The French army general appointed by Emmanuel Macron to oversee the reconstruction of the fire-ravaged Notre-Dame Cathedral has died while hiking in the Pyrénées. Mountain gendarmes discovered the body of Jean-Louis Georgelin, 74, the former chief of the defence staff, after he failed to return to a mountain refuge on Friday. He is believed to have fallen on Mount Valier, near the Faustin pass in the Ariège, south-west France, at an altitude of 2,650 metres. The public prosecutor’s office in Foix confirmed on Saturday the body had been formally identified and that the death was being treated as an accident. Macron tweeted on Saturday: “With the death of General Jean-Louis Georgelin, the nation has lost one of its great soldiers, France one of its great servants and Notre-Dame the master manager of its renaissance.” Georgelin, a graduate of France’s elite Saint-Cyr military academy, first joined the infantry then a parachute regiment before returning to the infantry. He also trained at the US Army Command and General Staff college, at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas; served in Algeria, Lebanon and Bosnia; and oversaw French military operations in Ivory Coast and Afghanistan. He was the military chief of staff and special adviser to the then French president Jacques Chirac from 2002–06. A practising Catholic, he was nominated to take charge of the restoration of Notre-Dame after it was damaged by fire in April 2019. In the aftermath, Macron had made what many saw as an overly optimistic pledge to rebuild the cathedral in five years. Georgelin said: “It’s not abnormal to choose a Catholic for such a mission. My role is to return the cathedral to the Catholic religion in the best possible conditions.” People of “all persuasions” in France had wept to see the Paris landmark burn, he said. The general took a military approach to the job, designating himself as chief of operations of a Notre-Dame “taskforce” and reportedly adopting the motto: “Advance without procrastination”. He was known as a plain speaker. In 2019, the government rebuked Georgelin after he told the Notre-Dame reconstruction’s chief architect, Philippe Villeneuve, to “shut his mouth” in a dispute over whether to replace the spire with an exact replica or a modern alternative. The culture minister, Franck Riester, described Georgelin’s outburst as “not acceptable”, adding: “Respect is a cardinal value in our society. As public officials, we must be exemplary.” Georgelin dismissed the incident, insisting there had been no quarrel just “respect and reciprocal esteem”.