French ex-army chief in charge of Notre-Dame cathedral rebuild dies while hiking
- Jean-Louis Georgelin died in the Pyrenees mountain range straddling the France-Spain border
- President Macron, who chose Georgelin to lead the complex reconstruction work on the fire-ravaged monument, said France has lost ‘one of its great servants’
A former French army chief in charge of restoring Paris’s emblematic Notre-Dame cathedral following a devastating 2019 fire has died during a mountain hike, prosecutors said on Saturday.
General Jean-Louis Georgelin, 74, died on Friday in the Pyrenees mountain range straddling the France-Spain border, said the prosecutor’s office in the southern French city of Foix.
A mountain rescue team deployed to the Mont-Valier peak “discovered the body of a man who has been formally identified as General Georgelin”, a spokesman said, adding that an accident was the likely cause.
Notre-Dame has lost “the overseer of its rebirth” and France “one of its great servants”, President Emmanuel Macron wrote on Twitter, now rebranded as “X”.
Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo hailed Georgelin on the same social media platform for creating “the human and organisational conditions for successfully completing the reconstruction of Notre-Dame”.