The burning last week of Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral stirred the emotions of people the world over, and Catholics especially, but the French, regardless of religious commitment, seemed to feel the loss most deeply. Examining this reaction in light of evidence of the rapid decline of Christianity in France, Christopher Caldwell writes:

For centuries French people revered their cathedrals, priests, and relics. But . . . they haven’t lately: just 6 percent go to Mass, down from 35 percent half a century ago. . . . The pollster Jérôme Fourquet argues in his book L’archipel français (“The French Archipelago”), published last month, that in matters of religion the country is undergoing an “anthropological shift.” As in the United States, the size of the still-religious generation born after World War II long disguised the decline. Today, as that generation ages and dies, a demographic trapdoor opens under the religious population. . . .

The alternative to Christianity, Fourquet shows in his book, has not been lucidity; it has been gaga conspiracy-theorizing. A third of French people eighteen to twenty-four years old believe that airplane contrails have been seeded with hazardous chemicals and that the United States military can provoke storms, versus only 7 or 8 percent of those over sixty-five who believe such things. The decline of religion does not seem to have grounded people in something more true.

That is partly why the fire at Notre Dame shook so many to the core. Objects and traditions bound up with religious belief lend a feeling of sense and stability. For believers they are a reinforcement. For nonbelievers they are a substitute. Notre-Dame is perhaps the greatest such object in Europe. It is a consoling relic, as surely as the crown of thorns that Reverend Jean-Marc Fournier, [the chaplain of the Paris fire department], rescued from the blaze, and this is so for believers and nonbelievers alike. . . .

The fire at Notre Dame is harrowing in a way that feels religious because it is religious: it forces us to understand France as those who created it understood it. The people weeping on the banks of the Seine must have sensed this, even if they could not put into words exactly what they were weeping over.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.