‘His Cathedral was Enough for Him’

Modern Paris traces its lineage to an island in a river, a Gallic fishing village conquered by Julius Caesar in the first century. Called Lutetia by the Romans, this settlement was renamed Paris during the fourth century and in 508 was made capital of the burgeoning Merovingian Empire ruled by Clovis, the first king of a territory that would later be known as France. By the eleventh century Paris had grown into an economic powerhouse, a status it maintains today thanks in part to its position on the River Seine, a position which divides the capital not North and South but Right and Left. This island is Île de la Cité, upon which sits the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris, Our Lady, the beating heart of the City of Light.

On the evening of 15 April 2019 she almost became a memory as fire broke out during the course of renovations. The world held its breath, watching in equal parts horror and fascination as the cathedral burned for more than 15 hours through the night. Her spire, soaring 90m towards the heavens, disintegrated as the oaken latticework beneath it gave way. White plumes billowed from the church’s rooftop, patently similar to those that hung over Mt Vesuvius on the day that Pompeii died. We couldn’t help but wonder if she would survive. Ultimately, she was spared destruction, but her near-death experience has raised several issues, the foremost of these relating to her origin and identity. Where did she come from, and what does she mean to French people? To the world? She is a building that for anyone alive today has always been. She matters simply because she’s still standing. And it’s true that for 856 years her twin towers have framed the everyday cityscape seen by millions of Parisians. They are likely the only constant and common denominators around which many people, perhaps unknowingly, have anchored their lives. Notre-Dame is the neighbour to whom we smile but do not speak. And only now, after years of apathetic neglect, do we pause to ask her for her name and find out where she came from.

As patrimony goes, Notre-Dame is to French design what the baguette is to French cuisine. And like the baguette, her form is unique and her offering indelible. She has maintained a storied history amid an unavoidably controversial existence, but apart from being just another construction of consequence the world must remember that Notre-Dame is, despite her beauty and grace, a house of worship before she is anything else. She was the brainchild of Maurice de Sully, Bishop of Paris, who desired a cathedral in the emerging Gothic style. According to one legend, the bishop was granted a vision of the church during a dream and later sketched it upon the ground where it was to be built. This was done on top of the charred ruins of two Romanesque structures located on the eastern end of Île de la Cité, which themselves were built over the remnants of a Gallo-Roman temple dedicated to Jupiter Lucetius, the Light-Bringer. Construction began during the reign of Louis VII, with the foundation stone laid by Pope Alexander III in 1163. In 1185 the Patriarch of Jerusalem, Heraclius, travelled to Paris to preach in the church’s sanctuary and in 1189 the high altar was formally consecrated to the Virgin Mary.

Structurally, Notre-Dame consists of a choir, an apse, a short transept, and a nave flanked by double aisles and square chapels. The choir, western façade and nave were completed in 1250, while the porches, chapels and other adornments were added to the structure over the next century. The church has had two spires in her time, the original erected during the thirteenth century but removed 500 years later due to fragility. The edifice was finished in 1345, although restoration projects have occurred intermittently since that time. With a surface area of 4,800m2, a bird’s eye view reveals the cathedral lying westerly in the shape of a cross.

From her inception Notre-Dame’s outer walls have operated much like a picture book, telling stories through the employ of iconography. This architectural device, known as a liber pauperum, or a poor man’s book, allows the church’s carvings and sculptures to recount episodes from both Biblical and Apocryphal scripture. The most famous view of the church is found at the western façade, which features the two massive towers, these measuring in at 69m each, and three ornate portals dedicated to the Virgin,

the Last Judgment and St Anne, the mother of Mary and grandmother of Jesus. This wall also contains sculptures of the 28 kings of Judah as well as the most-celebrated of the cathedral’s three rose windows. These rosettes, all of which still contain their original thirteenth-century stained glass and tracery, are considered masterpieces of French Gothic art.

In the past Paris was a major stopover along the Way of St James, one of the Middle Age’s primary Christian pilgrimages. Specifically, Notre-Dame could be found at the start of the Paris and Tours portion of the trail, called the via Turonensis in the Codex Calixtinis (ca. 1145), widely considered the world’s earliest guidebook. Today, wayfarers travelling through Paris can have their credentials stamped by staff at Notre-Dame and the nearby Tour Saint-Jacques before setting off on foot for Santiago de Compostela on the Galician coast of Spain. Most people don’t realise that one of the principal reasons behind the construction of churches during the Middle Ages was, apart from worship, the agglomeration and protection of relics in order to attract pilgrims. Notre-Dame is no exception, having maintained a collection of these since her earliest days. Among her most revered relics are articles relating to the Passion of Jesus Christ, specifically the Crown of Thorns, fragments of the True Cross and one of the Holy Nails. These, along with the Tunic of St Louis, were spared from the fire, as were the church’s high altar and golden cross, the rose windows and the bronze statues of the disciples and the evangelists. A reliquary in the shape of a rooster that was situated atop the spire contained a splinter from the Crown of Thorns and pieces of teeth, bone and hair from Sts Denis and Geneviève, the patron saints of Paris. This reliquary was pinned to the spire in 1935 to protect the structure from future disaster. Although the relics were lost to the blaze when the spire fell, along with roughly ten percent of the cathedral’s bevy of artwork which burned in the fire, to the faithful it seems they did what they were meant to do.

In addition to being the spiritual locus of Paris, medieval Notre-Dame was also the epicentre of its intellectual awakening. The École du cloître was located on the grounds of the church, acting as a forerunner to the Université de Paris, officially chartered in 1200 by Philippe Auguste.

Today, most people know this collegiate system by a different name: the Sorbonne. Music also played a role in this awakening, as Notre-Dame’s school of polyphony proved a driver of innovation within the ars antiqua of High Medieval music. Composers at Notre-Dame such as Léonin and Pérotin were among the first in Europe to combine voices in harmony and of varying duration in order to enhance the sacred Gregorian chant. Their inventions were recorded in the lost Magnus Liber (ca. 1200), one of the Middle Age’s most influential compilations on musical composition. Not surprisingly, this musical tradition lives on today. The cathedral’s great organ, which contains 8,000 pipes and dates back to the eighteenth century, is considered among the best such instruments in the world. There are also ten working bells at the cathedral, each with a name. The largest of these weighs more than 13 tons and is tuned to F Sharp. Known as Emmanuel, he is the primary bell of the church. Originally cast in the sixteenth century, Emmanuel has been judged one of the finest sound vessels currently in existence.

The cathedral’s spire-less towers have long beckoned those with imagination. Since the sixteenth century artists have frequented the quays around Île de la Cité in search of something, an ideal perhaps, that only the cathedral herself could offer. She features in the works of Victor Hugo, the musings of Ernest Hemingway and the tales of Charles Dickens, each author using her towers to situate their characters, as well as themselves, within the city. For them Notre-Dame is a silent protagonist, encompassing all people from the highest of the high to the lowest of the low. She belongs not to any one entity but to the universe. Her imposing figure also haunts the sketches of Henri Matisse and smothers the canvases of Jacques-Louis David, each man painting her as a living monument that exudes contradictory auras of permanence and malleability. In their artwork, as in her own lifetime, she is a witness to events both fluid and ferrous, at times overwhelming, at others uninspiring.

Such juxtapositions may seem off kilter, but imagine that for much of her history she was neither the primary beneficiary of the sobriquet she bore nor was she Paris’s preeminent parish in affairs of the state. You might wonder

how that’s possible given that roughly 13 million people visited NotreDame last year, making her one of the world’s most popular monuments. The simple answer is that this surge of acclaim, which grows exponentially year over year, did not come about until Gothic architecture returned to prominence by way of the Romantic movement (1800-50). Before that the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Reims crowned the French kings and the Basilique royale de Saint-Denis to the North of Paris buried them. For centuries they overshadowed Notre-Dame in almost every aspect, although today the inverse is true; an impressive turn-around given what France has thrown at her over the last eight centuries. Her doors remain open despite the fact that her gilded halls have played host to everything from rebirth and revolution to restoration and resistance.

Notre-Dame is the proverbial birthplace of the French Empire under Napoleon Bonaparte, who delivered her from revolutionaries and crowned himself Emperor there in 1804 in the presence of Pope Pius VII. She is the gusto of Hugo, whose Guerre aux démolisseurs (1825) and eponymous Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) forced the public’s attention back onto the monument after a prolonged spell of disuse. It was Hugo who said: ‘ Il faut arrêter le marteau qui mutile la face du pays; We must stop the hammer that mutilates the face of the country.’ And Hugo who kicked off the 25-year restoration project spearheaded by Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc and Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Lassus, during which the young architects shored up the cathedral’s flying buttresses and vaulted ceilings in anticipation of the 750-tonne spire they would soon erect. The pair also stuck a total of 16 cheeky bronze statues on the rooftop and installed countless rain gutters disguised as gargoyles on the structure’s perches. But just as Richard Linklater predicted in 2004, we’ve known that this Notre-Dame, of Violletle-Duc and Lassus, would disappear. So we ask ourselves now, what comes next?

Architects could opt for another spire, or three, although Viollet-le-Duc is said to have rejected a similar plan, famously quipping that such a stunt was ill-suited to his Notre-Dame. A dome, then, per the example of Sir Christopher Wren at St Paul’s Cathedral after the Great Fire of 1666?

Perhaps, but in Wren we are reminded of a simple truth: ‘ Si monumentum requiris, circumspice; If you would seek a monument, look around you.’ So, is more opulence really the answer or is praise alone legacy enough? Once again, Hugo says it best, this vis-à-vis Quasimodo: ‘ Sa cathédrale lui suffisait; His cathedral was enough for him.’ And for you, is it enough? No matter the response, like the ruins of the original Gallo-Roman temple, the cathedral is and always will be Notre-Dame Lucetius: a light unto the world.