It would be a sin to charge an entry fee for Notre-Dame

Britons are rightly upset about plans to charge them more than European visitors, but any fee to visit a place of worship should be opposed

It seems that the French have found a new way of annoying everybody – apart from, you know, being French, speaking French and giving rise to Joan of Arc, Napoleon and Antoine Dupont at scrum-half. The initiative comes from culture minister Rachida Dati, an admirable woman.
There are, in fact, two initiatives involved. Mme Dati has suggested, firstly, charging for entry to Notre-Dame cathedral when it reopens on December 8, five years and seven months after the fire which wrecked the 860-year-old monument. 
In almost the same breath, she mooted the idea of differential pricing for entry to France’s museums and cultural spots, so that non-EU citizens will pay more to get in. “Is it normal,” she asked last week, “for a French person to pay the same for entry to the Louvre as a Brazilian or a Chinese visitor? The French people should not have to pay for everything on their own.”
That last sentence is odd. The French don’t pay for everything on their own. Of the 8.9 million visitors to the Louvre last year, 68 per cent were non-French visitors coughing up their £14 (the price rose to £18.30 this year). So foreigners are already doing their bit. And – here’s another point – we all know that for every Brazilian loping around the Louvre, there are probably a couple of hundred Britons. So it’s clear who are the real targets of this ruthless cultural move.
But first things first: the €5 to get into Notre-Dame. Mme Dati justifies the charge on the grounds that almost everyone’s doing it: St Paul’s and Westminster Abbey in London, York Minster, the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona… they’re all reaching into our pockets, and for considerably more than €5 (£4.20). In York, it’s £18, at St Paul’s £25 and for the Sagrada Familia £22. What she doesn’t mention is that other outstanding Catholic places of worship – St Peter’s in Rome, Westminster Cathedral – remain free.
The Notre-Dame charge would break with this precedent. And, according to opponents, it might also be illegal. Since the 1905 separation of Church and state, French churches built before that year have essentially been in public ownership. The state or local council owns the buildings and furnishings, and lets the clergy use them for acts of worship. The councils pay for maintenance, the church for lighting, heating and any expenses concerned with religious observance.
You can see that, especially in France, such an arrangement is scarcely going to lead to harmony and peace on earth. It doesn’t. Right now, religious folk are arguing that, in compensation for having their churches confiscated in 1905, they gained an undertaking that the buildings would always be free of entry. It’s in article 17, apparently. So charging goes against the 1905 agreement.
Whether this is so or not – and whatever’s going on in churches in the UK, Spain or Italy – it’s not at all clear that a Notre-Dame entry charge is a brilliant idea. It responds to a layman’s idea of churches as purely cultural items. Of course, they are culturally vital – but that’s not all. They have a resonance beyond the scope of châteaux and museums. Look round the Egyptian section of the Louvre and it’s glorious, but you don’t feel that you’re in the presence of people who believe in, have believed in, or ever gave any real significance to Ra and the rest. The interest is important but purely historical.
In a contemporary cathedral (synagogue/mosque/temple), and even if you’re an unbeliever, you’re in the presence or peoples’ faith, hope and maybe charity – in short, some of the deepest of humanity’s concerns – both today and going back centuries. There’s a palpable power quite different to that generated in even the finest museums. I last experienced this in Notre-Dame just pre-fire, at an evening of 17th-century sacred music. It was of a discordant, tuneless purity hard on rock’n’roll-raddled ears. But gradually the sound swelled to fill the vast space, generating a bracing beauty which said more about the pain and complexities of faith than, frankly, I’d expected on a wet Thursday evening. It also somehow summed up the challenging grandeur of Notre-Dame itself.
In response to Mme Dati, Notre-Dame’s diocesan authorities last week put this much better than I can. “The principle of free access to cathedrals and churches,” they wrote, “is grounded […] in the fundamental mission of churches to welcome every man and woman unconditionally, and therefore necessarily free of charge, regardless of their religion or belief, opinions or financial means.” Letting worshippers in for free while obliging tourists to pay – as is suggested – “would deprive both pilgrims and visitors of the unity which is the essence of the place.”
It would also be jolly hard to operate, practically (who wouldn’t try to sneak in as a believer?) and would ignore the fact that many people are both visitors and believers. Or might become so, like the poet Paul Claudel. On Christmas Day, 1886, Claudel underwent a sudden conversion by the cathedral’s main Virgin statue. 
Ok, there’ll be money raised: £62.5 million a year, according to Mme Dati. The cash isn’t needed, for the moment, for Notre-Dame itself. Its £590 million repair works are more than covered by donations to the fire disaster fund. The £62.5 million will rather, she says, save all the churches of Paris and indeed of France. Which seems a bit of a stretch, given that present repair work to Nantes cathedral – burned out in 2020 – is alone costing £27 million. That’s just one cathedral out of France’s 87. Meanwhile, the country has some 32,000 churches, and 6,000 chapels. I’m not sure £62.5 million a year is going to be enough.
Incidentally, should visitors really want to contribute to maintaining Notre-Dame and other churches, they might be better advised to visit the Notre-Dame shop. A pack of three Notre-Dame soaps is available for a tenner, a Notre-Dame Christmas bauble for £12.50 and a fridge magnet of the cathedral façade for £4.20.
But the principle of free access to the cathedral itself seems an important one so that, in the words of the diocesan spokesman, nothing hinders all-comers “from experiencing the monument fully and appreciating its infinite beauty”.
The issue of differential pricing for museums and other cultural sites, with non-EU people paying more, is easier to resolve. It’s crackers. In truth, I find most instances of differential pricing a bit odd. I’ve never quite understood the justification for, say, rises in hotel prices simply because it’s July and August. 
Pretty much everything hotels themselves buy remains the same price (there’s no, “it’s summer, we’re upping the charge of laundry/electricity/bacon/Glenfiddich”), there’s less to spend on heating, they’ve generally got lots more people coming through so are generating more cash anyway – and so, um, they hike the tariffs. I don’t think that happens in petrol stations, supermarkets or, say, cinemas.
Differential pricing based on people’s provenance is crazier yet. Also very rude. You imagine going into a restaurant to be told: “Ah, you’re Chinese; we have a special menu for our Chinese friends. Prices are double. Bon appétit.” Or a bar? “Beer for Jean-Jacques le boulanger, €5. For you, his Scottish guest… here’s an estimate.”
So, when the culture minister asks whether it’s normal for a French person to pay the same to enter the Louvre as a Chinese or Brazilian visitor, the answer is: “Of course it is, madame.” For British visitors too. You wouldn’t expect to pay more to visit Stonehenge, or eat a full English in Bristol, merely, because you’re French. Imagine that. It’s as normal as can be that all nationalities pay the same… just as it’s normal that Chinese and Brazilian people buy big ticket items in Parisian fashion houses and that British people flow through your country, disbursing vast amounts of money from Calais to Nice and all points in between.
You really want to offend key customers with silly pricing? Have you seen the size of the French national debt?