Everyone in the construction industry clearly now just assumes this is how things work. Writing about the cathedral restoration in 2021, one haulage machinery firm guessed that “even with computer-generated 3D modelling and the use of modern building materials, the reconstruction effort could stretch into decades.” They weren’t the only ones guessing decades.

So how was it possible to restore Notre Dame in five years, when new nuclear plants, bridge crossings, canals, and railway lines seem paralysed across the West by bureaucratic executive dysfunction? The answer is that it’s not the actual construction which is the problem. Builders and tradesmen are, generally speaking, paid per job and hence good at getting on with things once the brief is agreed. What causes paralysis is agreeing on a plan for the work.

There are two linked reasons for this: one aesthetic and one political. Firstly, the artistic sensibility that commands high status among the type of information-class elites usually tasked with creating such plans is repugnant to the general public. Thus buildings and infrastructure in this style — think glass and steel, hostile boxes, weird lines and so on — tend to be unpopular, and have to be imposed de haut en bas.

And this triggers the second difficulty. Imposing unpopular buildings takes political will, and this is largely absent in the information class, which prefers abstraction and proceduralism and lives in morbid fear of personal accountability. Branding and finance is their fluid and ambiguous happy place; but project plans with clear, irreversible material dependencies trigger vast sheaves of anxious paperwork that often comes to replace doing the actual project. Add in hostile groups weaponising the same system to obstruct the final product, and you get the morass of buck-passing, strategic ambiguity, spurious bureaucratic procrastination and other symptoms of terminal paralysis that characterises a typical Western infrastructure project.

Notre Dame escaped that trap by having the plan already in place, in the collective memory of the people of France. The brief was simple: put it back the way it was. So — apart from among a few snooty modernist architects who wanted to “modernise” the ruin in various preposterous ways — public support for restoration was genuine and widespread. And thus the project escaped the usual executive-dysfunction traps, despite some bureaucratic rearguard action in the form of hand-wringing about lead pollution: the French government managed this by the simple expedient of passing a special law exempting the project from all the usual red tape. Voila!

There is a lesson here. Bureaucratic paralysis is a political choice. It’s often also a proxy for other battles, as in the Elon Musk haters who use environmental regulations to obstruct SpaceX. The only remedy for this paralysis is projects that command sufficiently broad public support that everyone agrees the clutter can be swept aside. Notre Dame illustrates that if the idea of a building is already present in the collective cultural consciousness, and everyone wants it to happen, doing the actual work is relatively easy.

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Mary Harrington is a contributing editor at UnHerd.

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