Aurélien Bellanger, cyclist, and marathon runner publishes The Architect of Notre-Dame with Actes Sud — first departure from Gallimard in over a decade, and a return to the historical-infrastructural novel that made his name.

Introduction: For fifteen years, Aurélien Bellanger has been building something like a Balzacian project for the present: a sequence of novels that each take a single technical or institutional object — a telecoms network, a stretch of high-speed rail, a political party, a cathedral — and use it as a lens onto the whole structure of French modernity. He announced the project’s ambitions early, with a 2010 monograph on Michel Houellebecq, before making it his own.

La Théorie de l’information (2012) turned the rise of the internet, and the biography of a Xavier Niel-like entrepreneur, into a history of the information age. L’Aménagement du territoire (2014), winner of the Prix de Flore, wove high-speed rail, property speculation, and buried Breton history around a Francis Bouygues-like figure. Le Grand Paris (2017) followed a young suburban operator, Alexandre Belgrand, through the cynicism and grandiosity of the Grand Paris Express — a Nicolas Sarkozy-like’s metro project — as a way of narrating the fracture between the capital and its banlieues. Le Continent de la douceur (2019) took on Bernard-Henri Lévy; Téléréalité (2021), Stéphane Courbit’s world of media and territory; Le Vingtième Siècle (2023) reimagined Walter Benjamin as a messiah. In 2024 Bellanger shifted register again, moving to Seuil for Les Derniers Jours du Parti socialiste, a satirical roman à clef about the collapse of French socialism into what he calls an “Orwellian left” — a current that presents itself as left-wing while functioning, in his account, as something closer to its opposite.

Abstract: The Architect of Notre-Dame returns to the old method and follows Viollet-le-Duc, accompanied by a country priest in the Bas-Maine who doubles as an informal watchman over the revolutionary activities of a group of Germans in Paris, among them a young Karl Marx. The other strand, set essentially in the present, follows Ancelin de Gorré, a young stonemason, a compagnon du devoir old guild tradition of itinerant craftsmen — under a mason who will himself go on to work on the Notre-Dame restoration after the 2019 fire.

You make Viollet-le-Duc a nineteenth-century architect, “the one who stays up latest”, haunted by a Middle Ages that he invents as much as he restores it. Can we speak of postmodernism here?

Aurélien Bellanger : That’s really the whole question. Architecture is normally the field in which these concepts take shape — it is almost the matrix of our regime of historicity. And yet Viollet-le-Duc oscillates, swings back and forth like a door that won’t quite close, between the old, which he venerates, and the modern, which he champions and which defines his method. I wanted to look closely at this anomaly, to see what it might tell us about our own present. Where are we now, overrun on every side by reaction, pursued by fascism? Are we still modern? Were we ever really postmodern?

The novel’s plot runs “from the fall of the Second Empire to the appearance of Islamic State” and Trump. Why is this huge temporal span necessary to tell the story of a cathedral?

Aurélien Bellanger: Two timelines complement each other. One belongs to Viollet-le-Duc, caught near the end, during his last journey. The other belongs to a contemporary stonemason who will find himself caught up both in the brief episodes of contemporary vandalism and in the fire at Notre-Dame. What links them is that the mason grew up in a manor house restored by the master.

Ancelin de........

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