Cultural guerillas

This is a really cool story…

It is one of Paris’s most celebrated monuments, a neoclassical masterpiece that has cast its shadow across the city for more than two centuries.
But it is unlikely that the Panthéon, or any other building in France’s capital, will have played host to a more bizarre sequence of events than those revealed in a court last week.
Four members of an underground “cultural guerrilla” movement known as the Untergunther, whose purpose is to restore France’s cultural heritage, were cleared on Friday of breaking into the 18th-century monument in a plot worthy of Dan Brown or Umberto Eco.

A “cultural guerilla” movement. I love it. If only more people elsewhere saw the world as they do and took on the responsibility of looking after their own cities, treating them as the cultural treasures that they are: “We would like to be able to replace the state in the areas it is incompetent,” said Klausmann. “But our means are limited and we can only do a fraction of what needs to be done. There’s so much to do in Paris that we won’t manage in our lifetime.” How many things do we pass every day and say “I wish someone would finally fix that!”?

Read the whole story here.