‘Someone has to roll up their sleeves’: Meet the 23-year-old Catholic restoring France’s statues

Temperatures climbed so high in France this summer that wildfires forced mass evacuations, Champagne grapes were harvested exceptionally early, the Louvre closed in the afternoons, and the field at the historic Parc des Princes stadium turned brown.

Raphaël Castex restores the statue of the Virgin of the Vow in Puygiron in the Drôme department in southeastern France. Credit: Raphaël Castex/Rénove une Statue.

With the mercury peaking at 111 degrees Fahrenheit (44 degrees Celsius), only the brave would consider embarking on a month-long tour involving hours of manual labor in direct sunlight. But that is exactly what Raphaël Castex, a 23-year-old recent graduate, decided to do.

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Castex spent August engaged in what he called a Tour de France du Patrimoine, or heritage tour of France. This involved traveling thousands of miles on a Honda motorcycle, stopping in towns and villages with the goal of renovating a total of 20 dilapidated religious statues over the month.

Castex, a calmly spoken figure with a fighter pilot mustache, is a co-founder of Rénove une Statue (Renovate a Statue), an association created in 2024 to restore the crumbling images of Christ, the Virgin Mary, and the