charge for access to the building itself”, said Maëlle Comte, a public law lecturer at Jean Monnet University.
Since the 1905 law is not part of the French constitution, some legal experts have suggested the government, if it was really determined, could simply rewrite it. Either way, said Ariel Weil, the mayor of central Paris, something needs to be done.
“The minister’s proposal as it stands may not be possible,” Weil told Radio France, “but it does raise the question of the huge number of visitors to Notre Dame and the colossal investments required in our religious heritage nationwide.”
It was by no means absurd, Weil said, to ask “whether 12, 13, 14 million visitors a year could not do their bit. Perhaps a voluntary contribution, with a suggested fee at the entrance? There’s a price, but you don’t have to pay it.”
Stéphane Bern, Macron’s heritage adviser, would go further. “Not when there’s a service on,” he said. “It’s the house of God; it must be free then. But is it really so bad to charge tourists in shorts, with cameras round their necks?”