Notre Dame - Practice

In 1163, Bishop Maurice de Sully ordered the demolition of an old basilica on the Île de la Cité and began a cathedral that would take one hundred and eighty years to finish. Nobody who laid the first stones lived to see the rose windows. That was the bargain of Gothic building: you worked for a roof your great grandchildren might stand under.

Notre-Dame gave Paris its centre in the most literal sense. A bronze star set in the parvis, point zéro, is the spot from which every distance in France is measured. The cathedral crowned Napoleon, rang its great bell Emmanuel for the Liberation in 1944, and by the 1820s had fallen into such disrepair that demolition was discussed. Victor Hugo wrote a novel in 1831 largely to shame the city into saving it. The campaign worked, and the architect Viollet-le-Duc spent twenty years restoring the building, adding the slender spire the world later watched fall.

On 15 April 2019, fire took the roof and the spire while crowds along the Seine sang hymns to the smoke. Five years later, in December 2024, the bells rang again. The oak forest in the new roof is already outliving its carpenters.