December 4, 2024 at 10:29 a.m.
'PEOPLE'S PALACE'
PARIS -- On April 15, 2019, when the images of the Cathedral of Notre Dame of Paris on fire reached the screens of millions of people, the shock reverberated throughout the world.
The Gothic cathedral in peril profoundly moved Catholics and nonbelievers. A prowess of architecture, a Gothic masterpiece, Notre Dame has stood firmly through the turmoils of history for more than 850 years.
1163: The Construction
“If this monument is one day finished, no other will ever compare,” declared monk, diplomat and 12th-century chronicler Abbot Robert de Thorigny of Mont Saint-Michel while visiting the building site of Notre Dame around 1177, 14 years after the start of the construction in 1163.
Paris, the most populated city in the Western world with 270,000 inhabitants at the end of the 12th century, was about to enter 150 years of continuous economic growth and development, a feat never repeated since. And it is during this most auspicious period that Notre Dame came to be built. Unlike other Gothic cathedrals in northern France, Notre Dame was uniquely financed, mostly by Maurice de Sully, a son of farmers who had become bishop of Paris, and by Parisians, all kinds of Parisians: prostitutes, peasants and bourgeois.
In fact, little money came from the king and his entourage, thus making Notre Dame the “People’s Palace” and the first covered public space accessible to all.
We will indeed never know the name of the architect who, under the direction of Bishop Sully, drew up the plans for Notre Dame. What we know though is that he didn’t lack “ambition, technical sophistication, clarity and serenity,” according to historian Alain Erlande-Brandenburg.
His designs must have commanded both admiration and immense respect as the three consecutive architects who oversaw the 182 years of construction did not interfere with the original conception. The highest building ever erected in a city, Notre Dame stood at 157 feet wide, 420 feet long and 115 feet high, with two towers reaching 226 feet and, today, a spire at 315 feet high. Rejecting the opulence of the cathedral of Saint-Denis, restored some decades before the start of Notre Dame’s construction, Paris’ cathedral was unique in her austere beauty, a triumph of both architects’ logic and mysticism.
1594: The Epic Moment
During the French Wars of Religion, Paris quickly became a symbol. Whoever conquered it would become France’s only legitimate ruler and the man who would be able to end decades of civil war.
Two sides were fighting each other to death: the Catholic league made of both moderates and extremists who controlled Paris, and Henry of Navarre, in theory king of France but a Protestant backed by royal Catholics, who owned the rich agricultural regions of France.
Of equal force, the outcome of their fratricide war could not be decided on the battlefield. There could only be a political and religious solution to the civil war. Henry of Navarre knew this. He abjured Protestantism in July 1593 and reached out to the moderates holding Paris.
And then, he needed to convince Paris and Parisians. At dawn, on March 22, 1594, riding his white horse, unarmed, he entered Paris with a few thousand of his men. He let Parisians get close to him, and calmly rode toward Notre Dame.
Shouts of “Vive le Roi!” -- “Long live the King!” -- became louder as he approached the steps of the cathedral. Henri IV walked to the choir and knelt in front of the altar to pray for national reconciliation. The hymns and music of the “Te Deum” began filling the nave.
Alerted by the bells, thousands of Parisians joined him in prayer. History remembers him as Henry the Great, the king who had won over the minds and hearts of a divided country.
1789: The Revolution
Never more than during the French Revolution, did Notre Dame deserve the title of “People’s Palace.” Chosen by the revolutionaries of all political hues as a place where they would celebrate their success, from the storming of the Bastille -- a medieval armory, fortress and political prison -- to the abolition of all privileges and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, Notre Dame became for the Revolution a laboratory of ideas in which Providence and the God of reason could only be at their side.
When King Louis XVI was forced to go back to Paris from Versailles, the National Assembly held its first session in Notre Dame. In a historical paradox, it is there that the revolutionaries decided to nationalize all church properties. When the Revolution chose to nationalize the cathedral itself, Notre Dame turned into a huge polling station where citizens could elect their priests, at least those who agreed to swear to the constitutional oath.
The revolutionaries were slowly transforming the cathedral in their own image. Alas, on Oct. 23, 1793, during Maximilien de Robespierre’s Reign of Terror, the beheading of the 28 kings of Judah on the cathedral’s facade, wrongly thought to be the kings of France, was ordered by decree. However, discreetly, some priests started putting away the treasures in Notre Dame to safety, while the organist kept playing revolutionary songs to appease the sans-culottes (“without-breeches” -- the common people of lower classes that joined the revolution against the Old Regime, or Ancien Régime). Its reconsecration to the “Supreme Being” did not disturb the cathedral, which seemed to patiently wait for Robespierre's fall. It came soon enough in July 1794.
1802-65: The Restoration
After national reconciliation and an agreement between the pope and Napoleon Bonaparte in 1802, Notre Dame’s bells could resume their daily melody, and Napoleon was crowned emperor in 1804 in a lavish ceremony attended by 12,000 guests.
However, behind the apparent munificence of the event, Notre Dame was dying of old age and neglect. One young man who, in the 1820s, felt it keenly was literary giant Victor Hugo. He tirelessly campaigned for all historical monuments to be safeguarded by law.
“There are two things in a building: its use and its beauty. Its use belongs to the owner, its beauty to everyone, to you, to me, to all of us. Therefore, to destroy it is to exceed one’s rights,” Hugo famously advocated.
The success of his 1831 novel “Notre Dame de Paris 1482” -- restyled as “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” proved a turning point: A ministry was created to look after France’s architectural heritage and a budget was voted on by Parliament.
In 1840, the 30-year-old self-taught architect and Middle-Ages-erudite Eugène Viollet-le-Duc was chosen to restore Notre Dame. It would take almost 25 years to complete. Viollet-le-Duc succeeded in blending his work with the original medieval architecture.
For Philippe Villeneuve, his successor today restoring Notre Dame after the April 15, 2019, fire, “Viollet-Le-Duc's great talent lies in the fact that his work was almost indiscernible from that of the medieval builders. His spire was not identifiable; it could well have dated back to the 13th century.”
On Dec. 8, when Notre Dame's gates will open again to the public and to worshippers, Parisians and the world will be able to admire another rebirth of the cathedral, restored after the 2019 fire that collapsed Viollet-le-Duc’s and large parts of the roof.
Agnès Poirier writes for OSV News from Paris. She is an author of “Notre Dame: The Soul of France.”
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