An extraordinary restoration has swept away the lead dust and made the cathedral vivid, but thankfully not kitsch. Our architecture critic takes a look inside
“This cathedral is a happy metaphor of what a nation is and what the world should be,” said President Macron. Yet, in an obvious mismatch, the unity and harmony of the restored Notre Dame de Paris, the collective achievement of thousands of craftspeople, builders, firefighters, engineers, architects, clergy, funders and administrators, is as different as could be from the fractious state of politics in France, whose most recent prime minister resigned in the week before the cathedral’s reopening.
What is true is that the achievement of the restoration, more or less within the five-year span improbably promised by Macron amid the still-cooling embers of the 2019 fire, is an example of a French ability to get grands projets done, when they put their mind to it, with ruthless efficiency. It’s of a piece with the country’s extensive TGV train network, or the confident way in which past governments scattered crystalline modernity – the Louvre pyramid, the Pompidou Centre, the Eiffel Tower – around the venerable fabric of Paris. Something to do, maybe, with centralised power, the authority of the president, a history with a Sun King and emperors.
And, when you enter through the portals of the cathedral’s ornate west front, the effect is staggering. It takes the breath, stops the heart, catches the throat. The heat of the fire has been replaced by light, reverberating through repeating and intersecting lines and curves, the mouldings and tracery of gothic architecture. Thousands of tonnes of Lutetian limestone, the product of hundreds of millions of years of geological time and centuries of human work, become a kind of filament. You can still sense the weight, which is part of the magic, but the primary effect of all this masonry, plus the unseen “forest” of oak beams that forms the roof above, is to make a space that seems to glow.
Then, when the powerful and melodious organ starts up, its 8,000 pipes carefully cleaned of the lead dust that came from the burning roof, the forms of their repeating vertical cylinders fortuitously echoing those of the bunched colonnettes of the stone pillars, the whole building sonically and visually resonates. The human voices of a choir, joining this big sound machine from near the other extremity of the 128-metre-long structure, make the cathedral into a musical instrument from end to end. I’m not religious, and I found one or two aspects of the mass I attended last Monday a touch creepy, and the magnificence of the multisensory experience won’t convert me, but it’s impossible not to be moved.
The interior is, for now, the thing, as work continues on much of the outside. It is not pure white, more ivory, but relative to expectations of ancient masonry it’s like the face of Marcel Marceau. The new look is an exorcism of the filth of the fire, a form of anti-soot. It is undeniably uncanny, the brightness and precision making the nave look unreal, like a 3D-printed version of itself, the overall perfection only slightly modified by the tilts and leans and out-of-kilter uprights that you get in almost every medieval building. Romantics who loved its former patina will be dismayed to find that it has been expunged; this is not now a cathedral where a hunchback could comfortably lurk. The British architect Norman Foster has described how the restoration brought back the “shock of the new” that the building would have delivered when first built.
French medieval cathedrals, I was taught at architecture school, are logical and single-minded, their structures seeking to sustain the soaring heights of their vaults with mathematical elegance. English cathedrals are more pragmatic, prone to adding extra bits of stonework, adapting to circumstance, more likely to change their style over the decades and centuries in which they were built. It’s an analysis that tends to sustain national stereotypes – haute couture versus comfortable tweeds, the rational philosophy of René Descartes versus the empiricism of John Locke – but be that as it may, Notre Dame conforms to this pattern.
It was one of a series of great churches, starting with the origins of the gothic style in the basilica of St Denis in the 1140s, that sought ever greater height and lightness of structure, until the time in 1284 when part of Beauvais Cathedral collapsed under its own ambitions. Notre Dame, started in 1163, is part of this progression, the 35-metre height of its nave less than the 48 metres of Beauvais, but record-breaking in its time. The lines of force that hold it up can be read in the slender ribs of its vault and the daring flying buttresses that ring its exterior. The design and detail are consistent and coherent, with the earliest and latest parts of the building looking much like one another.
The clarity and adventure of gothic engineering would become an inspiration to modernist and hi-tech architects such as Foster, which I imagine are qualities he particularly admires in the restoration. The gleaming new version brings them out. At the same time, medieval structural minimalism was not originally pursued only for its own sake, but to maximise the areas of stained glass that would illuminate the interior, which would also be richly painted and furnished. The ultimate aim was sensory effect, to create a space of colour and light and music, to present as vivid a vision as possible of the divine world.
The restorers of the cathedral have mostly not tried to remake all of this medieval splendour, much of which had faded or disappeared long before the fire. The new altar, by the designer Guillaume Bardet, is a broad bronze filled-in U, a sort of stretched salad bowl, and his font, lectern and thrones are similarly simple and modern. The restorers have, though, revived the rich colour schemes of some of the side chapels, their celestial blue ceilings dotted with gold stars. More significantly, the glorious medieval stained glass of the old cathedral, which, remarkably, survived the fire, is back in place.
Most of these decisions make sense, as an ornate pseudo-gothic altar would have looked ridiculous, while it would have been a loss not to bring back the chapels’ paint. There is some disconnection between the overall pallor and the outbursts of dazzle, but, the logic of the choices being clear, this seems fine. Less convincing is the relationship of the stained glass to the rest: seen, admittedly, on a dull December day, it now struggles to shine as it should. The competition with the prevailing brightness, augmented by electric uplighters, is too much. The lighting could beneficially be tuned.
There’s no single way of restoring a historic building. All projects have to decide whether the original intentions of the builders are more or less authentic than the effects on a monument of centuries of history. You can put the old work back faithfully and discreetly, as happened after a 1984 blaze wrecked York Minster’s south transept. The cathedral of Reims, medieval rival of Notre Dame de Paris, wrecked by fire and 300 shells in the first world war, was reconstructed in such a way that most modern visitors wouldn’t know how much of its fabric is from the 20th century.
You can declare the damage, as in David Chipperfield’s celebrated rebuild of the wartorn Neues Museum in Berlin, and place plainly new work alongside the old. In more extreme cases of destruction you can build something wholly new among the ruins, as in Coventry’s modernist replacement of its blitzed medieval cathedral. At the other end of the scale, you can reinstate a version of the original that no one has seen for centuries. A controversial recent restoration of Chartres Cathedral tried to bring back its bright medieval colour scheme to an unprecedented degree, a move which brought an accusation of “desecration”.
The restoration of Notre Dame isn’t quite any of these approaches. There were flirtations early in its development with such things as commissioning a contemporary architect to redesign its slender central spire, and there was alarm from some quarters that the new interior would be a work of Disneyfied kitsch. The final result eschews some of the riskier early ideas, but it is still a version of the cathedral that has never existed before.
The medieval original would have been more colourful, more lavishly furnished and of course lacking that electric light. The pre-fire Notre Dame was a work of the 19th-century restorer Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, plus several accidents, destructions and interventions of history, as much as of medieval masons. The latest edition keeps (or reinstates) most of both the first and subsequent versions, while creating an atmosphere of its own.
One craftsman who worked on the York Minster restoration urged the Notre Dame restorers to take their time in the aftermath of the 2019 fire. They didn’t. Instead, led by the late General Jean-Louis Georgelin, appointed by Macron to manage the project, they marched the cathedral to its triumphant if not-too-subtle present state. Some online culture warriors are now trying to portray this renewal as a victory for religious conservatism, despite the leading role of the secular French state, and as evidence of European superiority. They should desist. Notre Dame should belong to everyone, and anyone who wants to score cheap points off the achievement of its restoration can eat lead dust.
