The flames had barely been extinguished before President Macron went on national television to pledge that Notre Dame would be rebuilt within five years, in time for the Paris Olympic Games.
Macron will return to the cathedral tomorrow, the second anniversary of the fire that destroyed its roof and spire and covered the 12th-century edifice in dust and soot, but his aspirations have been lowered.
Jean-Louis Georgelin, the retired general placed in charge of the project by the head of state, no longer talks of completing the restoration of the world’s most celebrated cathedral for the 2024 Olympics.
His aim now is to ensure that it opens that year, albeit with painstaking work continuing.
The 850-year-old cathedral will still be a building site then and there is no guarantee that it will have a roof when religious services resume and the tourists return in three years’ time.
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“Inside [the cathedral], the work will be globally completely finished and the spire and the transept crossing will be finished, but probably the [roof] frame will not be finished and the great attic that we are going to do in lead will not have been replaced, and on the outside, there will still be work to do,” Georgelin said.
Even the watered-down presidential ambition represented a challenge that would require military efficiency if it was to be fulfilled, he admitted. “Today my main concern is to fix a timetable for the restoration that will mark the beat of our march towards the opening of visits in 2024,” the 72-year-old general told French television.
“That’s our objective and the secret to managing to meet it . . . is to advance with a rigorous plan that will enlighten us.”
Although 24 months have passed since the fire, the restoration proper has yet to begin.
Instead, workers have spent their time – and €165 million of the €833 million donated to fund the rebuilding of the cathedral – securing the site.
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They have had to safeguard the edifice against the risk of collapse and to protect themselves from the 460 tonnes of lead that went up in smoke with the fire and descended again as toxic dust.
No one can enter the cathedral without PPE that includes masks, disposable overalls and rubber boots, or leave it again without having a shower, in line with French health regulations.
Georgelin said that he understood the rules, given widespread concern over lead poisoning, but that they had slowed the work, as, indeed, has the pandemic, which shut the site for two months when France was in lockdown between March and May last year.
The first task facing workers when they returned last spring was to remove the 200 tonnes of scaffolding that had been put up around the cathedral a year before the fire ahead of a planned renovation.
The metal had melted and twisted in the blaze and each piece of scaffolding – there were 40,000 of them in all – had to be sawn in two before being taken down, a process that ended only in November.
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Another difficulty was the gaping hole in the cathedral’s roof where there had once been the 96-metre spire built in 1859 on the design of the architect Eugène Viollet-Le-Duc.
Before restorers can move freely around the cathedral, the edges of the hole need to be secured with layers of white plaster to prevent stones from becoming detached and falling.
Inside the edifice, there is also much work to be done in preparation for the restoration. Take, for instance, the organ that dates from 1733 and which emerged from the fire smothered in dust. Almost all its 8,000 pipes have been removed and placed in a secret location for cleaning. Only the casing and 30 or so pipes too big to be transported will be restored on site under the loving gaze of Mario d’Amico, a Uruguayan organ maker who learnt his trade at the age of 16 when German specialists arrived in his home town of Paysandu to repair the church organ and he asked them if he could help.
“It’s a dream to be restoring Notre Dame’s organ,” he said.
Above d’Amico, work is under way to reinforce the cathedral’s vaults with wooden beams that each measure up to ten metres and weigh more than a tonne. The aim is to prevent the vaults, eight centuries old, from crumbling when a temporary covering is laid over the cathedral to keep the rain out.
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As none of the vaults is exactly the same shape as any of the others, each has to be scanned so that the 60-odd beams can be made to measure before being lifted into the cathedral by a 80-metre crane.
It is a lengthy and complex process, and only when it is completed – probably this summer – will restorers finally be able to get to work.
Macron initially appeared favourable to calls for a modern design to replace Viollet-Le-Duc’s spire and for a titanium frame to support the new roof.
But as traditionalists howled with rage, he retreated and announced that the cathedral would be rebuilt exactly as it was before the fire – timber and all.
A total of 1,000 oak trees have been selected for felling in preparation for the reconstruction of the spire and the transept crossing. But they will have to be left to dry for up to 18 months until their humidity level has fallen from 45 per cent to less than 30 per cent before carpenters can go to work on them at the end of next year. A further 1,000 oaks will be needed for the rest of the roof frame.
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In the meantime, the hunt is on for 48-million-year-old limestones to replace those damaged in the blaze. Most of the stones used in the medieval construction of the cathedral appear to have come from in or near Paris. Given that it will be difficult to dig up the city to look for others, experts are hoping that quarries in northern France will have similar stones.
Other questions remain unanswered too. Should the stained-glass windows be cleaned on site, or removed first? Is it better to use a traditional latex paste to clean the stones, or a new paste developed specifically for Notre Dame? A test was carried out in January on two of the cathedral’s 24 chapels, but specialists are still debating what conclusions to draw. Until they have come up with a protocol, the cleaning of the edifice cannot be launched.
Then there is the question of money. In the days following the fire, when Bernard Arnault, the French billionaire luxury goods tycoon, pledged €200 million for the restoration, and François Pinault, his equally wealthy rival, €100 million, observers suggested that the cathedral was likely to receive more than it needed.
Two years later, some 340,00 people from 150 countries have pledged a total of €833 million, 98 per cent of which has either been donated or is the subject of binding contracts.
But some analysts wonder whether it will be enough, given that almost 20 per cent of the sum has been spent on safety work even before the start of the restoration. Georgelin’s team is still looking for donations, suggesting that there are fears of running out of funds.
Investigators trying to determine the cause of the fire are also struggling. They say they do not believe it was arson and are working on a theory that the blaze originated with an electrical fault or a cigarette butt thrown away by one of the workers involved in the renovation of the cathedral. But after two years of inquiries, police have little evidence upon which to base their theories. Indeed, they say they may never find out what started the fire.
