Brigitte Macron showed the French culture minister a proposal for a new spire for Notre Dame cathedral shaped like a “phallus with golden balls”, according to the former politician’s memoirs.
Roselyne Bachelot, who was replaced by President Macron last year, recounted how she resisted the push for a modern design to replace the 19th-century spire lost in a fire in 2019.
The 76-year-old, who deploys her lewd sense of humour as a regular radio and television panellist, writes in her 680-page memoir that Macron’s administration was upset when she announced in July 2020 that the spire would be rebuilt as a replica of the old one. “When I got back to the ministry, the office was in a state of stress: the Élysée Palace was dreaming of an ‘architectural gesture’ and was accusing me of just doing what I please,” she wrote.
“I do not regret this insubordination when, at lunch with Brigitte Macron a few days later, she shows me a project topped with a sort of erect phallus with its base surrounded with golden balls.”
Bachelot did not record the thoughts of her friend Mrs Macron on the design. It was one of several shocking shapes that had been offered by architects after President Macron said he envisaged “a contemporary architectural gesture... since the spire wasn’t part of the original cathedral.”
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Other architects’ designs included a greenhouse and beehives at the top of the medieval cathedral, a glass spire or even a laser.
Lord Foster of Thames Bank, the British architect, proposed turning the spire into a “super-slender needle touching heaven’s clouds’’.
Bachelot’s tale, a single paragraph in her new memoirs, sparked mirth on social media and criticism from traditionalists, a section of the country that has always disliked her unvarnished language and earthy humour. A pharmacist by profession and a member of the cabinets of Presidents Chirac and Sarkozy before joining the centrist Macron in 2020, Bachelot claims to be a friend of Mrs Macron.
Last year, she defended the president’s wife against persistent, false social media tales that she was a transgender woman.
