Notre-Dame de Paris: a photographer at the heart of the construction site (until 1 March)
Jacques Baumel Media Library, Rueil-Malmaison
Learn more about: https://www.mediatheque-rueilmalmaison.fr
Les compagnons du Tour de France, heirs to cathedral builders?
Thursday 19 February 2026 at 8.30 p.m., the media library Jacques Baumel de Rueil-Malmaison (Hautes-de-Seine; Île-de-France region) proposed, as part of its cycle « Agora, news differently », a meeting with Frédéric Thibault, stone tailor, sculptor and companion of the United Duties.
Free entrance, full room. The head of the media library introduced the guest of the evening, who came from Bordeaux, before giving him the floor to shed light on a world that many people fear without knowing him.
Pressed on a rich slideshow, Frédéric Thibault posed the subject in his fair measure. Companioning is not a unique label, but a plural story, made of crafts and homework. He recalled that we had to wait for the XVe century to find an indisputable first mention, in 1420, with the image of companions going from city to city to learn, know, see and know. In this formula, we already hear travel as a school, and transmission as a discipline.
The speaker then conducted a clear historical wire, without removing tensions. He mentioned the codification of rites, the appearance of colours, and then the recomposition of the XIX.e century. He recalled the Club of 1848, the first federation of 1874, and the emergence at the Paris Congress of 1889.Union compagnonnique Companions of the Tour de France des Devoirs Unis. The demonstration made it clear how the requirement shifted to rule, school and transmission. In this perspective, the masterpiece is not only an object, it becomes an intimate proof, the signature of a just gesture.
This requirement has found a natural echo in heritage news, at the same time as the media library presents Temporary exposure « Notre-Dame de Paris, David Bordes a photographer at the heart of the construction site »from 27 January to 1 Januaryand March 2026. About Notre-Dame de Paris, Frédéric Thibault deconstructed a myth relayed, that of an exclusivity of companions on major construction sites. He recalled the diversity of skills mobilized and the primacy of expertise. In the exchanges, he also alerted against the abusive use of the word companion by certain companies, and gave simple benchmarks to verify, without naivety, what falls within a title, a course, a reality.
Then the evening became a public workshop. The questions, many, deepened the remarks, with a very active female presence. We heard requests about the actual duration of the Tour de France, its organisation, the contracts, the reception network, the figure of the mother and the father, these discreet landmarks of a traveling fraternity. Other interventions focused on opening up to women, between official history and more discreet stories, and on the evolutions taking place according to the movements. The media library proposed to extend the exchange.
We come out with the feeling of having better understood, and sometimes discovered, the companion universe. The heritage of cathedrals is not a legend. He recognizes himself in a discipline of gesture, in the test of travel, in the demanding joy of transmitting, and in this idea that building a beautiful dwelling a way of forming the human being.
Y.G. for The Companion
