Notre-Dame Cathedral

In 1160, Bishop Maurice de Sully decided the existing Romanesque cathedral of Saint Etienne was hopelessly inadequate for a city whose population was exploding. He ordered its demolition to make way for a Gothic giant on the Ile de la Cite. Funding this colossal project required immense wealth. The cathedral chapter raised money by taxing their serfs. When those peasants refused to pay in 1250, the clerics simply threw them in prison. Queen Blanche of Castile eventually intervened, but the labourers still had to buy their own freedom to satisfy the project managers. The clerics used this extracted wealth to purchase thousands of tonnes of Lutetian limestone from the quarries of the twelfth arrondissement. Decades into the build, the master masons realised they had made a terrible mistake. The interior was far too dark. Competing with the luminous new sanctuaries rising in nearby cities, the builders radically altered the design in the 1220s. They tore out the upper levels to enlarge the windows, which immediately created a massive problem with rainwater pooling on the altered roof structure. To prevent the walls from rotting, they engineered exceptionally long flying buttresses equipped with carved stone channels. These arches were not just structural supports. They functioned as an advanced medieval plumbing system designed to vomit water far from the delicate masonry. Centuries of royal weddings and solemn ceremonies gave way to absolute chaos in the autumn of 1793. Revolutionaries stormed the square and looked up at the twenty eight statues of the Kings of Judah adorning the western facade. Mistaking the biblical figures for the French monarchy, the mob tied ropes around the stone necks and pulled them down before decapitating them in the mud of the square. The newly proclaimed republican government then stripped the interior of its silver and transformed the sacred space into a warehouse. For a brief period, the nave held fifteen hundred barrels of wine destined for the soldiers of the republic. Victor Hugo effectively saved the crumbling structure from total demolition with his 1831 novel. The fictional tragedy of Quasimodo forced the city to look at the physical tragedy of the rotting masonry. Eugene Viollet le Duc took charge of a massive restoration project that bordered on reinvention. He populated the upper galleries with his own fantastical creations. The brooding chimeras that tourists now photograph against the Paris skyline are not medieval monsters at all. They are nineteenth century additions born entirely from his own imagination. He even gave his own facial features to the copper statue of Saint Thomas that gazed up at the new lead roofed spire. That same spire collapsed in April 2019 when a catastrophic fire consumed the ancient roof structure known as the forest, which had been built from thirteen hundred oak trees. The disaster forced the building shut for five years of painstaking reconstruction. Workers carefully rebuilt the roof exactly as it was, while the state commissioned Claire Tabouret to design modern stained glass windows for the southern chapels. Visitors stepping inside today will find the familiar pale limestone brightened by a controversial mixture of medieval engineering and the bright glare of modern glass throwing new colours across the nave.