Rouen Cathedral

Christianity was established at Rouen in about 260 by Saint Mellonius, who became the city's first bishop; tradition has him setting up a place of worship in a private house given over by Praecordius, in a quarter of dwellings known to have stood on the ground. Around 260 to 280, at the time of the first Frankish incursions, fire destroyed that quarter, and the ruined housing was replaced, perhaps by public warehouses, on the block between the rue Saint-Romain, the rue du Change and the rue des Carmes. The first mention of a bishop at Rouen belongs to 314, a year after Christian worship was authorised in the Roman Empire and early enough to make a church building at that date doubtful. A sermon of Bishop Victricius of about 395 or 396 implies a cathedral already standing in the city and speaks of a basilica going up nearby, on which Victricius himself worked; one account puts a large three-naved basilica on the same site in 395. Excavations led by the archaeologist Jacques Le Maho in the cour d'Albane in 1986 confirmed that the basilica existed, and the episcopal group at Rouen, like those of Geneva and northern Italy, held at least two of them. In the fifth century the two basilicas were joined by galleries. The reform of Saint Chrodegang, introduced in the middle of the eighth century, assigned the northern basilica to the canons, and the southern one was dedicated to Notre-Dame. Saint Ouen enlarged the church in 650. In 755 Archbishop Rémy, son of the Frankish statesman and commander Charles Martel, established the cathedral's first chapter and built courtyards and lodgings around the church, among them a palace for the archbishop. Charlemagne came for Easter in 769. In the ninth century the episcopal palace, the canons' lodging and a westwork on the martyrs' church were all reworked, but in 841 fire set by the men of the North destroyed the cathedral group, and Viking raids from that year on did serious damage; the buildings were patched up provisionally while the region waited for peace. After the treaty of Saint-Clair-sur-Epte in 911, Rouen became the capital of the young duchy of Normandy.

The Viking leader Rollo, first Duke of Normandy, was baptised in the old basilica under the name Robert (in 912 by one reckoning and 915 by another), and was buried in the cathedral in 933, which became the necropolis of the first ducal dynasty. His grandson Richard I enlarged the Carolingian church, an addition put at 950; Richard died in 996. About 1030 Archbishop Robert the Dane rebuilt the choir in the Romanesque style with a crypt inserted beneath it to enlarge the standing basilica of Notre-Dame, work that, with the abbey church of Bernay, laid the foundations of the Norman Romanesque school and set the pattern for religious building in Normandy and afterwards in England. The site stopped at Robert's death in 1037. Maurille, archbishop from 1055 to 1067, finished it and rebuilt the nave by 1063, and is said to have raised a stone lantern tower shaped like a pyramid that carried his name. He dedicated the church on 1 October 1063 in the presence of Duke William (the Conqueror after his conquest of England in 1066), and of the suffragan bishops Odo of Bayeux, John of Ivry, Hugh of Eu, William Flaitel, Yves of Bellême and Geoffrey of Montbray. The bodies of Rollo and William Longsword were moved into the Romanesque cathedral at that time, and moved again into the Gothic church when it was finished. Excavations by the archaeologist Georges Lanfry at the last bay of the nave in 1954 uncovered the bases of a crypt built by Maurille in 1063, and, beneath the prelate's tomb, four small columns that may be the footings of a pre-Romanesque ciborium.

Four Dukes of Normandy lie in plain tombs with their effigies on either side of the choir: Rollo; his son William Longsword, who died in 942; Henry the Young King, heir to Henry II of England, who died in 1183 before his father; and a tomb holding the heart of Richard the Lionheart, Duke of Normandy and King of England. Rollo's original tomb was destroyed in the bombing of 1944 and replaced by a nineteenth-century copy of Henry the Young King's. Others buried in the cathedral include Poppa, Rollo's wife and mother of Duke William Longsword; Archbishop Maurilius, who died in 1067; Hugh of Amiens, first abbot of Reading Abbey and then archbishop, who died in 1164; the Empress Matilda; William FitzEmpress; and Walter de Coutances, the Anglo-Norman bishop of Lincoln and archbishop of Rouen who died in 1207. Richard the Lionheart died in 1199: his body was buried beside his father at Fontevraud Abbey, his bowels probably in the church of the château of Châlus-Chabrol in the Limousin, from whose walls came the crossbow bolt that killed him once the wound turned septic, and his heart at Rouen, where his effigy lies on the tomb with his name cut in Latin along the side.

In April 1144 Geoffrey Plantagenet, husband of the Empress Matilda, was solemnly made Duke of Normandy in the cathedral. In the same year Hugues III of Amiens, archbishop of Rouen, attended the dedication of the abbey church of Saint-Denis at the invitation of his friend Suger, the first Gothic structure, built on the principle of filling the interior with light. The following year he put in hand a new belfry six metres north of the old Romanesque front, the tower since called Saint-Romain, and a letter of 1145 records work inside the church without saying where, though excavation of the crypt suggests the decoration of the choir. Completed in 1164, the tower brought the Gothic to Rouen. About 1170 the main front was rebuilt with three portals, the central one dedicated to Saint Romain and since lost, the other two to Saint John and Saint Stephen.

About 1185 Archbishop Gautier de Coutances demolished the Romanesque nave and raised the first bays of a new one, the transept and choir left standing and open for worship. On the night of Easter 1200 fire destroyed the cathedral quarter and much of the town, sparing the new tower, the front and the new bays but badly damaging the unfinished church and its furnishings. Gautier repaired the damage and drove the work on, helped by gifts from John Lackland; the crypt was levelled and filled, and a longer choir was planned. A memorial in the cathedral remembers Arthur I, Duke of Brittany, rival claimant to King John for the throne of England, who was last heard of in Rouen Castle in 1203 at the age of sixteen and whose fate and burial place are unknown. In 1204 Philip II Augustus was received in the rebuilt nave for the celebration of Normandy's annexation to the kingdom of France. The choir must have been usable by 1206, the year Robert des Ablèges was consecrated Bishop of Bayeux there, and the main altar stood in it by 1207. From 1214 Enguerran, successor to the master mason Jean d'Andeli, worked on the axial chapel; the choir was going up in 1220; the nave was finished between 1234 and 1237, its last keystone signed by the mason Durand. The building appears to have been complete by about 1237, the year Pierre de Colmieu was consecrated archbishop and the house that had held Jean d'Andeli and Durand was sold.

Between about 1265 and 1275 chapels were added along the aisles under pressure from the city's brotherhoods and corporations, the outer wall pulled down and rebuilt four metres further out between the buttress piers. In 1280 Archbishop Guillaume de Flavacourt gave up the ground between the north transept and the rue Saint-Romain, which made room for the portal of the Boursiers, now the Booksellers' portal, with a forecourt before it; the Calende portal was cut on the south side, both of them the work of Jean Davy. The towers framing those portals were never given the spires intended for them. A cloister went up in the cour d'Albane in the same period, of which only the eastern gallery and the start of the southern one were built; the court took its name from Pierre de Colmieu, founder of a college there and later cardinal-bishop of Albano. In 1302 Flavacourt ordered a much larger axial chapel dedicated to the Virgin in place of the small one at the east end. Work on the west front resumed from 1370 and ran on to about 1450, its arcading filled with more than sixty statues in a manner that appears to follow the English fronts at Wells, Lichfield and Salisbury: the work of Jean Périer, carried on by Jean de Bayeux and Jenson Salvart, who also replaced the high windows to bring in more light, with new glass by Jehan de Senlis.

Guillaume Pontifs, master of works from 1462, carried on the reglazing of the north transept begun by Jenson Salvart and Geoffroi Richier, and between 1468 and 1478 finished the Saint-Romain tower with a high storey under a curved slate roof. It held nine bells, joined by the Marie d'Estouteville in 1467 and the Guillaume in 1470, which earned it the name of the tower of eleven bells. Pontifs rebuilt the canons' library between 1477 and 1479 and built the Booksellers' stair giving on to it from the transept, and the forecourt portal was finished in 1484. The west front being visually unbalanced by its single tower, at the end of 1485 he began a second at the south, under Archbishop Robert de Croismare, paid for by alms given in exchange for the right to use dairy foods during Lent, the Butter Tower. The Pope authorised Cardinal Georges d'Amboise to grant those dispensations for milk and butter in return for contributions, though the money collected covered only part of the cost. D'Amboise, archbishop from 1494 to 1510, brought Renaissance features into the Gothic design as he had at his own residence, the Château de Gaillon; in 1496 the tower was taken over by Jacques Le Roux on a more ambitious plan, and it was finished in 1506 with its crown left incomplete. The parish of Saint-Étienne was installed at its foot in February 1497.

The new tower unsettled the front. Cracks opened, Jean Périer's rose of about 1370 threatened to collapse, and from 1508 the central portal was rebuilt by Roulland Le Roux, nephew of Jacques, in a lavishly ornate Flamboyant manner, with the decoration of the portal and its tympanum given to Pierre des Aubeaux; the cardinal ordered the whole front reconstructed, layered with lacelike tracery and hundreds of sculpted figures, and held up by two massive buttresses. D'Amboise and his architect also rebuilt and decorated the archbishop's palace beside it, adding a reception hall, galleries, gardens and fountains. On 5 October 1514 the thirteenth-century spire over the lantern tower, known as the needle, burned. Roulland Le Roux strengthened the lantern the following year and added a storey in readiness for a replacement; his design for a stone spire was refused, and the Darnétal carpenter Robert Becquet built a wooden pyramid sheathed in gilded lead in the Renaissance style, begun in 1538, finished in 1557 and rising to 135 metres. By another account the spire was put back within a few months in exactly the same form and the same materials.

In 1562 the Calvinists sacked the cathedral, attacking the furniture, tombs, stained glass and statuary. The black marble tomb of John of Lancaster, Duke of Bedford, one of the English commanders who oversaw Joan of Arc's trial, was destroyed, as was that of Cardinal d'Estouteville, and the saints and archbishops on the front were beheaded; a commemorative plaque to Bedford remains. Lightning struck the building in 1625 and again in 1642. In 1683 a hurricane wrecked the west front, destroyed the rose and threw down three of the four crowning turrets, which broke through the vaults and ruined the organ, an instrument begun in 1488 at the west end of the nave, which was repaired and put back into service. Jean Titelouze held that organ from 1588 to 1634 and Jacques Boyvin from 1674 to 1706. In 1736 the chapter raised the choir and cleared away the tombs cluttering it, having taken delivery of a new high altar by Cartault on 14 December 1734; the brass screen that had enclosed the choir since 1526 was replaced by gilded copper grilles, the trumeau of the central portal was cut away to let the processional canopy through, and the thirteenth-century rood screen went in 1772, replaced in 1775 by a classical marble one by the architect Guillaume-Martin Couture. In the Revolution the cathedral became the Temple of Reason: the bells were broken and the Georges d'Amboise melted down, the chapel railings were melted for cannon, some furniture and sculpture was sold, the Lady Chapel served as a hay loft and the rest of the building as a concert hall. The accounts differ over 1796, which is given both as the year the revolutionary government nationalised the building and turned it to the cult of Reason, and as the year it recovered its standing as a cathedral.

Lightning on 15 September 1822 burned the Renaissance spire of wood and lead. The architect Jean-Antoine Alavoine proposed a replacement cast in iron in the Gothic manner, an idea fiercely contested, Gustave Flaubert denounced it as "the dream of a metal-worker in a delirium". Work began in 1825 and passed through Alavoine's collaborators Nicolas François Pinchon and Edmond Dubois after his death, then Jacques-Eugène Barthélémy and Louis-François Desmarest. At 151 metres the spire made Rouen Cathedral the tallest building in the world from 1876 until 1880, when Cologne Cathedral overtook it, and the four copper pinnacles framing it, by the ironsmith Ferdinand Marrou to Barthélémy's designs, were set in 1884.

Claude Monet painted the west front in a series of thirty canvases showing the same scene at different hours and in different weather; five of them are in the musée d'Orsay and two in the National Gallery of Art in Washington. John Ruskin held the building up as an example of good architecture in The Seven Lamps of Architecture. Flaubert took the stained-glass window of Saint Julian and the bas-relief of Salome as the basis of two of his Three Tales; Joris-Karl Huysmans built the novel La Cathédrale on an intensive examination of the place; and Willa Cather set a key scene in the making of Claude Wheeler, the protagonist of One of Ours, inside it.

Through the nineteenth century the shops and houses packed against the walls were cleared away. The wall closing the parvis came down on 26 November 1792. Two houses destroyed in the fire of 1822 were refused permission to rebuild, and repairs were progressively forbidden on the neighbouring houses. In 1851 the prefect wrote to the minister about the drawbacks arising from the houses and stalls backed against the cathedral, and the minister answered that it seemed proper and even necessary to free such a building of the parasitic constructions obstructing it, a view he restated after a fire at the foot of the Saint-Romain tower in 1855. A decree of public utility signed on 30 July 1861 authorised the expropriation of the adjoining buildings, and everything touching the cathedral in the rue du Change and the rue des Bonnetiers to the south, and the rue des Quatre-Vents and the rue Saint-Romain to the north, was demolished; only the Maison de l'Œuvre, against the canons' cloister, came through. The cathedral, with its cloister and chapter buildings, was classified a historic monument on the list of 1862. An inventory of 1879 counted seven doors, 130 windows, 25 chapels, 86 stalls, four bells, one of them of nine tonnes, and three reliquary shrines. Under the law separating church and state, the cathedral became the property of the French government in 1905, which granted the Catholic Church its exclusive use.

At the outbreak of war in 1939, remembering what the previous war had done to French cathedrals, the cathedral authorities packed sandbags around the sculpture and took the old stained glass away to sites far from the city. On 9 June 1940 fire caught the roof timbers of the south aisle after the quarter between the cathedral and the Seine burned. On the night of 18 to 19 April 1944 seven bombs tore the building open, one of them falling into the choir without exploding; the aisles of the nave and all but one of the south collateral chapels were destroyed, two windows were lost, and one of the four piers carrying the lantern tower was badly damaged, shored and reinforced at speed by the Lanfry firm to keep the spire from coming down through the whole structure. The nave stood on the flying buttresses of the Sainte-Catherine chapel alone. The blast blew out the great roses of the transept and the west front. On 1 June, during the week known at Rouen as the red week and a few days before the Normandy landings, the Saint-Romain tower caught fire; the bells fell and melted, leaving molten remains on the floor, and the fire ran on into the aisles, the nave and as far as the Booksellers' court. The April bombs were dropped by the British Royal Air Force, those of June by the United States Army Air Force.

Restoration was directed by Albert Chauvel, chief architect of historic monuments, with the architects Franchette and Grégoire and the firm of Georges Lanfry. After clearance and consolidation came the rebuilding of the choir, the crossing piers and the south aisles of nave and choir, the reconstruction of the north stone campanile of the west front, and the rehanging of the great bell, the Jeanne d'Arc, on a new frame in the Saint-Romain tower. The choir, damaged in the bombing, was substantially renewed before the reopening. Archbishop Martin consecrated the new high altar on 17 June 1956 in the presence of President René Coty. The Saint-Romain tower recovered its slated roof in 1987. Excavations from 1985 beneath the church and its surroundings turned up remains of the palaeochristian buildings and the foundations of the Carolingian cathedral. From 1974 the firm of Eiffel doubled Alavoine's cast-iron spire internally with a structure of 300 tonnes of Corten steel. The cathedral is the see of the Archbishop of Rouen, Primate of Normandy, and stands within the city's protected sector; beyond the 1862 classification of the cathedral itself, the archbishop's palace (the former hôtel d'Estouteville with the court of the Saint-Évode song school) was classified a historic monument on 6 February 1909, the Maison de l'Œuvre on 17 November 1927, and the archaeological remains of the archiepiscopal complex and of the buildings that preceded it, including those of the old church of the Madeleine and the ground of the cour des Maçons and the cour d'Albane, on 10 May 1995.

On 26 December 1999 the storm brought down the north-east pinnacle, a copper-clad wooden turret of twenty-six tonnes, which broke through the vaults of the choir; the fall of the vaults and of the pinnacle destroyed part of the fifteenth-century stalls. Emergency shoring, the rebuilding of the transverse arch and the stitching of the cracks were finished by early summer 2000, and a second phase from 2010 under the chief architect Pierre-André Lablaude rebuilt the lost pinnacle and repaired the roofs and flying buttresses at a cost of rather over seven and a half million euros met entirely by the state. Nine canvases belonging to the state, taken down after the bombing, were restored and rehung from the 1970s onward, among them a Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness and a Death of Saint Joseph brought back from Avignon by Frédéric Fuzet. The west front came out of its scaffolding on 30 May 2015, the campaign of restoration begun after the war being declared finished the following year; fresh scaffolding went up over the chevet at the end of 2015 for work on the roofs and high elevations of the choir, funded by the Ministry of Culture at rather over four and a half million euros across six phases and 74 months under the chief architect Richard Duplat. A carillon was installed in the Saint-Romain tower in 2015 and 2016; the cathedral's seventy bells, cast by the Fonderie Paccard at Annecy, sixty-four in the Saint-Romain tower and six in the Butter Tower, make up the heaviest peal in France at thirty-six tonnes. The restoration of Alavoine's spire, begun in 2016 on a seven-phase programme funded at fourteen and a half million euros, was still under way on 11 July 2024, when the spire caught fire after what was described as mishandling; some seventy firefighters and forty engines brought it under control the same day, without serious damage to the building.