Georges Méliès' Jeanne d'Arc

In the wake of the Industrial Revolution and the massive changes it brought to the communities and ways of life of Europe, there was a resurgence of interest in those traditions that were lost. It began with the Romantics of the 18th century and flowered with Gothic Revivalism in the 19th. Nor did this this movement escape the notice of France's pioneer of fantastic cinema, Georges Méliès. Indeed, he was fully and completely a part of it, articulating this ethos in the brand new medium of film.
Most famous for his films like Le Voyages dans la Lune (1902),  Le Voyage à travers l'Impossible (1904), and A la Conquête du Pôle (1912), Méliès was never a pure purveyor of Science Fiction. He consistently blurred the lines between the astronomer and the astrologer, the chemist and the alchemist, the scientific and the fantastic. Far more of his films had magic and fairy tales as their subject than futuristic inventions and mad scientists. Even his mad scientists, beneath Gothic arches, have more the character of wizards and sorcerers. Méliès' are the cinematic embodiment of the Scientific Romance and all that evocative term entails. 
As a patriotic Frenchman of the fin de siècle, Méliès would have been tapped into the fascination with Joan of Arc. Since her life, conquests, and tragic death, Joan of Arc became an amorphous symbol of French identity, ready to be used by anyone for any reason who have a stake in French society. A sign of strength and Divine Providence, she was appropriated by Republicans for her humble origins and by Monarchists for her support of the Crown. Just as she was a rallying point for France during the Lancasterian phase of Hundred Years' War (1415-1453), so too was she in the wake of the disastrous Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871). Against growing Industrialization she was a symbol of the Mediaeval, and against growing secularization she was a symbol of Catholicism. Nine years after Méliès' 1900 release of Jeanne d'Arc (English: Joan of Arc), she was beatified on the steps of Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris. In 1920 the "Maid of Orleans" was officially canonized as Saint Joan of Arc, Patron Saint of France as well as martyrs, captives, people ridiculed for their piety, military personnel and the US Women's Army Corps. Even those with no particular ties to France venerate the saint, and many women look to her as an icon of feminine heroism.

The nature of Joan's story, replete with angelic visitations and heavenly voices, lends itself well to Méliès' heady trick photography and the air of a fairy tale. Méliès crafts sets of sumptuous Mediavealism in extreme forced perspective, from the exterior of assaulted castle to the interior of churches gleaming with golden hand tinting. Perhaps for this auteur, there was really no necessary distinction to be made between gilded fairy land and the forces of political history. That is much like Joan herself, who turned an otherwise obnoxious war between English and French monarchical heirs into a populist, nationalist uprising and herself into an enduring symbol.

A Tribute to Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris

It's well known that I have a connection in my heart to France, and to nowhere is that connection deeper than to the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris.

For more than 850 years it has stood at the centre of Paris and in the centre of French history. In fact, it marks kilometre 0 for all distance measurements in France. To paraphrase Bishop Robert Barron, to say that Notre-Dame stands at the centre of Paris is to say that it stands at the centre of France, which is to say it stands at the centre of Europe, which is to say that it stands at the centre of Western civilization. And at the centre of Notre-Dame stands the Cross.

Notre-Dame is an icon of the city and the supreme example of the Mediaeval genius for both faith and art. The appreciation of Beauty is the aspiration towards the enduring, the transcendent, and the sacred. Beauty is the splendor of Goodness and Truth, their radiance into the world in modes far deeper and more powerful and more moving than an ethical or scientific debate. That is why Beauty - true art, the autonomy of art, uncontrollable art unfettered by propaganda and politics, art of the human experience - is always the first thing to come under attack in zeitgeists that seek to extinguish Goodness and Truth. The quest for Beauty is the longing for meaning. Few, if any, man-made places are as beautiful to my eye as the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris.

Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris is centuries of devotion and sacrifice petrified into stone. Statuary adorns it in high places that no Earthly eye is able to see. It moves humankind exactly because it was the best of humankind poured into something built to the glory of God. It is sublime and ageless, having survived disaster, desecration, and dilapidation before being restored to its rightful place as a jewel in the crown of Christendom. The July Monarchy deliberated on whether or not to tear the venerable cathedral down, after it had suffered so cruelly by the French Revolution's hatred of all Goodness and Truth and Beauty. Yet a popular novel by Victor Hugo reignited passion for everything about the romance of mediaevalism, patriotism, and religiousity that the cathedral represented. Notre-Dame was not only a symbol for the Church or the nation of France, but for the growing dissatisfaction with the failed promises of modernity. That is also what it represents for me: a living, ancient, enduring emblem of the romance of history, majesty, and faith. 

Notre-Dame figured prominently in my two trips to Paris, once during a brief layover in 2008 when it was one of only three attractions I had time to visit (the others being the Eiffel Tower and Disneyland Paris) and again in 2013 when we passed it nearly every day for two weeks. I lost track of the number of times we stepped inside to offer devotion, but its awesome presence, the breath of the Spirit moving through it, the weight of its ages and the innumerable people who have passed there all seeped into my bones. In the words of Sinclair Lewis: "He who has seen one cathedral ten times has seen something; he who has seen ten cathedrals once has seen but little; and he who has spent half an hour in each of a hundred cathedrals has seen nothing at all."

If there was any one building that I would consider my spiritual home, even more than my local parish, it would be the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris. It broke my heart beyond words to see the terrible images of its roof ablaze on April 15, 2019, and all I could do not to burst into tears at the good news that the stone structure was saved, along with the three rose windows and majority of the stained glass, and all of the art and relics. She still endures. Thanks be to God. 

L' Exposition Universelle de 1900

It was the last of its kind, the last of the true "universal" expositions and the final in string of international expositions held in Paris in 1855, 1867, 1878, and 1889. L' Exposition Universelle de 1900 was the high point of La Belle Époque and widely considered the finest of its kind ever held. Its monumental works still grace the waterfront of the Seine, including the Grand and Petite Palais, Pont Alexandre III bridge, and gare d'Orsay train station, now the Musée d'Orsay. The Paris Metro was also an inheritance of  L' Exposition Universelle, and though it did not play as strong a role in the aesthetics of the exposition, the Art Nouveau so associated with the Metro was brought to a true international audience. 

The previous major exposition was the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, which presented the United States of America come of age. The frontier was declared closed and the United States turned inwards and upwards, attempting to push new frontiers of industry and establish itself as a global player on the world's political and cultural stage. France had no such compulsion. After all, it was France, generally acknowledged as the world's cultural centre. Even past Parisian expositions had a sensibility of France trying to prove itself in the wake of wartime. There little of that preoccupation in 1900... This exposition was strictly looking back at the accomplishments of the past and looking forward to the future accomplishments yet to come, while all the time celebrating the greatest in French and international art.

The Eiffel Tower and Globe Céleste.