Reims Cathedral

At the beginning of the fifth century Bishop Nicasius moved the cathedral of Reims to its present site, over Gallo-Roman baths built by the Emperor Constantine, and dedicated it to the Virgin Mary, anticipating the Council of Ephesus of 431. Its baptistry was excavated beneath the present building in the 1990s. There Clovis I, king of the Franks, was baptised by Bishop Remigius about 496, the first Frankish king to receive the sacrament and the event that inspired the tradition of royal coronations at Reims.

Louis the Pious was crowned at Reims by Pope Stephen IV in 816, a ceremony that revealed the poor condition and inadequate size of the old cathedral. From about 818 Archbishop Ebbo and the royal architect Rumaud began a far larger church on the same site, using stone from the city ramparts. Work stopped in 835 and resumed under Archbishop Hincmar, who dedicated the finished building - 86 metres long, with two transepts - on 18 October 862 in the presence of Charles the Bald. The prestige of the Holy Ampulla, the vial of myrrh with which French kings were anointed, and the political power of its archbishops made Reims the settled place of coronation from Henry I in 1027.

On 6 May 1210 the cathedral, by then part Carolingian and part Early Gothic, burned down, the fire blamed on carelessness. A year to the day later Archbishop Aubrey laid the first stone of the new chevet. Four master masons - Jean d'Orbais, Jean-le-Loup, Gaucher of Reims and Bernard de Soissons - were named on a labyrinth once set into the nave floor, though which of them built which part is still disputed. In 1233 a dispute between the cathedral chapter and the townspeople over taxation and jurisdiction broke into open revolt: clerics were killed, the chapter fled, and an interdict halted the works for three years until the clergy returned in 1236. By 1241 the chapter could meet in the choir; the west front was not begun until 1252, the rose-window level was finished between 1275 and 1280, and the nave was not roofed until 1299, the year the king lifted the tax on the lead needed to cover it.

After Henry V of England defeated Charles VI's army at Agincourt on 25 October 1415, most of northern France including Reims fell to the English, who held the city until Joan of Arc captured it in 1429 and the dauphin was crowned there on 17 July. On 24 July 1481 a fire caused by the negligence of workers covering the wood-and-lead spire over the transept destroyed part of its framework, the central bell tower and the galleries at the base of the roof. Charles VIII and Louis XII funded the rebuilding with a share of the gabelle salt tax. The work was suspended in 1516 with the spires unfinished.

In 1793 the cathedral was closed and used first as a grain store and then as a temple of reason; the reliquaries in the treasury were melted down for their gold and the bells recast as cannon, though most of the medieval sculpture survived relatively intact.

Charles X, crowned in 1825, was the last king of France crowned at Reims. The building was classified a historical monument in 1862, in the middle of a century of restoration campaigns: the upper galleries, windows and towers under Jean-Jacques Arveuf, and the choir gallery and apse under Eugene Viollet-le-Duc from 1860.

The cathedral had been commissioned as a hospital when German shelling of the city began on 4 September 1914, and on 12 September the occupying German army spread 15,000 bales of straw on its floor for its wounded. On 19 September shells set fire to the scaffolding on the north tower, the straw carried the flames into the nave, and the timbers under the lead roof burned: the roof was destroyed, the bells melted, and lead poured through the mouths of the gargoyles onto the adjoining Palace of Tau. Wounded German prisoners sheltering inside were killed.

Henri Deneux, chief architect of the French historic monuments service, began the restoration in 1919, funded in large part by the Rockefeller Foundation and replacing the burnt roof frame with prefabricated reinforced concrete; the cathedral reopened in 1938. Charles de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer marked Franco-German reconciliation here in July 1962. Under the 1905 law separating church and state the building belongs to the French state, which pays for its upkeep while the Catholic Church holds an agreement for exclusive use, and in 1991 it joined the UNESCO World Heritage list with the former Abbey of Saint-Remi and the Palace of Tau.