The night nine centuries of history were saved — with 15 minutes to spare…
Eight hundred and fifty years is one helluva long time.
When Notre Dame’s first stone was laid in June 1163 it was more than 250 years before Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1439; more than 300 years before Christopher Columbus sailed to the Americas in 1492; 400 years before Shakespeare was born in 1564; and almost 500 years before Jan van Riebeeck landed in the Cape in 1652.
The cathedral was the realisation of a dream by France’s reigning monarch, King Louis VII, and the bishop of Paris, Maurice de Sully.
They wanted a religious monument that would dwarf any Europe had seen before; a cathedral that would be the wonder of Christendom. This would affirm the city’s status as the capital of France and France as the pre-eminent Christian country in Europe. (Besides, the existing church on the Île de la
Cité was becoming too small and worshippers fainted in the crush.)
One thousand labourers were employed, a work force that included masons, metal smiths, carpenters and two master builders.
The king and the bishop knew that their project was of such a scale that they would never see it completed in their lifetimes.
It was only 10 French monarchs later that Notre Dame was finally finished in 1345, almost two centuries after construction had begun.
How daunting and awe-inspiring this jewel of Gothic architecture must have appeared to the medieval residents of Paris.
Everything had been conceived on a Herculean scale. The ceiling rose higher than any other before it. The ribbed roof that suffered so much damage this week was constructed from 5,000 oak trees cut into beams up to 110m long. (In a damning indictment of modern times, a French cultural heritage expert said this week France no longer had trees tall enough to replace these ancient wooden beams.)
In the 850 years since the first stone was laid, Notre Dame has endured two world wars, extensive vandalism, religious fanatics and criminal neglect. It has played a pivotal role in the lives of kings, emperors and saints. It has been the subject of literature and art and was central to the creation of classical music.
During World War 1 a German pilot, flying aerial reconnaissance missions over Paris, dropped bombs by hand (as well as a note demanding the immediate surrender of the city). Notre Dame was slightly damaged during these bombings.
On the eve of the liberation of Paris in 1944 after years of German occupation during World War 2, Hitler ordered the hardline Nazi general Dietrich von Choltitz to gut the city, especially the religious and cultural sites. Notre Dame would have been the obvious starting point.
Hitler is believed to have asked the general: “Is
Paris burning?” Choltitz, in his memoir written in 1951, took credit for saving the capital and claimed that he disobeyed Hitler’s orders.
“If for this first time I disobeyed [an order], it was because I knew Hitler was crazy.”
Charles de Gaulle led victory celebrations down the Champs Elysées to Notre Dame even as German snipers still lurked in the vicinity.
Notre Dame had taken other severe knocks through the ages. Back in the 16th century, French Huguenots damaged some of the statues they considered idolatrous.
During the French Revolution anti-royalists stormed the cathedral to declare it a “temple of reason”. The spire was broken and they decapitated statues they thought represented the hated monarchy. The cathedral was used for food storage. Emmanuel, the oldest of the 10 bells, was the only one spared from being melted down. Relics were hidden in the National Library from Robespierre and his fanatics.
When Napoleon emerged as the leader of France he crowned himself emperor in Notre Dame in 1804. Napoleon had told Pope Pius VII, who was present, that he would be placing the crown on his own head. Pius raised no objection.
The Crown of Thorns, miraculously saved during Monday’s fire, is the cathedral’s most revered relic. Said to be from the original crown of thorns placed on Christ’s head during his crucifixion, it had been safely kept in the Byzantine Emperors chapel in Constantinople until the 13th century.
Then a Byzantine emperor ran out of money. Baldwin II pawned the Crown of Thorns to a Venetian merchant bank in 1238. King Louis IX of France then bought it and the sacred object was duly handed over in Burgundy to the French king. The king and his entourage then made their way to Paris amid great fanfare.
When they arrived Louis took off his royal garments and, wearing only a simple tunic with bare feet, continued on to Notre Dame.
The cathedral had been neglected through the centuries until a 29-year-old playwright was commissioned by a second-rate publishing house trying to imitate Walter Scott’s successes. Victor Hugo wrote The Hunchback of Notre Dame in 18 months and it was published in 1831.
The tale of the gypsy Esmeralda and the hunchback Quasimodo was a huge success. In the novel Hugo had described how derelict and shabby the cathedral was.
The Telegraph reports the novel was sniffily received by critics, including Balzac, as a Gothic potboiler, but readers immediately took to it. Suddenly Parisians started looking at the great dilapidated old cathedral, damaged during the French Revolution and patchily repaired, with new and possessive eyes.
France’s most noted medievalist architect, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, started renovations in 1844. He replaced the spire broken by Robespierre’s partisans, along with many statues of saints, and reconstituted medieval architecture.
Conservationists later discovered that Viollet-leDuc’s renovations were so shoddy that the original medieval parts were more enduring.
This week the cathedral survived its most Herculean test yet. As the fire spread on Monday night, a human chain of priests, politicians and churchgoers all worked to save the irreplaceable relics from the inferno. Miraculously the famous rose windows survived the heat.
A priest who entered the burning building to save the Crown of Thorns has emerged as one of the heroes of the hour. Jean-Marc Fournier, chaplain of the Paris Fire Brigade, served as an army chaplain in Afghanistan where he survived an ambush in which 10 soldiers were killed. He had previously tended to victims of the 2015 terror attack in the city.
Fournier insisted on being allowed to enter the burning cathedral with his fellow firefighters. He told a television network that “the difficulty for us was to find the person holding the security codes to open the safe where the holy relic is kept”. It must have taken nerves of steel to keep calm.
Notre Dame cathedral was just minutes away from being totally consumed by the fire.
“Just 15 minutes or half-an-hour later and it would have been too late to save it,” Laurent Nunez, the junior interior minister, told reporters.
How ironic that during a time of peace, 850 years of history was saved from absolute ruin with only 15 minutes to spare.
The Crown of Thorns, miraculously saved during Monday’s fire, is the cathedral’s most revered relic