Many commentators have looked to precedents that could offer some solace, especially to the histories of great buildings that had been rebuilt after fire. (On the day of the fire, the Teatro La Fenice, in Venice, tweeted in solidarity: “We burnt twice but twice we have risen from our ashes stronger. We are at your side, friends, so fear not!” 2) Here I would like to offer a largely forgotten yet remarkably suggestive historical parallel: the accidental fire that in July 1823 destroyed the immense early Christian basilica of San Paolo fuori le mura (Saint Paul’s Outside the Walls). 3 Like Notre-Dame, the fourth-century San Paolo, just south of Rome, was a holy site of the highest stature: the burial place of Saint Paul and, with St. Peter’s and the Lateran basilica, one of the three most important churches in Rome. San Paolo was also, before the fire, the biggest and best preserved church to have survived from the heroic era when Christianity, formerly outlawed, became the state religion of the late Roman Empire. [...]
The debates and commentaries that followed the two fires strike similar notes. The fire at San Paolo also occurred during a period of crisis — a long via crucis of occupation, humiliation, insult, and upheaval that had threatened the very survival of the Roman Catholic Church. The crisis had begun three decades earlier, in France, when an atheistic Revolution transformed the country traditionally known as the Church’s “eldest daughter” into its mortal enemy. In the tumultuous years that followed, Rome would endure two desecrating occupations, one pope would die in a French prison, another would be bullied into a series of enfeebling international agreements, and many church buildings in the city would be damaged or even demolished. After the fall of Napoléon, in 1814, Church leaders confronted what seemed an unrecognizable social, political, religious, and economic landscape. Catholic observance was in decline across Europe; political liberalism was ascendant; rights and privileges the Church had long enjoyed abroad were truncated or gone. The Church was collapsing financially, while the Pontifical State had become little more than a stagnant welfare state — a feudal relic surrounded by neighbors transitioning to industrial capitalism. The fire at the Roman basilica could scarcely have avoided being perceived as a supercharged metaphor. [...]
Opposition to this plan arose immediately among clerics and scholars who argued instead for an exact reconstruction of the old basilica, which came to be known as the in pristinum solution. At the time this was unprecedented. In earlier centuries new buildings had sometimes made formal references to older ones, while repairs or extensions sometimes sought to preserve harmony with an existing building. But a complete replica of a destroyed building was unheard of. 24 Valadier’s response was blunt: You cannot resuscitate the past. What is lost is lost. What had been most valuable about the old basilica, in his view, was the patina, the aura of antiquity, and that was irretrievably gone. All you could reconstitute were the mere physical forms, and these he regarded — as had most historians for centuries — as self-evidently inferior to any new design rooted in the Vitruvian classical tradition. Far better, Valadier wrote, to memorialize the destroyed basilica with a scale model, and to mount its surviving antique columns along the interior walls of a modern design that would “do honor to the 19th century.” 25 [...]
The key difference now was that the faithful would have to be persuaded to donate voluntarily to San Paolo. Accordingly, the in pristinum faction argued that a replica reconstruction would appeal far more to the ordinary faithful than would a tasteful church in the modern style. This point proved decisive for Leo XII, who longed to launch a popular Catholic revival that might heal the wounds of recent years. The fundraising drive for San Paolo became a centerpiece of that revival: an international crusade calling for obedience, sacrifice, and a cheerful spirit of Pauline devotion. Letters were circulated from Rome to be used by the clergy in making appeals at Sunday masses. What resulted was the first global fundraising drive in history. For several years, the Church collected money not only throughout Europe but also in the United States, Canada, China, the Philippines, Brazil, and Latin America. Lists of donors were published every six months in the Diario di Roma, and these were then reported in local papers from Baltimore to Tasmania — a publicity circuit which in turn fueled more donations. 48 With authority centralized in Rome and outreach extended to the hinterlands, this effort would prove to be one of the wellsprings of the great Catholic cultural and political revival that marked the second half of the 19th century. For it helped compel Rome finally to accept popular religiosity, which opened the way to the great upsurge of Marian devotion marked by the pilgrimages inaugurated at La Salette and Lourdes; the Catholic press soon expanded all over Europe, Pope Pius IX became the focus of a personality cult, and Catholic political movements gathered momentum. Catholics, in short, felt empowered as members of their Church as never before. 49
