Notre-Dame de Paris

Notre-Dame de Paris is the medieval Catholic cathedral of Paris, standing on the Île de la Cité in the middle of the Seine. Started in 1163, when Maurice de Sully was bishop, and largely complete by about 1260, it ranks among the finest achievements of French Gothic architecture, admired for its early flying buttresses, rib vaults, great rose windows and abundant sculpture. For more than eight centuries it has witnessed coronations, revolutions and national celebrations, and it became a symbol of the city and of France itself.

A Gallo-Roman temple to Jupiter is believed to have stood here; the Pillar of the Boatmen, a carved monument of the first century, was found beneath the choir in 1711. In the fourth or fifth century a large early Christian cathedral dedicated to Saint Stephen rose on this spot, near the royal palace. By the twelfth century its Romanesque successor was too small for a fast-growing city, and around 1160 Maurice de Sully had it pulled down and its materials reused.

According to a medieval chronicler, King Louis VII and Pope Alexander III both attended the laying of the foundation stone in the spring of 1163. Builders, whose names are lost, completed the choir first, and the high altar was consecrated in 1182. In 1185 the Patriarch of Jerusalem preached the Third Crusade from the unfinished church. The nave followed, then the west front, whose two 69-metre towers went up between about 1220 and 1250. In the mid-thirteenth century Jean de Chelles and Pierre de Montreuil rebuilt the transepts in the new Rayonnant style with two enormous rose windows; the south rose was a gift of King Louis IX, who also deposited relics of the Passion, including the Crown of Thorns, in the cathedral. Work on chapels and buttresses went on into the fourteenth century. Laser scans by the art historian Andrew Tallon suggest that flying buttresses were part of the design from the start, allowing higher, thinner walls and larger windows.

In 1302 the cathedral saw Philip the Fair open the first-ever Estates General. During the Hundred Years' War, in December 1431, the ten-year-old Henry VI of England received the crown of France here. Rioting Huguenots damaged statues in 1548, and in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the clergy refurnished the interior in the taste of the day, replacing most medieval stained glass with clear panes in 1756 and removing the decayed spire in 1786.

The French Revolution brought the worst damage. Church property was nationalised, treasures were melted down or looted, and the 28 statues of biblical kings on the west front, mistaken for kings of France, were beheaded; many of their heads were found in an excavation in 1977. In 1793 the building was rededicated to the Cult of Reason and later used as a warehouse. Napoleon returned it to Catholic worship under the Concordat of 1801 and crowned himself emperor there on 2 December 1804.

Neglect after the Napoleonic Wars was so serious that demolition was discussed. Victor Hugo wrote his novel Notre-Dame de Paris, published in 1831, partly to save the building, and its success helped persuade King Louis Philippe to order a restoration in 1844. Jean-Baptiste Lassus and Eugène Viollet-le-Duc rebuilt lost sculpture, glass and a new, taller spire, sometimes adding features they felt matched the Gothic spirit rather than strict evidence. During the last days of the Paris Commune in 1871, insurgents piled up furniture to burn the cathedral but gave up because the fire would have spread to a neighbouring hospital.

Since 1905 the French state has owned the cathedral, with the Church holding the right to use it. On 26 August 1944 a Mass celebrated the liberation of Paris, attended by Charles de Gaulle. The façade was cleaned in 1963, and a major restoration ran through the 1990s. Notre-Dame forms part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Paris, Banks of the Seine, listed in 1991.

On 15 April 2019 a fire in the roof destroyed the spire and the oak timbers supporting the lead roof, though firefighters saved the towers, walls and rose windows. After a contested emergency law and years of stabilisation and rebuilding with newly felled oak, the cathedral reopened in December 2024 with a replica spire. Plans to replace six undamaged nineteenth-century windows with contemporary designs have divided opinion.