Reflecting on the French Revolution a century earlier, thinkers such as Gustave Le Bon helped promote the idea that a crowd is always on the verge of becoming a mob.
Often a symbol and reflection of French political power, the cathedral was vandalized through the French Revolution while Napoleon Bonaparte used it to reinstate monarchic rule with his coronation as Emperor.
While the French Revolution succeeded in conquering this territory into France, Napoleon came around and expanded France's borders to well be gone to the natural borders of the Pyrenees, the Rhine, and the Alps.
The Bastille's fall gave momentum to the rest of the French Revolution, leading to the execution of the royal family and, eventually, the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte.
A cathedral rector, Patrick Chauvet, said this year marks the " first time since the French Revolution that there will be no midnight Mass" at Notre Dame.
Notre Dame, after all, is an architectural hybrid, the product of different centuries, ransacked during the wars of religion and looted during the revolution.
The second turning-point was the French revolution, with which he sympathised, and Napoleon's invasion of Spain and the long Peninsular war that followed.