Alexandre Chauveau / Photo credit: CHRISTIAN HARTMANN / POOL / AFP
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2:14 p.m., August 25, 2023
This Friday morning took place the national tribute paid to General Jean-Louis Georgelin, former chief of staff of the armies in charge of supervising the reconstruction of Notre-Dame de Paris. A sober ceremony, chaired by Emmanuel Macron.
It will have lasted just an hour, under an almost wintry gray sky, which reinforced the sadness of the moment. The ceremony in tribute to General Jean-Louis Georgelin, former chief of staff and “master builder of the rebirth of Notre-Dame”, as Emmanuel Macron had called him, took place this Friday morning. This began just after a mass celebrated in the Saint-Louis des Invalides church, which is the cathedral of the diocese of the French armies.
A eulogy in reference to Notre-Dame
Were then present in the courtyard of the Invalides, the ministers, but also members of the class of Jean-Louis Georgelin at Saint-Cyr, from which he graduated in 1976. Many soldiers, brothers in arms as well as companions and craftsmen engaged on the Notre-Dame site. The President of the Republic obviously alluded to it in his eulogy, where he mentioned the reopening of the cathedral.
“On December 8, 2024, we will be thinking of you, I will be thinking of you. The way you would have walked a little apart from the crowd in the nave, taking this moment for you, just yours, in the secret and the shadow of your faith. And you will be there, my general, in the carillon, through the strokes of the Angelus piercing the sound of the bells of Notre-Dame de Paris. The whole nation will still hear you. Farewell my General!”, declared, solemnly, Emmanuel Macron.
There followed the ringing of the dead, then a minute of silence, La Marseillaise and finally the funeral march of Chopin who accompanied, towards the exit of the courtyard of the Invalides, the coffin of the general draped in blue white red. Died last Friday during a hike in the Pyrenees, Jean-Louis Georgelin was 74 years old.