Out of the ashes: how Notre-Dame has been resurrected in a miraculously short time

It is tempting to assume that when President Emmanuel Macron said on national television on 16 April 2019 that he wanted Notre-Dame cathedral rebuilt within five years, the one person in charge of actually doing the building quaked in his boots. Pundits across the board thought 10, 15, even 20 years seemed more reasonable. Even the journalist Stéphane Bern, who was newly dubbed Macron’s own “Mr Heritage”, insisted on reminding readers that it took 40 years to rebuild Reims Cathedral.

But Philippe Villeneuve was sanguine. He has been the chief architect for historic monuments assigned to the cathedral since 2013. Whereas his 43 chief-architect colleagues divide the state’s 1,300-odd monuments between them, Notre-Dame is listed as his sole mandate.

On the night of the fire, he was in La Rochelle. He arrived in Paris on the 22:34 train and headed straight to the cathedral. Just before 10am the following day, the fire was declared extinguished.

Villeneuve was back on the site at 6am, walking around with the fire department. He figured that a five-year time frame seemed tenable. In fact, he felt optimistic.

The extent of the damage seemed clear: lost were the charpente (the medieval timber roof structure), the flèche (the spire) and the lead roof. It was obvious that the lead pollution would need to be attended to throughout the site. And three holes were identified in the vault. “But I felt confident. Five years didn’t bother me. On the contrary, I hoped everyone involved would be mobilised, positive and committed,” Villeneuve says.

As the official reopening date of 8 December loomed over 2024, several milestones have shown his faith to have been well-founded. In mid-January, the carpenters completed the charpente. In May, masons placed the final stone in the newly rebuilt crossing vault. A crane operator lowered back into place the choir roof’s 19th-century cross designed by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc—the only element of the roof that survived the fire.

By September, the bells had returned to the northern belfry. The new liturgical platform, 200 sq. m of chequerboard marble, followed in October, along with the designer Guillaume Bardet’s bronze ceremonial furniture. Workers began dismantling the wooden supports protecting the flying buttresses. The lead roofing neared completion.

“Everything is going according to plan,” the Archbishop of Paris, Laurent Ulrich, reassured his Radio Notre Dame listeners. Villeneuve concurred. All that remained were what he termed “the little things”: returning the 14th-century Virgin of Paris, found remarkably unscathed in the debris, back to her spot in the transept; getting the clerics to settle on lighting designs; letting the organ builders complete their fine-tuning; and the electricians, their wiring.

Some, but not all, of the scaffolding will be removed this month. Phase three of the wider restoration programme, which began well before the fire, is scheduled to run from 2025 to 2028. It will focus on the chevet (the umbrella term for the apse, the choir and the radiating chapels) as well as the sacristy.

The politics involved

In true French style, the oversight of this project has involved multiple, competing levels of administration. A governmental agency, Rebâtir Notre Dame, was created as an operational framework. As is customary in crisis situations, Macron put a military figure, General Jean-Louis Georgelin, at its head. Philippe Jost, the civil servant who succeeded Georgelin after his accidental death in 2023, is also an army man, from the engineering corps.

Villeneuve, meanwhile, brought on board two other chief architects for historical monuments, Rémi Fromont and Pascal Prunet. They answer to the ministry of culture.

He ascribes their close adherence to the deadline to two things. First, they carried out their official remit, which is to restore and restitute—not to commission contemporary works. If Macron’s idea of a new design for the flèche had been realised, the competition process would have massively extended the timeframes needed. As it is, the debate over the spire, along with official prevarications over the team’s controversial idea to rebuild the charpente as it was, with ancient methods, cost them more time than it needed to.

Second, the team had a ring-fenced budget from the outset, separate from the culture ministry’s wider annual budget. Interestingly, aside from slight increases due in particular to the reconstruction of the flèche, they have not incurred excess costs. In fact, Villeneuve says, since funds cannot be reallocated, any remaining monies will go towards phase three.

“As with any cathedral, once you’ve come full circle, you have to start over. You can see a monument is well maintained when it constantly boasts scaffolding,” Villeneuve says. The action galvanised by the fire has accelerated his schedule from the initial nine years he had planned, to four. After phase three, the southern transept and both naves, northern and southern, are next.

Quite how this ongoing programme will be financed is unclear. The Friends of Notre-Dame de Paris charity was founded in 2017 to raise international funds, on the premise that no major works had been undertaken since the mid-1800s. The fire of course elicited an unprecedented level of private philanthropy and dramatically expanded the charity’s activities. The ministry of culture’s 2025 budget is yet to be finalised. Private contributions for work on Notre-Dame will no doubt slow down after the reopening in December.

This speaks to the complex layers of emotion and political capital both triggered by the monument’s demise and expended on bringing it back to life.

The blurring of church and state

For Catholics in France, Notre-Dame is the mother church. For politicians, it is a kind of brick-and-mortar equivalent of the First Lady.

From the 13th century on, kings then emperors celebrated their victories within her precincts. While the Catholic Church was in power, Notre-Dame was the symbol of France’s independence from Rome. This explains why Pope Francis will be absent from the December reopening celebrations.

Of course, it is very odd to talk about “the French church” in the 21st century. The French Revolution bloodily enforced the separation of church and state. And that principle of secularism was upheld in 1905 in a foundational piece of legislation that laid out the ever-relevant notion of laïcité – the freedom of public institutions from the influence of the church.

But, as the author and honorary state adviser Maryvonne de Saint-Pulgent points out in her history of the cathedral, ever since the First and Second World Wars, Notre-Dame has been reintegrated into republican ritual. It has become a shrine to heroes and victims alike. When Charles de Gaulle entered Paris in 1944, he headed straight for the cathedral to hail the Liberation. When the 2015 terrorist attacks on Paris claimed 130 lives, 1,500 people attended a service there in their honour.

Macron’s response to the fire shows how the cathedral remains an attractive political tool. In April 2019, the president was in a showdown with the Gilets Jaunes movement. In fact, he was about to give a speech when the fire broke out. But, De Saint Pulgent says, he intuited that the reconstruction could be the big chantier, or project, he needed to unite the country. “The fact is, he never gave that speech on reconciliation. Because he no longer felt he needed to.” The socio-anthropologist Fabrice Raffin agrees: “France always uses culture as a means of creating national unity.”

It is also about leaving his mark on the city. François Mitterrand had his Pyramid at the Louvre. Macron’s enthusiasm for a contemporary design to replace Viollet-le-Duc’s spire can be seen, De Saint Pulgent says, as his attempt to follow suit.

A misguided attempt, as it turns out. To propose such a large-scale change was to misread public sentiment. Nobody wanted him to change what more and more had come to think of as their cathedral. Nowhere is this more tangible than in the people’s involvement in rebuilding the charpente, the cathedral’s fabled roof.

A new heritage paradigm

“If this fire had happened 45 years ago,” Villeneuve says, “we’d have a metal flèche, a concrete charpente, all these new materials that people thought amazing at the time”. Instead, along with Prunet and Fromont, he has invented, he says, a new concept of restoration that he terms “authentic restitution”.

Prunet was first brought in, by his own admission, as a glorified cleaner. He worked with experts to ascertain what the fire had done to materials and how to clean them. What they did not want was for the workers doing detailed repair jobs to have to wear full-body hazmat suits.

Raman spectroscopy studies on the carbonised debris showed the building had withstood temperatures as high as 1,100°C. The spire burned for ten hours. The vaults had lost about 3cm on the outside, and were covered in a kind of leaden pancake (“about as thick as a galette bretonne”) which had to be removed. Molten lead explodes in contact with water, so they also found a lot of lead debris outside.

Inside, lead oxide powder—that did not melt—was dispersed everywhere, propulsed by heat convection. Further, the water used to put the fire out caused plaster coatings on the stone vaults to turn into gypsum, leaving white marks everywhere. Elsewhere, walls were covered in soot and char.

To the dismay of French competitors, Prunet’s team opted to use latex-based peel-off pastes made by a German company, Remmers, to remove most of the dirt. This process lead to some special moments. Not only are the interior walls paler and lighter than before, but in the choir chapel, the chemicals involved in this cleaning procedure made temporarily visible Viollet-le-Duc’s erstwhile polychromatic wall paintings.

Once cleaning protocols were in place, Prunet turned his attention to the vaults. The medieval ribbed vaults of Notre-Dame, held aloft by ever thinner walls and pointed arches, are a thing of beauty and a mystery to this day. Above them rises the charpente. What the fire has made clear is the genius in how these two systems were conceived independently of each other.

The heat of the fire caused the stone to dilate and the vaults to rise by as much as 20cm before falling back down again— in not quite the same position. But the arches that hold the vaults in place did not budge. Even more surprisingly, the charpente above them did not take them down when it fell. Instead, these wooden structures toppled like dominoes straight down the line, following the axis of the nave and the choir.

“I don’t know if the architects at the time were conscious of designing it in this way or if it was a coincidence,” Prunet says. What became obvious to Villeneuve’s team, though, is the extraordinary soundness of that medieval structure that endured, completely intact, until Viollet-le-Duc decided to replace part of it in order to build his flèche in the 19th century, and then the rest of it burned in 2019. This enormous return on experience is what pushed Villeneuve to opt for rebuilding the medieval structure exactly as it was: “Even now, no scholar can explain why Notre-Dame stays standing. I’m an architect, and I didn’t ask the question. I just said, ‘She’s holding fast, let’s do what they did.’ And we did. And she’s still standing.”

Referencing the 1994 Nara Document on Authenticity, Villeneuve highlights Japan’s tradition of placing emphasis on intangible culture. As opposed to the Western approach to heritage protection, which treats old buildings like relics, the Japanese prioritise ideas and savoir-faire.

The Ise Jingu Shinto shrine has been rebuilt, from scratch, every generation for the past 1,300 years. It is a system that keeps knowledge and skill alive. Similarly, Villeneuve’s team has remade Notre-Dame’s charpente with the same green wood, the same harvesting techniques, and the same carpentry tools as in medieval times.

Three things made this possible. First, the skill. There has been a growing resurgence, in the past decades, of interest in ancient wood craft. Second, a map. Fromont and his colleague, Cédric Trentesaux, providentially undertook the first and only thorough technical survey of the original 800-year-old structure as recently as 2014.

And third, people everywhere loved the idea. From villages, towns and regions across France and beyond, communities wanted to donate an oak tree. De Saint Pulgent describes this arboreal gift network as a kind of “national reappropriation”, a people’s cathedral in the making.

Emotional response

Of course, not everyone in France identifies with this monument or with its purpose. When Raffin saw the fire on the news in 2019, he first thought about the young people he has long worked with in overlooked parts of the country. Pundits were waxing lyrical about the loss of such architectural beauty. But for those young people, built heritage is neither good nor bad, it is just old. It does not speak to or for them. Class, Raffin notes, is important here. “The people monopolising the public debate are intellectuals, historians, the state.”

But even Raffin underlines the shock that has driven much of the emotional response to the fire. The older the built environment, the more inconceivable its fragility, let alone its disappearance. It is an incontrovertible thing in the landscape of your life. “For the vast majority of people in France, whether they engage with what goes on inside or not, they’re still pleased the international press is talking positively about Paris because of Notre-Dame.”

None more so than its architects, who describe its irregular ribbed vaults and stone facings like a shepherd would his sheep. Villeneuve has loved Notre-Dame since he was a six-year-old organ fanatic. He still has the balsa wood and painted plexiglass maquette he made of the cathedral in 1979, when he was 16. (He caramelised the northern transept by burning Papier d’Arménie incense to recreate Sunday mass.) This puts his oft-repeated claim that he died on the day of the fire into perspective.

This depth of feeling resonates with Prunet, who is still haunted by what his family went through in the 1970s. His father was chief architect for historic monuments, in charge of Nantes Cathedral, when it burned in 1972. “That shook him so much, it traumatised his family too,” he says.

Pragmatism got the rebuild done. Prunet senses, though, that what so many people felt upon seeing the cathedral in flames has not been eroded. “I think everyone is happy to get Notre-Dame back.”