‘It is our destiny’: Meet the people who rebuilt Notre Dame

The yellow-brown plumes of smoke coiling upwards filled my entire kitchen window. A few moments earlier the sky had been bright blue. I rushed down the stairs on to Quai de la Tournelle. Everything was still and eerily silent: passersby looked stunned, rooted to the ground; cars had stopped in the middle of the road, the passengers immobile, all looking across the Seine. I followed their gaze. Notre Dame was burning. Huge red and orange tongues of fire were leaping from its roof; we could hear its 12th-century wood cracking loudly. I will always remember that sound: the sound of history wailing.

As the cathedral burned, the president, Emmanuel Macron, the leaders of the Senate and the National Assembly, the whole government, rushed to Notre Dame’s side. At 9.30pm, Macron authorised the daredevil attempt by 150 firefighters to save the cathedral by attacking the fire from inside the north belfry. Never was the Paris firefighters’ motto, Sauver ou Périr (To Save or To Die), truer than on the night of 15 April 2019. As Jean-Claude Gallet, a three-star general and commander of the Paris fire brigade, told me: “The situation was so grave, audacity was the only option.”

At 11.30pm, the French president told the nation that the cathedral had been saved: “Notre Dame is our history, our literature, our collective imagination, the place where we have lived all our great moments, our wars and our liberations. It is the epicentre of our life … the cathedral of all the French people … I am telling you now, solemnly, that we will rebuild her. We will call upon the greatest talents to contribute to her reconstruction … It is what the French expect of us, it is what our history deserves; it is, in the deepest sense, our destiny.”

The devastation was immense. The spire had gone, its collapse having destroyed part of the vaults at the crossing of the transept. The “forest”, the lattice framework underneath the cathedral’s lead roof, made of a thousand oak beams dating from the 13th century, had turned to charcoal and dust. The lead roof had melted and evaporated. The water used to fight the fire had weakened the masonry and an army of sculptures and gargoyles now needed painstaking mending or replacing. Everything else needed thorough dusting and restoration, and this included pillars, stained glass, chapels, pavement. And the 8,000 or so pipes of the grand organ. The task of rebuilding Notre Dame was  herculean.

The following day, Macron fixed a date for the completion of the reconstruction: 2024. Five years! How daring of him. The president was instantly criticised, of course. However, on the morning of 8 December this year, he will be there for the reopening, standing in the front row, to relish his achievement. There is even a cherry on the cake: after the dramatic pushback against Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National at France’s recent elections, no hard-right prime minister will be sitting behind him.

Eight and a half

The cathedral’s age in centuries.

700m

The restoration budget in euros.

846m

The amount, in euros, raised through donations.

340,000

The number of donors.

2,000

The number of ancient oak trees felled to rebuild the cathedral’s wooden framework.

200

The number of forests they were taken from.

2,000

The number of people across France who have worked on the restoration.

500

The number of people currently working on the site.

250

The number of workshops and businesses involved in the restoration.

140

The number of tenders issued to craftspeople from across France.

1,000

The number of pieces of wood that make up the spire.

66

Height in metres of the rebuilt spire, an identical reconstruction of the original.

2,000

The number of names sealed in a tube inside the golden rooster  on top of the spire to commemorate those involved in the project.

Watching Notre Dame burn that night felt unbearable, not only for us watching from the Left Bank but – I realised while commenting on the images live for world broadcasters – for many people abroad for whom the fate of this 850-year-old Gothic masterpiece felt personal. I had US TV anchors crying, asking me to explain why they felt so utterly devastated.

Wanting to understand this universal fraternity of sorrow, I wrote a book, Notre Dame, The Soul of France, and then embarked on making a BBC radio documentary, which allowed me unique access to the reconstruction, not only from my balcony, but by visiting artisans in workshops across France. I saw them working on site, inside the cathedral but also at 90 metres up, on the spire and the roof.

“I was once the world’s saddest architect; I am today its happiest,” says Philippe Villeneuve, architect-in-chief for the reconstruction, who you could say has Notre Dame in his skin, literally: Villeneuve has the original design for the spire tattooed on his left forearm.

It was March last year when we spoke in Val de Briey, a small town in Lorraine near the border with Luxembourg, and he looked elated. Notre Dame’s guardian angels, led by Jean-Louis Georgelin, the five-star general in charge of the restoration, were here to witness a very peculiar dress rehearsal. Just outside what looked like a plane hangar, artisans from four family businesses that specialise in restoring historical buildings were about to assemble the tabouret, or base, of Notre Dame’s new spire. If all went to plan, they would repeat the operation two weeks later on the four pillars at the crossing of the cathedral’s transept, 30 metres up in the air.

Before this practice run, Villeneuve and Georgelin made short speeches. An emotional Villeneuve said: “I’ve got news for you, put it in your diaries: Notre Dame will reopen on 8 December 2024, at 11.15am sharp. We are so impatient to see the spire ascend into the sky of Paris again.” General Georgelin grabbed the mic and added: “Let’s say 11.30am, we may be 15 minutes late.” People looked at one another, wide-eyed. We had a date. Macron’s five-year reconstruction challenge was not pure magical thinking after all.

Listening to them, two dozen carpenters dressed in black, their tools hanging from large leather belts, were smiling, but with an air of weariness. On their shoulders rests an immense responsibility: rebuilding the “Soul of France” on a tight schedule. France has always valued artisans, especially those perpetuating old traditions and skills, and these are the best. Known as Compagnons du Devoir (companions of duty), they belong to an organisation dating back to the middle ages. Starting their apprenticeships at 15, they spend years touring France, learning their skills as they go from town to town assisting older, master artisans. They are taught not only a craft but an ethics with the motto: “Neither self-serving nor submissive but being of service.”

Paul Poulet, 27, works for the construction company Cruard Charpente, near Nantes. “For me it’s important to repair old buildings, it is like nursing the injured. And I like using old techniques,” he told me. He has worked on the Louvre and the medieval market hall of Milly-la-Forêt, near Fontainebleau, but “working on Notre Dame is simply the chance of a lifetime”.

I was struck by the sheer scale of this historic endeavour. Those pieces of oak involved are colossal. “The two diagonal beams are 20 metres long and come from eight remarkable oak trees,” says a young carpenter. The spire base is 15 metres long, 13 metres wide and six metres high.

The practice run was a crucial step. It allowed carpenters to check that the 110 different pieces of oak, assembled in 150 different, complex patterns, fitted together.

It went without a hitch.

By the time of my visit to Val de Briey, the pace of reconstruction had moved up a gear. The 1,000 artisans working on the site and in their workshops may be the best, but the pressure of time is intense. Help has come from around the world, for just as donations poured in on the night of the fire and the following days from across several continents, the world’s artisans have offered their services.

Three months after my trip to Val de Briey, I took the train west to Saumur, to meet two American carpenters working alongside French craftspeople at the carpentry company Asselin. Their names: Michael Burrey and Jackson Dubois. Dubois, as in “made of wood”.

In the summer of 2021, Dubois took part in building a replica of one of the trusses of the “forest” (the wooden lattice structure underneath the cathedral’s lead roof) for the educational charity Hands House, which aimed to show solidarity with Notre Dame but also to prove that such skills still existed. Villeneuve, on a visit to Washington DC, where the replica was exhibited, liked what he saw, and a conversation started between American carpenters and Asselin. Dubois submitted his CV and voilà, here he is on a three-month visa, lending a hand as a specialist in heavy timber construction.

Burrey, from Massachusetts, also took part in making the replica of the medieval truss. This was his first time in France and he had never visited Notre Dame. However, he had ties with France. “My parents spent their honeymoon in Paris in 1958 and visited Notre Dame. My grandmother was stationed as a nurse in France during world war one and was even decorated by the French government.”

At the time of my visit,Burrey and Dubois have spent five weeks making trunnels – wooden pegs that will hold together the steps at the base of the spire on which the statues of the apostles stand. Their French colleagues have been recreating the wooden foliage, dragon, gargoyles, handrail and balustrade from original drawings by the architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, who masterminded the 19th-century restoration of the cathedral. The master carpenters and wood carvers use their axes, chisels, gouges, rasps and files with the dexterity of surgeons.

Our conversation was interrupted by Georgelin, who was about to make a short speech. He wanted to thank Dubois and Burrey and called for them over, military style: “Boston! New York! Where are you? Come and join me on stage!”

It was President Macron who had what turned out to be the enlightened idea of getting Georgelin, France’s former chief of defence staff to supervise the reconstruction. His appointment ruffled feathers, notably at the ministry of culture, which felt sidestepped, and also with Villeneuve, who was not used to being given the military treatment. But under him, the reconstruction became a formidable machine.

I personally grew fond of the general. Touring the different workshops, he always mentioned the “battle for France” that they absolutely had to win, but also spoke of his deep gratitude. That afternoon in June last year in Saumur, he told the compagnons: “Your pride in your work is beautiful to see. How lucky France is to have you helping to return this absolute masterpiece of a spire to the sky of Paris. We understand what Notre Dame represents for us all and there is no reason why we should fail in our mission. We will do it! Vive la France!”

Two months later, Georgelin fell to his death while hiking in his beloved Pyrenees. He was 74. The face and perhaps even more the voice of the reconstruction, a paterfamilias figure in France, had gone. Would his sudden death derail the reconstruction schedule? His deputy, Philippe Jost, stepped in immediately. There was no time to lose. Everyone would work even harder to make the general’s dream come true. And four months later, President Macron himself would carve Georgelin’s name into the wood of the spire, next to the master carpenter’s and the architect’s, 96 metres in the air.

A few months after the general’s death, I was walking across the Pont de l’Archevêché in Paris when I observed a strange phenomenon in the sky. A pale, armless Jesus Christ, caught like a fish in a turquoise blue net, was flying over the Seine towards the towers of Notre Dame. Lifted by the site’s gigantic crane, the restored 8ft limestone saviour was then deposited on top of the south transept. There to meet him were Villeneuve and Jost with his arms, ready to be fixed at the right angle.

A week later, another fabulous sight in evening light stopped people in their tracks on the riverbanks: the spire’s needle, l’aiguille, levitating at a height of more than 100 metres, was slowly ascending to be fixed at the top of the spire. Once in place, the 66-metre, café au lait-coloured oak construction would be expertly covered by roofers with hundreds of sheets of lead. In just eight months, it had been carved from oak trees, put together and erected above the cathedral. An incredible achievement.

Things were clearly accelerating. Ten days before Christmas, the newspaper Le Parisien had warned Parisians that a symbolic event would take place the following day, the final touch to the spire before the scaffolding came down: the installation of Notre Dame’s new gilt bronze rooster. With its flame-like feathers, it looked appropriately like a phoenix. Just after 4pm, in the beautiful light of a sunny winter afternoon, the archbishop of Paris placed the relics of Saint Genevieve, the patron saint of Paris, inside the cockerel. After a short blessing, it was then lifted into the bright blue sky, and fixed on top of the needle. Shimmering in the winter sun, it could be seen from miles away.

On the night of the fire, the original weathercock had whirled into the air like an incandescent ball. It was found the next morning, bruised and battered, lying in the gutter of Rue du Cloître-Notre-Dame. Too damaged to be restored, it is now exhibited in the Museum of Architecture and Heritage, and says more about that night than many books will ever convey.

Every trip to meet the artisans working on Notre Dame was full of promise and excitement. They usually started at dawn in a Paris train station. Very early on 4 May this year, I boarded the slow Paris-Granville train to Normandy, and got off at Villedieu-les-Poêles, the international capital of bell making but also the site where master ironworkers have been making and shaping ornaments for the cathedral, among them some fierce-looking gargoyles.

At Fer Art Forge, a family-owned workshop, the restoration of the cross of the apse, designed by Viollet-le-Duc in the 1860s, had been completed the night before. This was the only piece of the choir roof that survived the fire. Twisted and battered, it took 1,000 hours of work to restore it to its former glory. Adorned with foliage, a constellation of gold spheres and a wyvern eating its tail, the cross may look like delicate lacework but weighs 1.5 tonnes. A fortnight later, it would fit like a glove into the wooden structure above the apse, where the trusses meet.

Around the cross and on the roof, an army of gargoyles and monsters guarded the cathedral for centuries. Most of those in stone could be restored, but many in iron had to be recreated, identically to Viollet-le-Duc’s original drawings. “It was particularly difficult to recreate the gargoyles, for the devil is in the details,” confided Vincent Combes, the project manager. “At first, our gargoyles were deemed too smiley, not frightening enough. Then, they scared the hell out of anyone who saw them. Our third attempt was the right one: scary-looking but not the stuff of nightmares.”

Notre Dame’s gargoyles are subtle creatures.

On the night of the fire, the north belfry’s eight bells survived thanks to the dedication of the 150 firefighters who put out the flames attacking the timber structure supporting them. Had they failed, the north belfry would have crashed down on to the south tower and then the whole edifice would have collapsed like a house of cards.

The eight bells, known as Gabriel, Anne-Geneviève, Denis, Marcel, Étienne, Benoît-Joseph, Maurice and Jean-Marie, were taken home to Villedieu-les-Poêles for a health check. Unlike the old bourdon Emmanuel, cast under Louis XIV, which has been hanging in the south tower since 1686, the north tower’s eight bells were only a few years old – they had been cast for the 850th anniversary of the cathedral in 2013, right here in Villedieu, at the 159-year-old Cornille-Havard foundry.

“We cried after they departed in 2013, and we cried when we saw them return,” says Paul Bergamo, the head of the foundry. “When you have worked, even only once, for Notre Dame, you feel a visceral attachment to it. It is difficult to explain; it comes from the guts.” In what shape were his baby bells? “We found out that six out of eight only needed cleaning and waxing for harmonisation, two needed heat treatment, those were Marcel and Gabriel, and a bit of welding.” Do you have a favourite? He smiles: “I do. Anne-Geneviève. Her toll is a bit above perfect because she was light-tuned just after casting. Just don’t tell the others.”

Ten days later, I was invited to visit the cathedral, a rare privilege. The last time I had been there was in July 2019, on a stifling hot day – blue sky and 38C in the shade. I was almost suffocating in my white overall, helmet, heavy boots and gloves. The omnipresence of lead on site made such armour compulsory. Now it was pouring with rain, and everyone I came across up on the scaffolding was smiling.

I got out of the lift at the base of the spire 33 metres up. The view of the south of Paris is one to cherish and would soon be the preserve of pigeons and gargoyles alone.

In the south belfry I went to look at Emmanuel, one of the lowest-pitched bourdons in the world, christened by Louis XIV himself. I felt dizzy, and not just because I had had to climb a narrow wooden ladder. I caressed the bell’s waist, touching history. Next, I found myself face to face – or nose to nose as we say in French – with Notre Dame’s most famous gargoyle, the Stryge, the demonic yet sardonic creature that has gazed over Paris, rapt in contemplation, for more than 170 years.

Then it was down the 422 steps of the north tower, into the body of the cathedral through its central portal, dedicated to the Last Judgment, featuring the archangel Saint Michael weighing souls while Satan stands by him, openly cheating. Those central gates are usually only open for kings and emperors, and for the cathedral’s army of artisans.

As I stepped inside, I felt sucked into the “Gothic symphony”: a special harmony and coherence that is unique to Notre Dame and comes from the clarity of its space. It’s a triumph of both logic and mysticism, of truth and grace. Those nave pillars, their sheer volume and their newly restored sand colour, not seen for centuries, instantly lift the visitor’s spirits. As I looked up at the ribbed vaults, their wounds finally closed, their scars invisible, I could not stop admiring the prodigious work that had been done here in the last five years.

Notre Dame won’t reopen quite on time for the Paris Olympics, which start on 26 July. However, with the spire and completed roof gleaming in the sky above Paris, the cathedral will preside silently over the opening ceremony. And perhaps, just this once, the French will feel gratitude to their president, who has brought Notre Dame back to life, back to its past splendour. Politics is one thing, eternity is another.

• Notre-Dame, The Soul of France by Agnès Poirier is published by Oneworld. To support the Guardian and Observer, order a copy from guardianbookshop.com or call 020-3176 3837. Her documentary, Rebuilding Notre-Dame, will be broadcast on the BBC World Service in December