Notre-Dame de Paris

Bishop Maurice de Sully decided in 1160 to replace the Romanesque cathedral of Saint-Étienne, outgrown by the city. Tradition, following the chronicler Jean de Saint-Victor, has the cornerstone laid between 24 March and 25 April 1163 before King Louis VII and Pope Alexander III, though the work probably began as early as 1161. The choir was completed in 1177 and its high altar consecrated on 19 May 1182 by the papal legate Cardinal Henri de Château-Marçay with Sully.

Four building campaigns ran under Sully and his successor Eudes de Sully. The nave followed between 1182 and 1190, and the two western towers between 1225 and 1250.

In the late 1240s Jean de Chelles added a gabled portal to the north transept topped by a rose window, and from 1258 Pierre de Montreuil executed a similar scheme on the south. Pierre de Chelles, Jean Ravy and Jean le Bouteiller succeeded them in turn, le Bouteiller taking over in 1344 and being replaced on his death in 1363 by his deputy Raymond du Temple.

Patriarch Heraclius of Jerusalem called for the Third Crusade from the unfinished cathedral in 1185, and Louis IX deposited the relics of the Passion there, among them the crown of thorns bought from the Latin Emperor Baldwin II. Philip the Fair opened the first Estates General in the cathedral in 1302, and on 16 December 1431 the ten-year-old Henry VI of England was crowned king of France there, Reims being under French control.

Church property until the Revolution, Notre-Dame was nationalised on 2 November 1789. In 1790 the revolutionary Paris Commune removed all bronze, lead and precious metals to be melted down, and the cathedral was rededicated to the Cult of Reason in 1793 and the Cult of the Supreme Being in 1794. The twenty-eight statues of biblical kings on the west façade, mistaken for French kings, were beheaded. Under the Concordat of 1801 Napoleon restored the use of the building, but not its ownership, to the Church, and crowned himself Emperor there on 2 December 1804.

Legislation of 1833 and 1838 confirmed cathedral upkeep as a government expense, and the 1905 law separating Church and State confirmed state ownership while granting the Catholic Church exclusive religious use in perpetuity. Classified a historical monument since 1862, Notre-Dame is one of seventy French churches held on those terms; the archdiocese pays the staff, keeps the building open free of charge, and receives no state subsidy.

After the Napoleonic Wars the fabric decayed so far that Paris officials considered demolition. Victor Hugo wrote Notre-Dame de Paris in 1831 to save it, and the book's success raised awareness of the cathedral's decaying state; in 1844 Louis Philippe I ordered a restoration and Jean-Baptiste Lassus and Eugène Viollet-le-Duc were appointed. Viollet-le-Duc remade or added decoration he judged to be in the spirit of the original style, including a taller flèche in place of the 13th-century one removed in 1786. The work ran on into the 1860s and cost over twelve million francs.

During the Paris Commune of March to May 1871 the churches were closed and some two hundred priests, with the Archbishop of Paris, were taken hostage. In the Bloody Week that May, Communards piled furniture together to burn the building; the arson was halted when the Communard government realised the fire would also destroy the neighbouring Hôtel-Dieu hospital, filled with hundreds of patients.

On 26 August 1944 a special Mass celebrated the liberation of Paris from the Germans, attended by Generals Charles de Gaulle and Philippe Leclerc. In 1963 the culture minister André Malraux had centuries of soot cleaned from the façade, and a programme begun in 1991 renewed much of the eroded stone.

Fire broke out in the attic at 18:18 on 15 April 2019. The alarm system was not designed to notify the fire brigade, which was summoned only at 18:51, after a guard was first sent to the wrong attic. The flèche collapsed at 19:50, bringing down 750 tonnes of stone and lead, and firefighters concentrated on the north tower, where the eight bells hung, bringing the fire under control by 21:45; the façade, towers, walls, buttresses and stained-glass windows were saved.

A thousand mature oaks were selected in 2021, and the new flèche was put in place on 16 December 2023. The cathedral reopened on 7 December 2024 in a ceremony presided over by Laurent Ulrich, Archbishop of Paris, before 1,500 world leaders and dignitaries, and the crown of thorns was returned on 13 December 2024.