Silicon Valley Nearing the Breaking Point

European Straits #117

Dear all,

I’m on my way to France, where I’ll spend a few days before heading back to London. Obviously there everybody’s mind is on the fire at Notre-Dame. Reading the headlines, you can sense that the disaster triggered a national trauma, which was only reinforced by the emotion expressed worldwide.

As for me, I’m not sure I ever went inside Notre-Dame. I might have a long time ago, as a child, with my father. But for many Parisians (as I once was for about 10 years), Notre-Dame is more of a pleasant, distant sight: a place you avoid because of the many tourists but that you gaze at with great pleasure whenever you have the opportunity to do so.

It’s also a place that resonates a lot with history. It’s by Notre-Dame that the masters of the Knights Templar were burnt alive on the order of King Philippe Le Bel in 1314—just a few decades after the cathedral was completed. Notre-Dame then became a national myth thanks to Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (also an animated picture b…