Notre Dame is back – but not quite as you knew her - Digiblitz Touch

Paris
CNN
—

Politely hidden behind construction hoarding, razor wire and a gauze of scaffolding, “Our Lady of Paris” has been healing.

Five years after the flames roared and the world held its breath, Notre Dame cathedral is coming back to life.

“It’s a wonder. Even for us who are very often in the cathedral, it doesn’t get old, it gets more beautiful every day,” Philippe Jost, the head of the effort to rebuild Notre Dame, said in November.

“There’s a Sistine Chapel effect,” he said of returning to the beloved landmark, with something to see and discover wherever you look.

With the cathedral set to open to the public on December 8, even today, the cause of the catastrophic fire that blazed through the monument on April 15, 2019, remains a mystery, though investigators believe it was accidental.

Huge plumes of smoke billow into the air as fire engulfs the spire of Notre Dame in Paris on April 15, 2019. It took firefighters nine hours to extinguish the blaze.

Benoit Tessier/Reuters

Regardless, the numbers behind the reconstruction efforts are striking. Restoring the historic monument to its former state has cost an estimated €700 million ($737 million), according to Rebuilding Notre Dame de Paris, the public body headed by Jost which is responsible for the work. Overall, €846 million ($891 million) were raised in donations from 340,000 donors in 150 countries, with the extra funds used to restore other monuments.

Beyond that, there are the materials used in its rebuilding: The tallest oak felled was 27 meters tall (88 feet high), 1,300 cubic meters of stone were replaced, 8,000 organ pipes (belonging to France’s largest instrument) cleaned and retuned, 1,500 solid oak pews hewed – all the work of 2,000 dedicated artisans.

The result of their labor is even more impressive.

Dark to light

A few steps beneath the cascading statues of the cathedral’s magnificent façade, dark gives way to light.

The naked columns of the cathedral soar up to the ceiling; the walls, stripped of centuries of dust and grime, appear brand new.

The cost of the fire hasn’t just been financial – the careful cleaning and restoration has stolen some of the mystical gloom and charm that visitors will remember. But those responsible hope it will ensure the health of the building for centuries to come.

The nave of Notre Dame has been transformed since the inferno. Before any work could be done, the building first needed to be secured to prevent damaged portions from collapsing and to support the 28 flying buttresses of the nave.

Sarah Meyssonnier/AP

France’s President Emmanuel Macron set an ambitious target for reconstruction five years ago and, with his visit on Friday, returned to thank the hundreds who doused the flames and helped with restorations.

Over much of the preceding 2,055 days, the site had been a hive of industry, with teams cleaning marble mosaics, retouching frescoes and clambering over the anthill of scaffolding that filled the center of the landmark.

CNN teams have visited Notre Dame several times since the fire, even as the work ploughed on through Covid-19’s stranglehold on France.

For CNN cameraman Mark Esplin, one change has been most striking. He recalls how there was still a “huge hole in the ceiling” when he was granted permission to tour the site in 2019, adding: “You could see right up to the sky.”

Like many in 2019, a CNN team watched in horror, mere meters away, as the cathedral’s spire was wrapped in flames before toppling to the ground. Late in the evening, they heard hundreds of people gathered around the landmark raise their voices in hymn.

“I remember the smell … Mark and I got so close that my jacket stank of smoke for days,” recalls Senior Producer Saskya Vandoorne.

Today, the octagonal base of the new 315-foot spire – almost identical to the one designed in the 19th century by architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc – has filled that void in the ceiling. Seen by so many as a symbol of strength and dedication to the rebuilding efforts, the wooden spire finally shed its scaffolding and returned to the Paris skyline early last year.

A worker installs the clapper onto one the eight restored bells of the cathedral’s northern belfry on September 12.

Ed Jones/AFP/Getty Images

Hearing the bells ring out last month for the first time since the fire was another important milestone.

The eight restored bells of the cathedral’s northern belfry, which was partially destroyed in the fire, tolled in early November as part of a technical test before Notre Dame’s grand reopening weekend on December 7 and 8.

Some Parisians hailed the return of the almost-life size statue of the Virgin Mary to Notre Dame, which also took place in November, as “miraculous.” Considered the symbolic heart of the cathedral, it was somehow spared in the fire.

Its return last month – during an evening procession attended by hundreds – was yet another sign of the deep emotion that this recovery has sparked in the hearts of so many in France.

For Monseigneur Patrick Chauvet, who was rector of Notre Dame de Paris at the time of the fire, the memories are still raw.

“It was an apocalyptic vision, the cathedral was upside down,” he said of his first look inside Notre Dame after the blaze.

“I haven’t fully recovered from it; it’s engraved in the depths of my being.”

Workers protect the Virgin Mary statue, which has become a symbol of resilence as it did not suffer from the 2019 fire, before its return in the Notre Dame on November 15.

Louise Delmotte/AP

A work of passion

On the night of the fire, with the air still acrid with smoke, Macron made a solemn promise.

“We will rebuild Notre Dame. Because that’s what the French expect and because it is what our history deserves,” he said outside the ruins of the cathedral.

It was then that he set the bold deadline of five years to rebuild, which to many seemed an impossible task.

Few beyond those directly involved have been allowed in to see how the specialized laborers and craftspeople have replicated the techniques and materials of the cathedral’s original construction.

But for those soon to revisit Notre Dame, this improbable victory is best seen by looking up.

The ceiling is a lattice of some 1,200 oak logs – the “forest” as workers call it – which were felled in a former royal wood, just like the beams that held up the original roof.

Harvested in France’s west, and fashioned into towering frames in the country’s northeast, the oaks of Notre Dame’s newly soaring roof, wound their way back to Paris along the River Seine.

A “forest” of wooden latticework below the lead roof of Notre Dame fueled the fire within the building in 2019. The oak frameworks and lead roofing of the nave, choir and transept of Notre Dame were reconstructed to look exactly like the originals, according to Rebuild Notre Dame.

Sarah Meyssonnier/Reuters

Atop sits the spire, with a golden phoenix now at its summit, symbolically replacing the rooster that was found amid the rubble of the fire.

Remarkably, most of the original beams of the cathedral dated from before 1226, with the oldest from a tree felled in 1156.

Even today, the country boasts the world’s largest reserve of mature oaks, a unique boon for the rebuilding efforts. Three of the oaks used in the restoration were 230 years old, according to France’s National Forestry Office.

Carpenters with the “savoir faire” to fashion the trees into medieval-style frames were plucked from across France and the world, a move similar to all the highly specific skills required for the restoration: stone masons, metal workers, organ builders and more.

These artisans, working in concert with larger companies, were able to repurpose antiquated building practices at scale, in lieu of faster and cheaper modern building techniques.

For the man tasked with overseeing the cathedral’s reconstruction, using those traditional methods was crucial. “It’s authenticity, it’s the care to respect the monument,” Jost told CNN. “We use the same materials, oak and stone, and with the same techniques.”

The nave of Notre Dame cathedral. Some 250 companies and hundreds of experts were mobilized for the five-year restoration costing hundreds of millions of euros.