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Notre-Dame de Paris

On April 15, 2019. the world watched with horror as a fire tore through the most iconic church in the world: Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral. Built nine hundred years ago, for centuries it has been the spiritual icon of France. No trip to Paris was complete without a visit, whether the visitor was a true-believer or not. Napoleon crowned himself Emperor here, a Mass was said here as soon as Paris was liberated in World War II, a clear signal to the world that France had survived four years of Nazi occupation, and in 1970 General Charles DeGaulle’s funeral was held in Notre Dame.

The Cathedral almost died a fiery death that April night. The fire started — likely by a worker’s cigarette or torch — among the thousand-year-old oak structure that held up the lead roof. By the time it was detected and fire units arrived, there were flames coming through the roof. There is a delicate balance between the outward pressure of the ribs holding the walls and ceilings up and the inward pressure of the flying buttresses; if the fire damaged the ribs enough, they would have fallen and the walls then would have caved in. Whether the grand old lady would survive was in doubt for days, but the heroic efforts of the firefighters had saved her.

But the result was ugly:

As bad as the visible damage was, the structural damage was worse - the Cathedral had come within a hair of having the structure so damaged that it couldn’t have been saved. But the following day, the French President Emmanual Macron vowed that Notre-Dame would be rebuilt and would be open for the 2024 Olympics to be held in Paris. When we visited Paris in 2021 — two years after the fire — the team leading the restoration announced that the structure was finally safe enough to start working on the actual restoration.

I think few people believed that Macron’s goal would be met, and it wasn’t, but not by much. The Olympics were held in Summer 2024, and the Cathedral re-opened in December of the same year. To finish within six months of the planned finish date on a project of this size is miraculous. Several thousand workers - artisans, architects, engineers, masons, and a hundred other skills participated in what must have been a project manager’s worst nightmare. I did a lot of project management in my career and I am in awe of how successful this project was.

So of course Laurie and I had to see the restored Notre-Dame-de-Paris. We’d seen it several times before and, honestly, weren’t exactly overwhelmed. She was then certainly showing the wear and tear of nine hundred years. But we had followed the restoration pretty closely and we knew it was going to be beautiful again. And it was.

The one problem — we weren’t exactly alone in the Cathedral. No one who visits Paris is going to miss out on seeing the Cathedral, so it was a little crowded:

Yikes! This is one of the two aisles; the other aisle, the narthex and the apse were equally crowded. In many places it was impossible to set our own pace, to speed up or slow down; we moved as the crowd moved. Even the gift shop had long lines to the cashiers.

But beautiful it was. These pictures can only give you and idea — I and my little point-and-shoot camera just can’t convey the beauty of the Cathedral, post-restoration.

There’s a story behind the beautiful cream color of the Cathedral’s interior. When the Chartres Cathedral was restored a few years ago, many layers of paint were taken off the interior walls and it was discovered that the original color was a cream — big surprise to the restorers. So when the Notre Dame restorers found almost the same color here - the two Cathedrals were built over the same period of time — they realized that overcoats of other colors and the smoke of hundreds of thousands candles had darkened Notre-Dame noticeably. The restoration returned it to this lovely color.

A fair amount of the Cathedral's stained glass survived, including the rose windows. This is the rose window of the south transcept. All stained glass received restoration and cleaning; six windows in the south chapels were damaged beyond repair and will be replaced in 2026 by contemporary stained glass.

This chapel hasn't looked so good in decades All the colors were renewed, the stained glass cleaned and restored and the starred ceiling completely restored.

Notre-Dame looks fine from the front, but outside views show the amount of work that continues. The schedule for a complete restoration calls for twenty years more work!

Laurie checking out the façade, which looks just fine.

The cranes give a hint of how much continuing work remains.

I've always loved looking at the back-end of Notre-Dame, with all its flying buttresses and structures. Today, interesting, but in a totally different way.

Now, where is that Cathedral? You can hardly see it for all the construction equipment around it. This end used to be a lovely park.

We look forward to returning for another visit to Notre-Dame de Paris when the crowds have diminished and we can contemplate its beauty quietly. One of my best memories of this visit was seeing a nun leaving the prayer area in front of the altar with a huge happy smile on her face. The miracle of the Cathedral’s saving and restoration was not lost on her, and should not be lost on all of us.