Notre-Dame De Paris

In 1977, workmen digging in the courtyard of a bank in central Paris hit carved stone. They kept digging and came up with twenty-one heads, each about the size of a person's torso, each with the battered crown and stylised beard of a medieval king. They were the heads of the Kings of Judah from the front of Notre-Dame, hacked off in 1793 by a revolutionary crowd that took them for kings of France. For nearly two centuries nobody knew where they had gone. It turned out that someone sympathetic had bought the heads, buried them in his garden, and said nothing. The garden became a bank. The heads are now in the Cluny Museum, a short walk from the cathedral they were knocked off.

Notre-Dame has that kind of history: things lost, found, burned, rebuilt, usually by people with strong opinions. It began in 1163, when Bishop Maurice de Sully decided the island in the Seine needed a cathedral on a scale Paris had not seen. There had been a church here before, and before that a Roman temple; in 1711 workmen under the choir found a stone pillar dedicated to Jupiter by the city's boatmen. Sully wanted vaults around thirty-three metres high, among the tallest of the age, and walls that thin and that tall tend to push outward under such a load. The answer, arrived at in the late twelfth century, was to prop the building from outside with arches flung across open air. Notre-Dame was one of the first large buildings to use flying buttresses, and they are part of the reason it still stands. The main structure was finished around 1260, the twin towers reaching sixty-nine metres.

Six centuries followed in which the cathedral was whatever Paris needed it to be. During the Revolution it became a Temple of Reason and then a wine store. Napoleon crowned himself emperor here in 1804, in a building so shabby that tapestries were hung to hide the walls. By the 1830s there was serious talk of pulling it down.

A novel stopped that. Victor Hugo published "Notre-Dame de Paris" in 1831, the book English readers know as "The Hunchback of Notre-Dame", and he wrote it partly as an argument; there is a whole chapter inside it about the destruction of Gothic architecture. The attention it stirred led to a competition, and in 1844 Jean-Baptiste Lassus and Eugène Viollet-le-Duc got the job. They worked for twenty years. An uncomfortable amount of what now reads as "the medieval cathedral" is theirs. The brooding stone creatures on the upper gallery, chins in hands, looking out over the city, are mostly nineteenth-century inventions. So was the spire of oak and lead that Viollet-le-Duc raised in 1859, complete with a row of apostles at its base, one of whom, St Thomas, patron of architects, has the architect's own face and is looking up at his spire. Those statues had been lifted off by crane for cleaning just days before the fire of 2019. They survived.

The bourdon bell, Emmanuel, cast in the 1680s and weighing about thirteen tons, escaped the Revolution when the other bells were melted down, and it rang out the liberation of Paris in 1944. The Crown of Thorns, bought in 1239 by Louis IX from the cash-strapped Latin emperor of Constantinople, came to Notre-Dame after the Revolution and was carried out of the burning building on the night of 15 April 2019 by firefighters and a chaplain.

That night the roof went: a lattice of oak beams so dense it was known as "the forest", much of it cut from trees felled in the Middle Ages. The spire leaned, folded and fell through the vault while the world watched on television. Hundreds of tons of lead from the roof melted and spread over the neighbourhood, and the clean-up argument went on for months. The three rose windows held. The great organ, with its eight thousand pipes, survived but had to be taken apart and cleaned of lead dust. The cause has never been settled; an electrical fault and a discarded cigarette were both investigated.

The next morning, a restorer picking through the rubble found the copper rooster that had topped the spire, crushed but intact. Inside it were three small relics, placed there in 1935 as a kind of spiritual lightning rod for the city. A new rooster, with new relics, now sits on the rebuilt spire.

The cathedral has belonged to the French state since 1905; the Church uses it but does not own it. More than 800 million euros in donations came in from around the world. Over a thousand oaks were felled for the new roof and spire, which follow Viollet-le-Duc's drawings closely, and the building reopened on 7 December 2024. Before the fire it drew more than twelve million visitors a year, more than anything else in Paris. The open question is how an eight-hundred-year-old stone building carries that many people, having so recently shown how quickly it can be lost.