The restoration is a technical triumph, but the cathedral is as much Gothic Revival as Gothic.
Greetings from Paris. Notre Dame, of course, is not to be missed, but, in compare-and-contrast mode, I also visited the Basilica of Saint-Denis, the small cathedral and necropolis for every French king and queen from the tenth century to Louis XVIII.
Like everyone else, I was horrified when Notre Dame came close to collapse on April 15, 2019, after its firetrap wooden roof caught fire. Never a favorite — that would be the cathedral in Chartres — Notre Dame is still the avatar of French history. I write “never a favorite” since French history isn’t mine. And it’s more often than not a brutal thing. The cathedral’s last substantial renovation, from 1844 to 1864, impressed me as unsatisfying. Its innovations, among them the gargoyles, the grotesques, the dinky spire, and the redecorated side chapels, imagined what medieval architects might have done. Most of the sculpture we see today is Gothic Revival.
My horror in watching the fire was that it was allowed to happen at all. How was it possible that Notre Dame was allowed to decline into tinderbox territory? It was a crisis in heritage preservation, worse than the Glasgow School of Art, a pure Arts and Crafts masterpiece, burning not once but twice, the last time leaving a demolition site.
Chalk up the Notre Dame calamity to one more failure for the French state. Since 1793, France has had multiple republics, emperors, and kings, some despotic, some decrepit. It’s been invaded, sacked, and conquered. I’m convinced I’ll see a Sixth Republic in my lifetime, and it might be Islamic.
But enough scorn and contempt. The French, in five years, rallied to rebuild Notre Dame. Though a Methodist, I went for the 8:30 Mass, in French so I didn’t understand it and couldn’t be called complicit in anything Vatican. Then I gave the place a close look.
The restoration involved 2,000 craftspeople, hundreds of companies, and raising and spending about $900 million. Though Notre Dame is made from stone, stone can burn. The critical damage was the collapse of the oak-timber roof, called “the forest” for its labyrinthine look and density and built in the early 1200s. The inferno’s intense heat weakened the flying buttresses that support the stone structure under the roof.
The first miracle was the survival, mostly intact, of the two bell towers, the cathedral’s stained glass, and thousands of works of art from tomb sculptures to chalices. Stabilizing the building and removing the art and debris happened in tandem. Notre Dame was already undergoing very modest rehabs here and there. Melted scaffolding combined with the ruins of the roof — charred wood and molten lead — to make a site that rivaled World War I trenches and no-man’s-land for danger. Robots were used for lots of debris-clearing.
The first big decision, made by President Macron, was to rebuild the cathedral as it looked after its Gothic Revival redo in the mid-19th century and, specifically, to replicate the wooden roof. In 2020 and 2021, despite the Covid mass hysteria and hallucination, far worse in France than even in the nuttier parts of the U.S., about a thousand oak trees, perfectly straight, at least 60 feet tall, and at least 20 inches in diameter, were found and harvested. A team of carpenters, some American, who knew 13th-century roofing techniques remade the roof. Every wooden truss has to conform to the building’s ever-so-uneven walls. I’m not surprised that Vermonters were in the mix. Timber framers Hank Silver and Will Gusakov, who learned all things timber in our most forested state, re-created the nave’s roof.
The wood is now fireproofed. The fire, by the by, is said to have been caused by an electrical short circuit or a cigarette. Knowing French men, I’d bet my pocketful of centimes that it was a tossed Gauloise.
The restoration also required about 50,000 cubic feet of limestone that matched the cream-colored, fine-grained stone quarried nearly a thousand years ago in the Loire Valley. The thousands of pipes in the massive grand organ were cleaned. The stained glass windows — the oldest of which date to 1225 — had lots of smoke damage. I visited on a sunny day. The characteristic blue in stained glass windows in Notre Dame, the cathedral in Chartres, and Sainte-Chapelle comes from lapis lazuli imported in medieval days from Afghanistan. Reflected on the now-cleaned, cream-colored limestone, the blue light from the windows is ethereal and beautiful.
Macron promised what he called “a contemporary gesture” as part of the reconstruction, and it comes in the form of a new suite of stained glass on part of the south side of the cathedral. Claire Tabouret, a French artist based in Santa Monica, Calif., was selected to design six windows replacing windows added in the 1860s as part of the Gothic Revival renovation. Her windows will be figurative, replacing windows with geometric shapes that weren’t damaged in the fire and that will go to a museum in France.
Critics are enraged, but I’m not. Notre Dame is a 900-year-old building that’s had lots of tweaks and interventions. It had a Louis XIV redecoration in 1699 and a Jacobin desecration in the 1790s, when everything metal went to the smelter and the church was used as a Temple of Reason and, when all reason failed, as wine storage.
Tabouret’s windows are called Macron’s vanity project, but the windows they’re replacing aren’t remarkable except they’re there and weren’t damaged. As odious French presidents go, Macron isn’t the smelliest. He delivered the Notre Dame rehab on time and on budget. If it’s a vanity project, he deserves it. “Just because he’s the head of state, why should he call the shots?” one critic, evidently born yesterday, asked.
Before the fire, Notre Dame was France’s most-visited site, notching 12 million tourists and churchgoers in 2018. I visited three or four times, first with my mother in the mid-1960s and then in the ’90s. Spiffed up, the Gothic Revival elements look contrived at best, cheesy otherwise. If you must go, go early. By the time I left, the line stretched the length of the Seine, though it moved fast. People were there to say they were there, I think. For the art of stained glass, Sainte-Chapelle is the supreme flower of Rayonnant Gothic architecture, where bricks and mortar are mere traces and walls are mostly brilliant, colored glass. It’s steps from Notre Dame, which looks squat and dull by comparison.
And if you want to own a piece of Notre Dame, your chance is around the corner. France’s Patrimony Foundation is raffling around 50 stones from the cathedral, each weighing around a pound, and each too damaged to have been restored and reinstalled. Tickets are 40 euros ($44) each, with the drawing scheduled for April 15.
The foundation oversees around 50,000 historic sites and estimates that 5,000 are in perilous condition. These include many of the country’s hundred or so cathedrals. The 1905 French law officially separating church and state also transferred ownership of all historic churches and synagogues to the central government, with the government responsible for maintenance and religious groups able to use the buildings for services. Before the 2019 fire, a renovation of Notre Dame was planned for some point in the future and projected to cost 150 million euros ($156 million).
I doubt the French are taking my advice — always a mistake — and it’s free, too! At least for the great cathedrals, an infrastructure trust fund for maintenance and renovations would go far in preventing another catastrophe. France’s “other” Notre Dame, the cathedral in Nantes in Brittany, has been closed since 2020 after a fire caused by arson. It’s a mixed bag. The cathedral in Chartres had a massive renovation in 2009. Notre Dame, alas, fell through the French bureaucratic cracks, wide as they are.
After my Notre Dame visit, I took the métro to the Parisian suburb of Saint-Denis to visit Paris’s old abbey church where the French royals are buried. It’s a cathedral and also a basilica, as the church in Rome calls it, so it’s important, but I went for the choir architecture and the tombs. Saint Denis, Paris’s first bishop, was sent to France from Rome around a.d. 250 to Christianize the pagan tribes. Decapitated by contrarians, he’s said to have carried his head around until he settled on the site of the church for his burial. By the 600s, it was a royal favorite. The choir loft, commissioned by the church’s abbot, known today as Suger, is the first purely Gothic structure. Built in the 1140s, it’s earlier than Notre Dame. His team of masons were able to replace heavy dividing walls with slender columns, using exterior buttresses and allowing for bigger windows outfitted with stained glass.
The church today is in the suburbs, but in Suger’s time it was in the boonies. Still, the royals kept their regalia there as well as their skulls and bones. Dagobert I, the king of the Franks, is the first high-end blue blood to be buried there as well as a corps of Clovises, Clothars, and Pepins tall and short. Suger, when he wasn’t abboting, designing, and raising money, advised French kings and ruled as regent during the Crusades.
The church figures in the wildest desecration in the Jacobin era, the days of French woke. On August 1, 1793, the Jacobin National Convention decreed that Saint-Denis’s royal and ecclesiastical tombs would be destroyed, first the ancient kings, then the old abbots, among them Suger, and finally the Bourbons. “It’s for the lead,” the white knights of the French Revolution argued, referring to the coffins. “My foot,” I say, and they did indeed find Catherine de Medici’s foot. They did it for demented joy and vanity. Yanked as well were Dagobert’s jaw, Henry III’s teeth, and Marie de Medici’s hair. Some bodies were perfectly intact. Some were only a bone or two. Designers of embalming-studies curricula, take note. Tawny and inky smoke bobbed from the opened tombs, drifting over the desecrated site and the neighborhood in back of the church. Locals and raiders alike sickened. Hundreds of body parts were dumped in a mass grave.
Today the church is worth seeing for the choir and the considerable tomb effigies for the French royals. The sculpture is angular and abstract. Some have portrait likenesses. Pepin the Short, Charlemagne’s father, is indeed height-deprived though his wife, Bertrada of Laon, known as Bertha Bigfoot, looks to be a size 8. I believe she had a club foot. The tomb sculpture was vandalized, too, and restored in the 19th century.
Napoleon had the royals exhumed and interred in the church, from one mass grave to another. He hoped to be buried there, too, but landed in the Invalides in the grand tomb on which Ulysses S. Grant’s tomb was modeled. In the crypt are the graves of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, moved there in 1815, heads and all. The graves are covered in black marble slabs in a dark hall. They’re not easy to find or see. The French understand what the Sixth Republic might mean.
Very little of the stained glass is original. Some was vandalized for the lead. Much is in museums. The reproduction glass is good and probably better than the Suger-era glass, which is said to have faded by the 19th century. The effigies are clearly labeled. On a Sunday, no one was there, so it’s far more contemplative than Notre Dame. It’s a 40-minute métro ride from the neighborhood I like, a block from the Luxembourg Garden.
"https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/03/notre-dame-back-to-life-after-the-2019-fire/">Brian T. Allen