Inspiring Pictures: Gleaming Notre Dame Reopening After Massive Fire

French President Emmanuel Macron hailed the “sublime” rebuild of the magnificent 12th-century gothic Notre Dame de Paris cathedral as he toured it before reopening on Friday.

Notre Dame de Paris will reopen on December 7th, in time for Christmas, some five years and eight months after it was tragically gutted by fire, burning out the roof and bringing down its magnificent timber and lead spire. French President Emmanuel Macron, who has somewhat tied himself politically to the rebuild — having promised to have it done in five years shortly after the blaze — made a final site visit to the church on Friday and met with some of the workers who had repaired the building.

There had been some 2,000 people who had worked on the project and 1,300 of them, which French newspaper Le Figaro states included stone masons, carpenters, blacksmiths, gilders, roofers, sculptors, decorative artists, and architects were in the cathedral today. President Macron congratulated them on rising to the “insane challenge” on the “construction project of the century”.

He told the artisans: “The fire at Notre-Dame was a national wound and you were its remedy through will, through work, through commitment (…) You have achieved what was thought impossible”.

As Macron toured the cathedral he called the work, which has transformed the building from a blackened shell of five years ago and even from the time-worn 800-year-old gothic cathedral before that, into a gleaming church. He called the work “sublime” and said he found the “blond stone” post-cleaning more hospitable.

One of the stops on the tour of the cathedral was the spire, near which the April 2019 fire started while it was shrouded with scaffolding for restoration work. The spire had burnt fast and collapsed onto the roof below, its weight smashing through the vaulting above the nave and the transept.

The rebuild of the spire had been the subject of some controversy in the first months after the fire as an architectural competition was suggested to decide a new design, which suggestions even that a confection in glass and steel might be symbolic of modern Paris. Calmer heads eventually won out though, and Notre Dame’s third spire was built as a replica of its second, designed in the 1850s.

The cathedral has not escaped modernist touches, however. French artist and designer Guillaume Bardet was selected for furniture including the baptistry font, which is distinctly minimalist.

More fundamental questions remain over if and when such fires will happen again and what, if anything, has been learnt from the very near total loss of Notre Dame de Paris. As reported last year French historian Didier Rykner sounded the alarm over the continued danger to world-class heritage. As stated:

Leveling his criticism at the French government this week, he warns governments are more dedicated to imposing new ecological standards on ancient structures than protecting them from being consumed by fire during renovation work… Rykner said the devastating Notre Dame fire could have been avoided, and the government had already been warned about insufficient fire protection at the site shortly before the blaze. These warnings, he claims, were ignored.

Rykner said of the lack of preparedness that even now nobody knows how or where the fire started because observation of the great cathedral during a time of heightened danger — while reconstruction work was underway — was so lacking. He told the paper: “we do not know where the fire started, because there are not enough personnel to monitor the cathedral. I actually think that we have not given ourselves the means to avoid it”.