There’s something unsettling about a statue with its head lobbed off. Sure, it’s just a piece of stone. But it represents something. There are headless statues in churches all over France, statues of bishops, martyrs, saints. It’s not surprising those statues came out of the French revolution badly; the church and its clerics weren’t popular.

But the revolution was nearly 250 years ago. How come the heads haven’t been put back on? It seems lax of the church authorities, to say the least. After all, the church in France is often referred to as fille aînée de l’Église , the ‘eldest daughter of the Church’. Its roots go back to the Apostolic Age when Jesus’s earliest disciples landed in Gaul. But, it turns out, the church actually has little power over the state of its decrepit buildings.

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