The People’s Altar

By Marisa DeMaria and Marian Bleeke

It is probably safe to say that most people who visit Notre-Dame see it as a medieval building, one that has changed little since it was first constructed. One point of this website project is to demonstrate that that’s not actually true: the building has changed over and over again over time. But it looks medieval. And for that reason it may be jarring for visitors to see a modern, abstract sculpture its center in the form of the high or main altar known as the People’s Altar.

The People's Altar at Notre-Dame.  Zmorgan, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The cathedral’s high altar has changed multiple times over the centuries. The original high altar was located at the east end of the choir, that is, the east end of the central portion of the cathedral, inside of the ambulatories and the chapels. It looked like a stone casket with arches on its base. In the 1300’s it was embellished with a gilded silver retable, placed above and behind the altar table, and a metalwork frontal placed in front of its base. A consecrated host hung over the altar table in a silver-gilt container and gilt-silver crucifix sat on it. This altar was replaced in early 1700’s. At this time, the high altar was moved further east to directly in front of the columns that separate the choir from the ambulatory. A marble sculpture of the Pieta, the dead Christ on the Virgin Mary’s lap, was placed above and behind this altar and sculptures of Kings Louis XIII and Louis XIV were placed on either side of it. During the Revolution, these sculptures were sent to a museum and the altar was destroyed. The sculptures were returned after the Revolution and combined with a new medieval-style altar created by Viollet-le-Duc. This was all still in place before the fire in 2019 – and will be again after the post-fire renovations are complete – but this is not the high altar for the cathedral.

Eighteenth-century sculptures and nineteenth-century altar in the choir of Notre-Dame.  The cross in the background is modern.  GO69, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

 

Priests who said mass at both of these altars did so facing the altars and so with their backs to the people attending the mass. This is made obvious by the placement of the second altar at the end of the choir, up against the columns. This was a common practice in the Middle Ages and beyond. It began to change in the 1960’s, when the Catholic Church made changes to the mass in order to open it up to the people. These changes included celebrating mass in the local language instead of in Latin and having the priest face the people during mass. In order to make that possible, altars were moved away from walls and other things so that the priest could be on one side of the altar and face the people on its other side. To make that change happen at Notre-Dame, the high altar had to be relocated again. The new altar is placed in the middle of the church, in the crossing where the main east-west body of the church intersects with the transept that runs north-south. In 2004 it was elevated on a podium.

People's Altar in use during a church service.  Dennis Jarvis from Halifax, Canada, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

This altar was commissioned by Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, a notable figure in twentieth-century Catholic history in France. Born to secular Jewish parents, he converted to Catholicism in 1940 and was ordained in 1954. He served as a chaplain at the Sorbonne for 15 years and then as a parish priest in Paris for 10 years, before becoming Bishop of Orleans in 1979, then Archbishop of Paris in 1981, and Cardinal in 1983. Once he took on these public roles, he was open about his Jewish roots and advocated for a closer relationship between Jews and Catholics. This included organizing the French church’s 1997 apology for its participation in the deportations and deaths of French Jews during World War II – including his own mother who was first detained at Drancy and then deported to Auschwitz and killed in 1943.

During his time as a parish priest at Sainte-Jeanne de Chantal, starting in 1970, Lustiger became interested in the role of art in the liturgy. He commissioned the artist Jean Touret to create altar sculptures for this church. And he returned to Touret in 1989 for the new high altar of the cathedral. About Touret, Lustiger has said “I found in him a man who had moved forward in relation to what were my own questions about art… He wanted to help with his pieces of wood, with his plates. sheet, zinc, copper, to show the invisible in the visible. He was a spiritual man, a man of God. He lived in realized eschatology.” Touret was a companion of Henri Matisse and lived from 1916 to 2004. He had 13 major religious projects including refinishing churches, internal and external crosses, stained glass windows, sculptures and modern seating. There is little to no biography information available on Touret. He is known for two things: his faith and his work. His personal life, other than his friendship with Lustiger, is quite the mystery. This is because, although contemporary in style, his work was a religious expression rather than a self-conscious artistic self-expression. In other words, his art wasn’t about him.

Touret's People's Altar in the foreground, eighteenth-century Pieta and modern altar cross in the background.  Dennis Jarvis from Halifax, Canada, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Touret’s High Altar for Notre Dame is abstracted, yet still figurative. Sculpted in bronze, it stands nearly five feet wide. It is a painted, brass chest with effigies in solid bronze. The edges of the chest itself are not perfectly linear, but they do form rectangles on each side. On the frontal side, we see four figures. We can distinguish this by the elongated body shape. The legs are simply just a rectangle, but the torso is slightly bigger with squared shoulders. Although the body is almost consistent in shape, there is a small, abstracted neck that connects a head to it. The head is a much smaller, square shape in contrast to the long rectangular body. Each body varies visually as the edges are slightly different, alluding to the hips or legs of some sort. While captivating visually, it is not void of biblical history and reference. These modern shapes on the front are of four apostles: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. On the sides, these bodies repeat, two on each side representing four prophets. On one side, two bodies represent Ezekiel and Daniel on the left. On the right side, there is Jeremiah and Isaiah -- also prophets. Although modern in style, it is not secular or anti-religious.

Touret’s altar has been controversial from the start. After the fire in 2019, some claimed that damage to the altar was God's wrath upon this artwork. However, there was very little damage to the altar from the fire. A falling stone broke the head of the figure of Jeremiah. It will be easy to repair. To honor Touret and Lustiger, it is planned to include a quote from Lustiger in the altar during restoration. The response and restoration reflect the contemporary movement of the Catholic church.

Sources:

Colin Nettelbeck, "The 'Jewish Cardinal'? Aran Jean-Marie Lustiger (1926-2007)," French Cultural Studies 28/1 (2017): 67-78.

 Dany Sandron and Andrew Tallon, Notre-Dame Cathedral: Nine Centuries of History.  The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020.