When the spire of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris was toppled by a wall of flames on a clear, crisp spring evening five and a half years ago, a collective howl of sorrow echoed around the French capital and reverberated across the world. “We all remember that moment,” said the graphic novelist Sandrine Martin, with a catch in her throat, a few days later. “No one in Paris can ever forget. It was shocking, very, very shocking.”
Martin didn’t know it then, but she would become one of an elite group of artists invited by French authorities to sketch and document the €1bn-plus stabilisation and reconstruction of the cathedral, a monumental architectural project that will culminate with its official reopening this weekend.
There is no building that has been more important to France – or been more symbolic of the Republic to the rest of the world – than Notre-Dame de Paris. In 1239, just 76 years after the laying of its first stone by Pope Alexander III, Our Lady became home to what was purported to be Jesus’s Crown of Thorns when King Louis IX – later to become Saint Louis – triumphantly delivered the relic, evidence of the passion of Christ, to France.
In 1804, Notre Dame was the site of Napoleon I’s coronation, only to become a lightning rod for the anger of rioters in the Revolution of July 1830. Notre Dame withstood the wrath of the Luftwaffe and German bullets and in 1944, General Charles de Gaulle attended a thanksgiving mass there to celebrate the liberation of Paris.
During a visit to thank the army of specialist artisans who worked on the restoration last week, Emmanuel Macron described the rebuilding of Notre Dame as “the project of the century” and a “shock of hope”. The burning of the cathedral, the president said, had been a “national wound”, and the craftsmen and women who returned the Gothic masterpiece to glory from the ashes had been “its cure”. The names of all 2,000 artisans involved in the restoration have now been inscribed on a scroll and, along with the relics of two Parisian saints, were placed inside the new spire as cranes hoisted it into place one year ago, almost to the day.
Walking the perimeter of Notre Dame not long after the catastrophic fire, I remember being struck by the fact that the 1,000 oak trees needed to rebuild the spire, the transept and adjacent bays, had been planted just before the French Revolution by royal foresters responsible for ensuring that the navy was kept supplied with fresh ship masts. The new oaks may have been cut in 21st-century mills, but a group known as Carpenters without Borders – experts in medieval woodworking techniques – hand-finished every piece of the spire in a faithful recreation of the 19th-century drawings by the architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc for his own meticulous restoration of the cathedral.
This week, as news spread around the world of the imminent, official reopening of Notre Dame’s doors to tourists and the faithful, I was struck too by the incongruity of a president of the Republic talking about a religious building “living at the epicentre of French national life”. Macron, in keeping with French laïcité – secularism – will apparently not enter the cathedral when he hands it back officially from the state to the church at a secular function on Saturday. Instead, the openly Catholic president will attend the ceremonial and musical mass on Sunday, joining several hundred other heads of state and celebrities to mark its return to religious life before the public are ushered in next week.
There was little doubt that France would rebuild its greatest monument, and the extraordinary global outpouring of grief – underpinned by an unprecedented €1bn raised in donations from the super rich in France and the US – guaranteed the project. But debate on how it should be done at times became acrimonious.
Macron originally tried to encourage innovative thinking from a plethora of brilliant young (and old) architects, but some of the designs were so bizarre – including a crystal spire and glass garden roof – that the chief public architect, Philippe Villeneuve, ended up describing the proposals as akin to giving Mona Lisa a nose job.
In the end, the traditionalists triumphed and the cathedral, at least from the outside, will look exactly as Viollet-le-Duc, then just 30 years old, envisaged for his 25-year restoration, launched in 1860. Villeneuve, his 21st-century successor, noted recently that modern restorers have indeed “left no trace of their passage”.
Inside, however, it is a completely different story; the estimated 15 million visitors who will enter Notre Dame’s doors each year – up from 12 million before the fire – will find that the cathedral looks very different to what they might remember from previous visits, postcards or books.
For a start, a couple of centuries of grime and candle smoke have been cleaned from stained glass, paintings and sculptures. The vast stone walls, a muted grey in the past, have also been stripped of dirt and now reportedly look bright and creamy, a cleansing exacerbated by a caustic peeling that was required to extract toxic lead deposited by the fire.
Gobet
The vaults, which collapsed in the heat, have been seamlessly rebuilt, gold leaf fresh and glinting. For some, warn French public officials, the sheer brightness of colour and texture of the interiors may well be a bit of a shock.
A new monumental bronze altar and baptismal font, designed by the sculptor Guillaume Bardet, will be in place, its curved sides evoking a pair of uplifted arms, along with 1,500 new curved-back chairs, and high-tech LED lighting that is programmable depending on the season or the event being held inside.
Visitors will be able to book a timed spot online for the first time – an estimated 40,000 are expected each day – and once there, will follow a carefully curated path, a kind of “pilgrim’s way” to explain the import of the chapels, paintings and sculptures to the Catholic faith in multiple languages via a phone app.
For me on my next visit, it will be straight to the apse at the far east end of the church to see the Crown of Thorns in its new, specially designed reliquary. I never understood why this most fascinating and precious relic of Christendom was so difficult to find and its presence kept so low key and little advertised. It was saved by the quick thinking of the Paris fire brigade’s chaplain, Father Jean Marc Fournier, and since the fire, the crown has been housed in the Louvre.
From next Monday, it will seem to float in a glass hemisphere, inside a 3.7-metre high, 2.6-metre wide altar made of cedar: untouchable, mysterious and, like the cathedral itself, miraculous in its survival.
