When President Macron said they would get Notre-Dame de Paris up and running inside just five years, everyone laughed. However, the restoration project is currently on track to meet the reopening deadline of December 2024 set by Emmanuel Macron just after the blaze, although there will still be some renovation works going on in 2025.
Jean-Louis Georgelin, the retired army general in charge of reconstruction recently said “We made an undertaking in front of the whole world that we would have our cathedral finished inside five years.”
Seeing the latest images of the Notre Dame spire base arriving on site and the cleaning of the stained glass windows prompted the IOC to look at the ongoing works.
None of the stained glass was seriously damaged in the fire as the firefighters refrained from spraying water on the glass and the opportunity to remove 200 years of grime has been taken – the human grease from the breath of millions of worshippers, the soot of millions of candles, the stains of condensation. It all left its mark.
Built from hundreds of oak trees raised and felled in ancient French forests, the base of the spire – weighing more than 80 tonnes – was transported to Paris at the end of April 2023 and hoisted to the roof of the cathedral.
It had to be measured with utter precision in order to slot into the corners of the medieval masonry where the original architects had put their first roof frame 900 years ago, although the spire, whilst a much-loved part of the Paris skyline, was not actually part of the medieval building. It was only put in place in the mid-19th Century, to replace the original spire that had been dismantled around the time of the French Revolution due to it being unstable. It was in the same period that many of the cathedral’s stained glass windows were also replaced – the originals having become too fragile.
In addition to the spire, work is proceeding on the sections of elevated masonry that fell in. The roof’s entire wooden substructure is also being replaced – as far as possible in an exact replica of what was destroyed.
The reconstruction of the cathedral has been an enormous task. It began in 2022, after more than two years of work to make the monument stable and secure enough for artisans to start rebuilding it.
An estimated 1,000 people across France are working on the restoration of Notre Dame every day, including the framework. You can view the rebuilding Notre Dame video on BBC iplayer