When her
roof became engulfed in flames and her spire toppled over, I couldn’t help
remembering 9/11 and the Twin Towers collapsing under huge volutes of black
smoke and flying debris.
Miraculously
though the twin towers of Notre-Dame and much of her structure have survived
this month’s fire. The world now awaits
and wonders how modern technologies will help restore this iconic monument.
We
shouldn’t worry too much, for Notre-Dame has always found ways to survive
disasters, adapt to successive crises and draw on human talents to stay forever
young.
Consider her
history. Her construction started around
1162, under the reign of Louis VII, at a time when the king’s authority
extended over a fraction of what is France today and was threatened by Henry II
of England.
It took a
century to complete her construction, mostly; by 1260, the first wooden central
spire was erected, only to be taken down in 1790. From the 14th to the 18th
century, Notre-Dame was the scene of innumerable additions (new chapels, the
great organ), interior redesigns, major repairs (twin towers, roof, buttresses),
sloppy repainting and repurposing (the cathedral was twice used as a giant
cemetery for royals and princes, and functioned as a food and wine depot during
the Revolution of 1789).
After
centuries of vandalism, haphazard redesigns and repairs, Victor Hugo published in 1831 his famous novel Notre-Dame de
Paris and launched a nation-wide wave of support to restore the cathedral.
Then as
today, captains of industry competed to fund this effort. In 1845 architects Viollet-Leduc and Lassus submitted
their project and won the right to implement it. This would be the start of the most
ambitious, comprehensive and, when Lassus died, unrestrained restoration
project in Europe.
Viollet-Leduc
produced over 1,000 drawings and plans for Notre-Dame. Deep down, he wanted to rebuild the cathedral
as it should have been in the first place.
His
restoration project was extraordinarily thorough, touching all parts of the
cathedral: statues, the spire, foundations, flying buttresses, the façade, the
roof, the paint, the windows, etc.
Viollet-Leduc’s
imagination and ambition were boundless, as his drawing
below of what Notre-Dame should look like shows.
After
this massive undertaking, Notre-Dame was left more or less to herself until the
1960s when Culture minister André Malraux decided to clean her up, exposing for
the first time in a century the exquisite details of her façade, sculptures and
stone work.
Another
period of benign neglect and meager restoration budgets ensued, until the
recent fire.
Throughout
her life, Notre-Dame has survived wars, revolutions, plagues, insurrections,
fires and haphazard care. She is now
over 850 years old, and not a day older[1]. Time for a new make-over. Time also to learn lessons from the past.
