The lesson from the ruins of Notre Dame: don’t rely on
billionaires
Aditya Chakrabortty
The French super-rich promised to dig deep, but such
philanthropy comes at a steep price
@chakrabortty
Thu 18 Jul 2019 06.00 BST Last modified on Thu 18 Jul 2019
15.20 BST
You remember the story, of course you do. One of the most
ancient and holy buildings on Earth, Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, goes up in
flames. As pictures of the inferno are beamed around the world, adjectives rain
down: it is atrocious, disastrous, diabolical.
Barely has the fire been put out before some of the richest
people in France rush to help rebuild it. From François-Henri Pinault, the
ultimate owner of Gucci, comes €100m (£90m). Not to be outdone, the Arnault
family at Louis Vuitton put up €200m. More of the wealthy join the bidding, as
if a Damien Hirst is going under the hammer. Within just three days, France’s
billionaire class has coughed up nearly €600m. Or so their press releases
state.
A few folk question this very public display of plutocratic
piety, but we are of course professional malcontents. Some of Paris’s 3,600
rough sleepers protest at how so many euros can be found for a new cathedral
roof yet not a cent to put a roof over their heads – still, what do the poor
know of the sublime? From all other seats, the applause is deafening.
“Billionaires can sometimes come in really handy,” remarks the editor of
Moneyweek. “Everybody is at our bedside,” says French TV celeb Stéphane Bern.
Flush with cash, French president Emmanuel Macron vows the gothic masterpiece
will be rebuilt within five years. Front pages scored, studio hours filled, the
world moves on. You almost certainly haven’t heard the rest of the story – yet
you should, because it comes with one hell of a twist.
Weeks go by, then months, and Notre Dame sees nothing from
the billionaires. The promises of mid-April seem to have been forgotten by
mid-June. “The big donors haven’t paid. Not a cent,” a senior official at the
cathedral tells journalists. Far humbler sums are sent in, from far poorer
individuals. “Beautiful gestures,” says one charity executive, but hardly les
grands prix.
That prompts a newswire story, after which two of the
wealthy donors, the Arnault and Pinault families, stump up €10m each. Followed
by silence. Questions I put this week to the various donors and charities went
largely unanswered. (Perhaps their offices are busy or emptied out by the
summer holidays.)
But for now, let’s call this the Parable of the Disappearing
Billionaires – a tale that goes to the heart of much that is wrong with modern
philanthropy. Whether dispensed by the Sacklers of opioid fame, or sponsored by
BP at the British Museum, it often comes on the terms and timelines of the
wealthy, with the epic generosity hiding a much harder bargain.
At the time of the fire near the Seine, you could barely
move for expressions of cashmere-clad concern. Take the family and foundation
behind L’Oréal, who at the time declared how “touched” they were “by this drama
that unites beyond cultures and beliefs [and] intend to take part in the
collective effort and talents needed to meet this immense challenge, which
touches the heart of our country”. As of mid-June, they had handed over a big
fat zero. The same goes for oil giant Total.
“It is more blessed to give than to receive,” said Jesus. To
which anyone surveying the Notre Dame debacle might advise the son of God to
get a better brand manager. Because the billionaires who promised those vast
sums have received all the credit while not giving more than a fraction of the
money.
They have banked the publicity, while dreaming up small
print that didn’t exist in the spring. As another charity executive, Célia
Vérot, said: “It’s a voluntary donation, so the companies are waiting for the government’s
vision to see what precisely they want to fund.” It’s as if the vast project of
rebuilding a 12th-century masterpiece was a breakfast buffet from which one
could pick and choose.
Meanwhile, the salaries of 150 workers on site have to be
paid. The 300 or so tonnes of lead in the church roof pose a toxic threat that
must be cleaned up before the rebuilding can happen. And pregnant women and
children living nearby are undergoing blood tests for possible poisoning. But
funding such dirty, unglamorous, essential work is not for the luxury-goods
billionaires. As the Notre Dame official said last month, they don’t want their
money “just to pay employees’ salaries”. Heaven forfend! Not when one could
endow to future generations the Gucci Basilica or a Moët Hennessy gift shop, so
you, too, can enjoy the miracle of sparkling wine, or a nave by L’Oréal
(tagline: Because Jesus is Worth It).
For the super-rich, giving is really taking. Taking power,
that is, from the rest of society. The billionaires will get exclusive access
to the “vision” for the reconstruction of a national landmark and they can veto
those plans, because if they don’t like them they can withhold their cash.
Money is always the most powerful casting vote, and they have it. Never mind
that much of this cash actually comes from the public, as French law grants a
whopping 66% tax relief on any donation – the power is entirely private. The
annual cap on such contributions doubtless constitutes a prudent reason for the
big donors to stagger their generosity.
Whether in France or Britain or the US, the rich give money
to the grand institutions at the heart of our cultures to secure their social
status in plaques and photo opportunities. In much the same way, they fund our
political parties, then enjoy the kickbacks when they form a government. As
Julia Cagé, an economist at Paris’s SciencesPo, points out, some of the same
people pledging donations to Notre Dame were also among those who funded Macron’s
rise to the presidency. In her recent award-winning book, to be published in
English next year as The Price of Democracy, Cagé calculates that 600 wealthy
people in France gave between €3m and €4.5m to Macron’s election campaign. In
other words, 2% of all donors made up between 40 % and 60% of all En Marche
funding. Within a few months, the new president cut taxes on the wealthy,
giving his richest donors “a return of nearly 60,000% on their investment”.
Just as with Notre Dame – a tiny deposit, a lot of influence and one hell of a
payout.
Perhaps I and others have got this all wrong. The
billionaires could, with the flourish of a pen, pay up the money in full with
no conditions. Let’s see. But the irony of all this big money is how alien it
is to France’s image of itself. In the middle of this decade, then-president
François Hollande could boast he didn’t even like rich people. But back then
the country could still console itself with the memory of les trentes
glorieuses: the three glorious postwar decades of Keynesian economic management
and relative equality. No more. A recent study co-authored by Thomas Piketty,
among others, notes that since the era of François Mitterrand in the 1980s and
90s, there have been another 30 glorious years – for those right at the top,
whose real incomes have risen at triple the rate of most of the population.
The political and cultural consequences of this face us now.
Macron can go from investment banking to the Elysée palace
where he claims to be the Anti-Trump but, like his bête noire, he can’t cut
taxes hard enough to help his rich friends, all the while slashing welfare
benefits and school funding to make his budget stick. Charitable giving, too,
has been Americanised. As Thomas Roulet at Cambridge University told me,
Paris’s big donors now ape the champagne-guzzlers and influence-hawkers over on
Wall Street.
The tragedy of Notre Dame came with a flatpack happy ending:
of France’s wealthy dipping into their pockets to save a chunk of world
heritage. But what once appeared tragic now looks grotesque: a wealthy few who
are all press release and no cheque and who rely on thousands of ordinary
French people to stump up instead, even while the entire economy is turned
inside out to benefit those who already have the most.
• Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist
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