The Restoration of Notre Dame

 Three years ago this spring, the cathedral of Notre Dame burned.  This was a heartbreaking loss of a cathedral that had stood in the middle of Paris for 850 years.  Today it is being restored, and the goal is still, as announced in April 2019 right after the fire was put out, to have it open again by the summer Olympics of 2024, which will be held in Paris.

So what exactly does "restoration" mean?  It has a specific meaning that is not just rebuilding or repairing.  It means putting it back to its "last known state," what it was like before the fire, i.e. like the image below.

 

This is not the twelfth-century version of Notre Dame (building began in 1163).  The twelfth-century version was a construction site.  It was not actually finished until the 1220s, some sixty years after construction began, and those bell towers were among the last things built.  And Notre Dame has had plenty of changes over the centuries, even though the overall structure has remained pretty much the same since the thirteenth century.  The flying buttresses were added not long after it was officially finished, because the weight of the roof threatened to push out the walls, built tall and thin with lots of windows.  (Once the fire took off the roof, those buttresses threatened to push the walls in, though lots of trusses have now staved off collapse.)

Other changes happened over the centuries.  In the seventeenth century, the cathedral canons decided the original stained glass was silly and old-fashioned and knocked a lot of it out, replacing it with plain glass.  In the eighteenth century, with the French Revolution, the heads of the kings and queens of the Old Testament, arrayed across the front over the doors, were knocked off.  Down with tyranny!  A smaller fire scorched the cathedral in 1830, during a revolt against the archbishop.  So when Victor Hugo published Notre-Dame de Paris in 1831 (known in the English-speaking world as The Hunchback of Notre Dame), the cathedral was in a deplorable condition, to which his book brought attention.

Viollet-le-Duc to the rescue!  He was an architect who essentially invented the restoration of historic buildings in the 1850s, putting them back to what they had been.

Before then, a damaged historic building, or one that was no longer serving the desired purpose, was either just patched up or rebuilt in whatever the current style was, whether or not it was anything like the original.  Medieval architects had little interest in restoration.  When the current Notre Dame was first being built in the twelfth century, the remains of the various cathedrals that had stood on the spot since the fourth century were cleared away.  Some of their stones were reused in the foundations of the new structure.

Viollet-le-Duc intended not only to restore Notre Dame to what it had been like in the twelfth-thirteenth centuries, but to make it what he thought it should have been like.  He thus had new heads made for the kings and queens of the Old Testament, much sweeter and more simpering looking than the thirteenth-century originals (now knocked off).  He made the gargoyles now considered iconic.  His work was finished by about 1870.

Most notably, he made a really enormous spire to rise above the crossing of the nave and transept and decorated the area with copper figures of the Apostles.  It is Viollet-le-Duc's version of the cathedral that is now being restored, medieval with a nineteenth-century twist.

I personally have doubts about that spire.  When it caught fire, it crashed through the stone vaulting below, causing most of the damage that occurred to the church's interior.  In the rest of the church, the medieval stone vaulting (sort of like a ceiling, below the roof) held up fine, protecting the cathedral's interior even while the fire raged above.  The vaulting may have indeed been weak where the spire fell, because Viollet-le-Duc had removed it at the crossing point, to bring up his enormous spire in sections from below.  He then replaced it, but I bet his techniques weren't up to the thirteenth century.

Some of the limestone from which the church walls were built was badly weakened by the fire.  Stone won't actually burn, but limestone, when heated in a lime kiln, breaks down to become one of the ingredients to make cement.  Some of the stone in the upper walls near the roof broke down badly in the heat, so new limestone is being quarried to replace it.

The biggest disaster was the roof.  It was supported by what was called a "forest" of oak beams, and the 900 year old timbers burned like crazy.  Originally it was thought that there was no way that 1200 or 1300 oaks big enough could be found in modern Europe to replace them, so other plans were suggested, including a glass roof supported by steel beams, with a garden growing on top of the stone vaulting.  But the architects claim to have found 1200 big enough oaks, mostly from France though some from eastern Europe, many planted in the eighteenth century with the intention of growing them into masts for ships.

One might wonder if building back in wood is the best plan, but they're going with it (sprinkler systems are supposed to be involved).  Timber framers have been studying medieval methods for a long time, so they will reconstruct the "forest" as it was (it was thoroughly documented), using mostly medieval techniques, though some sawmills will be involved.

The roof itself was a topic of intense discussion.  It was 500 tons of lead, which spewed toxic lead dust over central Paris with the fire.  But at least for now the plan is to go with lead, based on the argument that no one will climb up and lick the roof, so don't worry about it.

The cathedral of Reims was heavily damaged in World War I, with the vaulting taken out as well as the roof.  It was restored over a twenty year period, just in time for World War II, when fortunately it was not bombed again.  Today it looks a lot like it did in the thirteenth century, or the early twentieth century anyway (they had plenty of photos to work from).  They reused as many of the fallen stones as they could.  So Notre Dame may well soon be looking like itself again, again welcoming 50 or more times as many tourists as people attending Mass.

 

The February 2022 National Geographic has a good article on the people doing the restoration work.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022

Notre Dame of Paris

This is heart-breaking.  Notre Dame is burning.

The cathedral is 850 years old, having been begun in the 1160s under the direction of the bishop of Paris.  The pope laid the cornerstone.  There had been older cathedrals there since the fourth or fifth century, changed or replaced every century or two, but this one was so large and so beautiful that it was never replaced.  It's built of local limestone.  The roof, now gone, was supported by wooden beams, giant oaks dating from the twelfth century, which would have been very dry and burned very readily.

It's one of the earliest and best-known churches in the Gothic style, a new twelfth-century way of building churches that emphasized height and light.  (The monastery of St.-Denis, on the outskirts of Paris, is now considered the first Gothic church, a generation earlier.)

The church was finished within a generation, but of course it had challenges and issues over the centuries—though nothing like what it is now facing.  The first problem was that the high walls, pierced by high windows, started bowing ever so slightly but very alarmingly.  The flying buttresses were then added to help keep the walls upright at the beginning of the thirteenth century.

During the early eighteenth century, the church lost much of its medieval stained glass, knocked out by the cathedral canons as too "old fashioned."  Then in the late eighteenth century, when France went officially atheistic during the Revolution, the facade was deliberately damaged, the heads knocked off the kings and queens of the Old Testament who were ranged across the front.

It was still however the biggest, most important building in Paris, and when Napoleon was crowned emperor (crowning himself), he held the ceremony in Notre Dame.

The novelist Victor Hugo deplored the dilapidated condition of the cathedral, and in his Notre Dame de Paris (1831), usually translated as The Hunchback of Notre Dame, he inspired Parisians to look at their cathedral and save it.  Extensive renovations were carried out, headed by Viollet le Duc, who put new heads on the Old Testament kings and queens, added gargoyles, and had the whole thing topped off by a spire (flèche in French) at the crossing point of nave and the perpendicular aisles (transept), which spire collapsed today.

Recently the whole church was cleaned of the dirty patina from polluted air and was looking fresh and inviting, as seen in the picture below, taken the last time we were in Paris.  The limestone walls still stand, but it may be an awfully long time, if ever, before the church will be itself again.  (Limestone doesn't actually burn but it disintegrates in intense heat.  It is burned in kilns to form one of the components of cement.)

In the twelfth century, when Chartres cathedral caught fire, the local citizens pounded on the walls and cursed God.  One can see their point.

Added May 6:

Amazingly, much of the interior of the church survived.  There was stone arching (ceiling) below the actual roof, and it held up fairly well.  The biggest damage was at the crossing, where the nave met the transept.  The nineteenth-century spire crashed through there when it fell.

But obviously the church still needs a roof.  There are not 1300 oaks in Europe big enough to replace the 1300 wooden beams (made from oaks already several centuries old in the twelfth century).  And there is concern that, without a roof pressing down and out, the walls, which are pushed in by the flying buttresses, might start leaning toward the center.

Here's an article from the NY Times about how the fire spread--and how it could have been even worse than it is.

The French government has promised restoration within 5 years, in time for the next Olympics (to be held in Paris).  We'll see.  But cathedrals have been rebuilt before.  Reims, in northern Champagne, was blown up in WW I, leaving nothing but the walls, and was rebuilt back to its thirteenth-century glory over 20 years.

© C. Dale Brittain 2019