
In the hours after news broke that the Cathedral of Notre Dame suffered extensive fire damage, many found hope in a story that circulated on social media about a centuries-old protocol the fire department in Paris followed when battling the fire. The story originated with Twitter user Michael Slavitch, who claimed that firefighters prioritized saving the people and relics over preserving the wooden roof structure of Notre Dame because they knew that the materials needed to rebuild it lay waiting in the Palace of Versailles. After the French Revolution, when large parts of the cathedral were desecrated and damaged, oak trees from Versailles were used to rebuild it. The oaks that were planted thereafter were intended to be used to help rebuild Notre Dame, should it become necessary in the future.
“This is the Long Now in action,” Slavitch tweeted. “It’s what happens when you maintain civilization.”
For many, Slavitch’s story was a silver lining on a dark day. But it is almost certainly apocryphal.¹ It also bears striking similarity to another apocryphal tale we like to tell at Long Now about the oak beams at Oxford.
Stewart Brand on the oak beams of New College, Oxford in “How Buildings Learn.”
That so many wanted the story of the Versailles oaks to be true testifies to the power of foresight and long-term thinking. Just because these stories are apocryphal does not mean they aren’t instructive in teaching us to think long-term. (The Oxford oak beams story, after all, helped inspire the founding of The Long Now Foundation.) Slavitch may be off the mark when he says there are oaks at the ready to rebuild Notre Dame, but he’s correct when he says that doing so is a way to maintain civilization.