Notre-Dame Reopens in Paris After a Fire. It’s Astonishing.

Benoist de Sinety, former vicar general of Paris, was on his scooter that April evening in 2019, driving across the Pont Neuf toward the Left Bank when he spotted flames in his rearview mirror billowing from under the eaves of Notre-Dame. He cursed, made a U-turn and sped toward the cathedral.

Mary Queen of Scots was married at Notre-Dame, Joan of Arc beatified, Napoleon crowned. The cathedral has been so central to France that its forecourt is ground zero from which all distances in the nation are measured.

Now it was burning.

The whole world seemed to stop and hold its breath that evening. For nearly 900 years, since construction began in 1163, the great Gothic cathedral had been a constant and gravitational center of Paris, holding time at bay. Before the fire it attracted some 13 million global tourists a year, more than the Eiffel Tower or the Louvre or St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.

With plumes of smoke and ash drifting over the Seine river, many Parisians and countless travelers, having come to treat the building as part of the civic furniture, suddenly realized how much Notre-Dame meant. It was a shared bond not just with the city and the past but also with beauty and the highest order of human achievement.

What did it say about us and our moment, in the long arc of history, if this was its last day?

The building was still smoldering when France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, promised to reopen it in five years. The timeline seemed a Hail Mary. The roof of the cathedral, supported by a medieval forest of oak trusses, had collapsed. Its 19th-century spire lit up like a matchstick against the darkling sky, its tip cracking and plunging through the ceiling.

Restorations on that scale could take decades. The country was already rattled by uprisings over gasoline prices and a frayed social safety net that, like Notre-Dame, had long been a source of national pride and identity. The symbolism of the cathedral’s fire was unmistakable. Then came Covid.

Yet here we are.

Notre-Dame reopens to the public on Dec. 8. Restoration will continue on parts of the cathedral for years, but as a feat of sheer military-grade organization, expertise and craftsmanship, the achievement thus far is astonishing and historic.

For Macron and this still deeply divided nation, having pieced the building back together now carries a different sort of symbolic weight. For a wider world, it underscores that calamities are surmountable, that some good and true things endure — that humanity may not yet have lost touch with its best self.

I last got a glimpse inside the cathedral while it was under repair this summer, much of it still covered with tarps and obscured by scaffolding. But I came away feeling I had witnessed a kind of miracle.

I made it to the roof, where workers were securing the rebuilt spire and new rafters. Jean-Louis Bidet, the technical director of Ateliers Perrault, one of the French companies in charge of the carpenters, told me that each oak tree had been selected to match the contours of the ancient beam it would replace.

The tree was then carved to duplicate the peculiarities of the hand-tooled silhouette of the original, with the medieval carpenter’s mark even tattooed back onto it.

“Faithful” only began to describe the effort, which was not for show. The public won’t get to see the rafters that are now behind the restored ceiling vaults. I spoke with workers who came and went in the pop-up container village behind the apse, which had become headquarters for the restoration and where some of the 2,000 laborers, mostly French but some from elsewhere, picnicked under the trees during lunch.

“Each day we have 20 difficulties,” Philippe Jost, who headed the restoration task force, told me. “But it’s different when you work on a building that has a soul. Beauty makes everything easier.”

I can’t recall ever visiting a building site that seemed calmer, despite the pressure to finish on time, or one filled with quite the same quiet air of joy and certitude. When I quizzed one worker about what the job meant to her, she struggled to find words, then started to weep.

Notre-Dame was also a wreck during the 19th century when a young French architect named Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc was hired to save it from ruin. During the Revolution, insurgents had decapitated the statues of Old Testament figures on the facade, which they mistook for portraits of French kings. They rededicated the cathedral to the Cult of Reason, melting its bells down for coins and cannonballs.

He and another young architect, Jean-Baptiste Lassus, had won a competition during the 1840s that was organized as part of a dawning nationalist movement to save French heritage in the wake of Victor Hugo’s novel about a hunchbacked bell ringer. The novel stirred public outrage over the degraded state of the cathedral.

Hugo wrote in voluptuous, righteous prose about Notre-Dame’s dereliction. A critic of the Church hierarchy, he celebrated Notre-Dame as a great palace of the people, embodying all sorts of Romantic-era ideals about equality and community and history.

The abbey church of St. Denis, a few miles away, had lately risen to house the tombs of French kings. Its pointed arches, flying buttresses and piers sprouting ribs that branched like spider webs helped usher in the Gothic age. The bishop wanted to build an even grander Gothic monument.

Notre-Dame would take nearly 200 years to complete. Imagine a ribbon cutting today on a building whose foundations were laid before the dawn of electrification. From across France, itinerant glassblowers, masons and carpenters — hewers, who squared the timbers, joiners, who fit beams together — converged on Paris. They scratched plans onto tracing floors made of hardened mortar, because paper was still a rare commodity.

I gather that new seeds have been planted where oaks were cut down to rebuild those rafters. You may recall a variety of wackadoodle proposals, alternatives to the rebuilding, that circulated online after the fire, including one to put a swimming pool on the roof, another to replace Viollet-le-Duc’s spire with a chubby, gold-leaf, carbon-fiber sculpture of a flame, which looked vaguely like the logo for a chicken wings franchise in Colorado.

None of them, as far as I recall, recognized the building as a religious shrine.

They arose because France’s prime minister hastily floated the prospect of an international competition to reimagine the damaged top of the cathedral, which opened the social media floodgates for predictable insanity. It wouldn’t have been the first time Notre-Dame suffered unwelcome change. The cathedral was ransacked by rioting Huguenots and remodeled by Louis XIV, who found its Gothicism old fashioned.

Architecture, the kind that continues to have use and meaning, is a living organism. It adapts to new conditions and takes on fresh identities. During the 1920s, the great Gothic cathedral in Reims was rebuilt with concrete and steel after its roof burned during World War I. The British decided to leave the 14th-century cathedral in Coventry as a ruin after the Luftwaffe bombed it, to function as a war memorial, with a new cathedral built next door.

But Notre-Dame in 2019 was not victimized by some world-shattering event, which demanded remembering. The fire was probably caused by an electrical short circuit or stray cigarette butt. Prodded by preservationists and senior French architects like Jean Nouvel, President Macron elected to do the right thing, restoring and cleaning the interior and rebuilding the oak and lead roof. Despite some early fears, it turns out that no ill health effects appear, so far at least, to be traceable to fallout from the incinerated lead on Notre-Dame’s roof.

And wood rafters, protected by modern fire suppression systems, could last virtually forever. The original trusses had lasted for the better part of a millennium, the very definition of sustainable architecture.

Restoring the roof would also enlist skilled carpenters, stone workers and artisans trained in ancestral techniques with roots in French and European history. Notre-Dame could help rejuvenate these fragile but precious crafts.

After Macron’s announcement, a French organization of artisans called the Compagnons du Devoir, dating back to the 12th century, began receiving thousands of applications.

“In France, as in America,” one of its former leaders, Jean-Claude Bellanger, told me at the time, “those who go into manual trades today tend to be considered failures by the elites. Notre-Dame has reminded everyone that such work is a path to dignity and excellence.”

This is one of the timeliest and most uplifting outcomes of the restoration. It helped the restorers that Rémi Fromont and Cédric Trentesaux, two French architects, had taken precise measurements of the roof structure in 2014, and that Andrew Tallon, a Belgian-born Vassar College professor who died in 2018, had digitally scanned Notre-Dame before the fire, mounting laser scanners on tripods at dozens of different spots around the cathedral, collecting more than a billion points of data.

That effort gave the workers a map of the building, accurate to the width of a pencil eraser.

On top of which, the fire, for all the damage it did, was a time of wonders. Notre-Dame’s walls somehow didn’t collapse like a house of cards, as firefighters feared. Nor did the erector set of metal scaffolding that restorers had built before the fire crash and knock the walls down.

The cathedral’s stained glass windows survived, too, along with the organ. And so did those copper statues of the apostles on the roof, including the one that’s a portrait of Viollet-le-Duc, his face turned toward the spire he designed.

Providentially, they had all been removed by conservators just days before the fire.

I retraced the cathedral’s history earlier because Notre-Dame, since the 12th century, has always been a shared enterprise. Its nearly $900 million restoration, largely paid for by donations from a few Paris billionaires and some 340,000 other donors, many of them Americans, is just the latest example. Not an unheard-of sum of money by crazy American standards, the cost raised a few French eyebrows about precious resources flowing to a tourist mecca that could have helped countless lesser-known monuments in need of repair.

In response, the culture minister lately provoked criticism, most notably from Church leaders, by suggesting tourists pay an entrance fee to the cathedral that would go toward fixing other religious sites.

Notre-Dame can seem like further proof that we live in an age when the rich get richer.

That said, it is hard to think of many other buildings that have continued to mean as much, for as long, to so many different people, rich and poor, worshipers or otherwise.

Those artisans and conservators I met spoke so movingly about working in concert on something larger and longer lasting than themselves. For millions of people around the world, Notre-Dame remains the seat of the Roman Catholic Church in Paris, a ticked box on a bucket list, source material for a Disney film.

But it’s clearly more than those things. If not the most graceful Gothic cathedral, it is nonetheless a glorious, towering pile, its facade a marvel of serenity and balance. It has inspired Proust and Sigmund Freud and the Modernist architect Le Corbusier, who dreamed about demolishing central Paris and replacing it with concrete skyscrapers but wanted to preserve Notre-Dame.

Why did the whole world pause that April night? The first feeling of entering the cathedral can be overwhelming, as the crowds are so big and the architecture seems so cavernous and complex. But another feeling often takes over.

Partly it’s in reaction to the quality of sound, the audible change from outside to in, and the way the cathedral has its own resonance. One of Notre-Dame’s organists, Olivier Latry compares it to an organ pipe: The building is a volume, with certain peculiarities, he told me. D Major sounds wonderful in Notre-Dame, he said.

Partly it’s a response to the kaleidoscopic beams of slanting light, which, especially in the clean new interior, can almost seem to dissolve the heavy columns and piers that stretch up as if into the ether.

The best-selling novelist Ken Follett, who wrote a little book about Notre-Dame after the fire, identifies that second feeling as tranquillity, which I would add is a form of reassurance. This is what the restoration ultimately provides.

It reinforces our bond with the past. And it assures us that we can still find each other as so many millions of people have done across so many years, under the oak rafters, among the old stones.