The first fire alarm sounded shortly before 6:30 p.m. on April 15, 2019, and the evacuation began almost immediately. Nobody knew where the fire was. The second sounded more than twenty minutes later, when the flames had begun to burn the roof of a cathedral that attracted an average of 30,000 visitors a day and more than 12 million every year. Tourists and Parisians began to gather in the surrounding area. The roar of the sirens of the fire trucks, which arrived another 15 minutes later, invaded the streets of Paris.
The spectacle was dantesque. While the firefighters tried to climb, the fire spread through the first roof, formed by a kind of forest of wooden lattices, many of them with more than 600 years of history. A few minutes before eight in the afternoon, the legendary 96-meter spire, installed in the 19th century and sheathed in lead, collapsed. The spire was made of wood, like the first roof, and both were reduced to ashes.
Meanwhile, embers of burning wood began to filter into the cathedral like small comets. And if a deluge of fire did not form or the damage was not even greater (bursting, for example, the three large rose windows of the cathedral), it was because the second roof (which was made of stone) resisted and due to an intervention of around 500 firefighters, which did not end until almost ten in the morning the next day.
By then, the news had gone around the world several times and there were many French people who demanded that someone take some responsibility for what happened. The archdiocese of Paris manages the day-to-day running of the Gothic cathedral, but the owner is the French State. In addition, the contractor for the repair work that was being carried out also had to answer some questions.
Hypotheses about the cause of the fire have continued until today. One of the main ones that have been considered during the trial was that six electronic bells were installed in the spire at the request of the clergy and that their cables, which are the ones that could have caused the first spark with a short circuit, crossed part of the wooden ceiling. . The contractors said that they had heard the bells ringing many times during the work, but that it was not their job “to know why they were there, whether or not they had the necessary permits and whether they received regular maintenance.”
The archdiocese, of course, also had its own arguments for the disaster. And that is why we know that two years before the fire, in 2017, he had requested 150 million euros from the French State to repair the damaged masonry of an almost 700-year-old cathedral. At that time, and with the socialist François Hollande in his last months as President of the Government, he offered them four million euros per year. Everything seemed to indicate that the maintenance and repairs were going to do honor to the cathedral… becoming eternal.
The archbishop of Paris then set out to create a platform for private philanthropists to finance the rest and thus accelerate the works. The response from donors was so lukewarm that some estimated the restoration would not be completed for three decades.
Thus, the following year, work began that would fill with scaffolding and cover with construction cloth a cathedral that was inaugurated in the year 1345, one of the most important prayer centers in the world and one of the main tourist attractions in Paris. Work that, making a virtue of necessity, someone thought required the installation of electronic bells in the needle that would serve as temporary support for the old ones.
Experts in ancient restoration, as many admitted after the fact, would have advised against them, and even more so if they had to cross, even minimally, a very old dry oak roof equivalent to around 50 acres of forest, which is about 200,000 square meters.
But the April 2019 fire not only destroyed the roof and spire, but also all the calculations that had been made for the restoration. Let us remember the starting point: in 2018, the planned duration of the works was counted in decades, the budget in tens of millions of euros, and the private patrons were mainly Americans.
In 2019, however, President Emmanuel Macron’s government promised that reconstruction would take only five years, donations of around €850 million were raised and almost all of the main patrons were French, essentially large fortunes or foundations of large companies that They wanted to position their brands, such as LVMH (formerly Louis Vuitton) or L’Oréal. There was such an amount of money that, according to the Bloomberg agency, in 2023 patrons were asked if the more than 170 million that were going to be left over could be used to carry out other maintenance works not directly related to the fire.
Macron had a dream: that the reopening of Notre Dame would precede by a few months the Olympic Games that Paris will hold in July of this year, and it is not going to come true. The cathedral can be visited, at the earliest, in December… and some portions of the temple will still be covered with scaffolding. The delay is due to the fact that Macron did not consult with a single expert about the time the reconstruction would take before announcing his dream date and, to a lesser extent, because archaeological explorations have been proposed and discarded during the works and there has been debate about whether to add elements moderns to the cathedral, as had happened with the installation of the glass and steel pyramid in front of the Louvre Museum under President François Mitterrand.
The chief architect of the Notre Dame reconstruction project, Philippe Villeneuve, assures that he never believed in giving it a modern twist, something that ended up being rejected in 2020 first by a commission of experts and then by Emmanuel Macron himself.
In any case, Villeneuve has also admitted to Der Spiegel magazine that “without the example of the architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, who made decisive changes to Notre Dame [including the famous Chimeras] in the 19th century and also designed the spire of the cruise, I would never have become an architect.” Viollet-le-Duc, in a cleaning and restoration project that spanned between 1845 and 1870 and which some of his contemporaries judged too bold, also received authorization to demolish the buildings near the cathedral.
Before that show of love, the story between Paris and Notre Dame had had its moments of euphoria, indifference and tragedy. For example, some of the images in the temple had experienced the punishment of the Protestant revolts during the religious wars. Later, in the midst of the French Revolution, the cathedral was desecrated and suffered the theft and dispersal of many of its assets, as well as the desecration of some of its religious imagery, which was damaged.
Notre Dame would later become a warehouse until, in 1802, the property was returned to the Catholic Church, which spruced it up enough for Napoleon Bonaparte to be crowned emperor two years later, with Pope Pius VII participating in the restoration. ceremony. Some have pointed out, with irony, that Emmanuel Macron has also asked Pope Francis to share with him the reopening after the works.
In any case, after Napoleon’s defeat, the temple again lost much of its prestige, especially due to its later association with the monarchy, violently called into question in the July Revolution of 1830 in the French capital. What’s more, Notre Dame did not regain its popularity until Victor Hugo published Our Lady of Paris, the memorable novel by the hunchback Quasimodo, in 1831.
That popularity has hardly stopped growing since then, and since, in the mid-19th century, it was crowned as one of the most representative places of a city that Georges-Eugène Haussmann turned into a legend of world architecture almost at the same time as Viollet- le-Duc restored the cathedral to its former beauty. Few expected that a building that had survived religious wars, revolutions, Napoleonic wars and, later, two world wars, would have to undergo, in the 21st century and due to an accident or carelessness, what may have been the most difficult test. devastating of its history.
And five years have already passed since that April 15, 2019, a world in our lives perhaps due to the tragedy of the pandemic, but barely a sigh in that of an almost 700-year-old cathedral that has seen it all and that only now , in times of relative peace, has seen what could have become definitive destruction.
