Flames to glory: How Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris was rebuilt

Gasps were heard around the world on April 15th, 2019, when Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, a jewel of gothic art perhaps best memorialized by Victor Hugo, suddenly went up in great tongues of flame. President Trump tweeted from the White House that fire-fighting planes should be sent to stifle the great fire climbing up from the church’s rooftop. Rumors quickly circulated as to what the source of the fire was, most fanciful of all being that it was the vengeful work of the wrathful King Tut whose tomb treasures were on display in Paris at the time. Outcry was so immense that €846 million in donations quickly flowed in to finance the rebuilding effort. As it happens, the works were completed at only €700 million, so the extra €146 million will go to renovating the cathedral grounds.

Many obstacles had lain in the way of this happy conclusion. Architect Philippe Villeneuve and General Jean-Louis Georgelin were appointed heads of a new, public rebuilding authority that was established so quickly it was almost hard to believe this was the same-old slow-poke culture of France and its southern European ilk. The authority contracted companies that brought a total of 2,000 engineers and workers to the site. Eight different taskforces specializing in stone, wood, metal, and acoustics formed to pool expertise on how exactly the cathedral was built and establish how to rebuild the destroyed sections. “The shared sense of purpose among the various moving parts are what most helped carry things forward without a hitch,” said Philippe Villeneuve. The tireless architect and overseer of the construction is a likewise a lover of fine art and praised the cathedral’s new, highly modern altar by artist Guillaume Bardet, saying it reminded him of the mysterious monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick.

In December 2019, eight months after the fire, a 84-meter-tall crane was installed on the site to keep the edifice in place. Engineers and builders worked relentlessly. Any notion of celebratory feeling was a long way off yet. Then came the first lockdown from mid-March to June of 2020 temporarily suspending work, meaning that in order to finish the rebuild on schedule—as slated by President Emmanuel Macron—the crews had to redouble their efforts when things recommenced. During the first two years, specialists were brought in to take inventory of the damage and a secure perimeter was established around the worksite. The rubble was cleared away, the largest bits of which requiring the use of heavy remote-controlled machinery to lift. Before rebuilding work could break ground, the intersection where the transept and nave axes meet had to be shored and the great deal of artwork the cathedral was home to had to be placed into storage. As the structure had already been in the midst of restoration work when the fire began, the fire tangled and melded together bits of scaffolding and sent 75 tons of ceiling work tumbling to the floor. This phase of the work lasted for six months from June to November 2020.

Standing magnificently over the western portal, the great organ, built by Aristide Cavaillé Coll in 1867, had been spared for the most part, but not entirely. Lead dust had clogged the 8,000 pipes and the whole instrument had to be taken apart piece by piece for cleaning, an operation that took a total of five months to complete, then an additional six months to not only reassemble but tune to sound like it did in 1867. The woodwork of the roof was some of the oldest still standing in Paris, built from some 2,000 oaks—thus the roof was nicknamed “the forest”—and sadly not a plank of it could be salvaged. New trees were felled and ingeniously processed copying the methods of the 13^th-century artisans who first erected the cathedral.

Some 2,700 sheets of lead were shaped into the roof of the nave and choir to protect against weather damage. Most gob-smacking of all images of the tragedy was the sight of the merciless flames rising from the building’s great spire. Rebuilding this iconic piece of the building was the subject of much debate. Should it be rebuilt as an exact replica of what Viollet-le-Duc had constructed in 1859? His spire had replaced an original built in the 13th century and taken down in the late 18th due to weather damage. There was a vocal group advocating for a new, contemporary spire, but the Viollet-le-Duc-replica advocates won out and construction started in autumn of 2022 and finished a year later. Once it was crowned with a brand-new Gallic rooster made of gold, Paris had a new watchman scouring the rooftops of the city.

Viollet-le-Duc’s original apse cross was thankfully spared and re-erected in April of 2024. The famous Angel of the Last Judgement statue was restored and mounted above the west gable in July 2024. Following disassembly for lead-dust cleaning, the eight bells in the northern belfry—whose weights varying from 800 kg to 4.1 tons—were rehung in September 2024 and blessed by cathedral rector Father Olivier Ribadeau Dumas. The building’s precious decorative objects—candelabras, relics, illuminated manuscripts, and more evacuated during the fire to put in storage in the Louvre—made their return in 2024. Among these was the statue of the madonna and child “miraculously” spared from the fire, some say. It’s commonly known as the “Virgin of the Pillar” because it stands against the transept’s southeast pillar, and 20^th-century writer Paul Claudel adopted an almost baroquely flamboyant practice of Catholicism following an epiphany he had at the foot of the gothic-era work.

Then finally on December 7th, 2024, the red carpets finally got rolled out for the re-opening. In attendance were the like of the archbishop of Paris Laurent Ulrich, Emmanuel Macron, Donald Trump, and a whole host of other heads of state and monarchs. For the sake of finding a silver lining in everything, the fire did open up sections of the building that had long stood inaccessible and unearthed parts of a colorful rood screen that had once partitioned the choir from the nave. Dating back to the 13th century and destroyed in the 18^th, the partition piece depicted moments of Christ’s passion, Judas’ kiss, and other major biblical events. Last but not least, it led to the discovery of two lead sarcophagi buried under the nave-transept intersection, one containing the remains of a high church official, Canon Antoine de La Porte, who died in 1710, and an even older one holding the supposed remains of Joachim du Bellay, the illustrious poet of Pléiade fame who died in 1560. This is according to research carried out by paleoanthropologist Éric Crubézy at Toulouse Teaching Hospital. It had been known that, through the intercession of Du Bellay’s uncles, one the bishop of Paris and the other a cardinal in Rome, the poet had been buried at Notre-Dame Cathedral, but no one knew where. To quote a line from Du Bellay’s most famous sonnet, “Happy is he who, like Ulysses, has returned successful from his travels,” so Notre-Dame continues to overcome travails throughout time and hold no shortage of surprises for us.