Knocking on the great wooden doors of Notre-Dame with a specially designed crozier, the archbishop of Paris, Laurent Ulrich, reopened the famous Parisian cathedral to the world on Saturday 7 December.
After five-and-a-half years of silence following the devastating fire of 2019, the cathedral’s oldest bell rang out, announcing the re-emergence of Notre-Dame to the city and to the world. It was the same 13-tonne bourdon that proclaimed the liberation of Paris in 1944. It was named Emmanuel when it was cast in 1681 under the reign of Louis XIV.
Its namesake, President Emmanuel Macron, was this weekend the master of the grandiose ceremony that took place under the watchful eyes of around 6,000 law enforcement officers.
The embattled French president, whose government was forced to resign just two days before, invited around 40 heads of state and 2,000 guests from around the world, including President-Elect Donald Trump, the current US First Lady Jill Biden, the (much applauded) Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Elon Musk. Only the Pope declined the invitation to the celebrations.
The French president staged the reopening as a personal triumph—with a hint of revenge. He spoke of the iconic monument’s rebuilding as a “metaphor” for the nation’s potential, recalling that his declaration that the job would be completed in five years had been derided as “impossible, crazy and arbitrary”.
But he stuck to his decision and “the nation united all its forces” to achieve this extraordinary feat. In his televised address following the resignation of his government, he urged France’s warring political factions to do the same—presumably with a much lower chance of success.
This miraculous execution was accomplished through the more than €800m collected from 340,000 individuals and companies in 150 countries, with the US being the largest donor after France.
However, much still remains to be done, as evidenced by the scaffolding still visible on parts of the monument. The restoration—as well as the changes foreseen for the cathedral’s surrounding area and the establishment of a nearby museum—will not be completed for years.
To get the cathedral’s refurbishment to a point where it could be reopened, President Macron set up an agency that was run like a military operation by the army general, Jean-Louis Georgelin, who died in a trekking accident in 2023.
The success of President Macron’s gamble was also achieved by the enrolment of hundreds of artisans across the country, rather than just one major construction company as is usually the case for such a monumental project. Around 2,000 people worked on the site. In his address on Saturday, President Macron took time to name all the trades involved in the undertaking.
The most moving moment in the opening ceremony, however, was the appearance of the craftspeople and firefighters who saved the site from complete destruction. They were enthusiastically applauded by the audience.
The ceremony was the result of months of negotiations between the church and the state, each eager to assert their place in the sanctuary. President Macron welcomed the heads of state in a tent set up outside the cathedral, where he was also supposed to deliver his speech. But Storm Darragh put an end to this plan, and, in an act of mercy, the church authorities permitted him to address the crowd inside the restored nave. For the same reason, the concert held in front of the cathedral had to be recorded the day before and inserted into the transmission of the ceremony by France Télévisions.
Meanwhile Notre-Dame’s famous Grand Organ, with its 7,952 pipes that were cleaned of lead dust and reassembled, opened the liturgical ceremony. Only sacred anthems and classical concerts were authorised by the clergy, leaving more popular music to the recorded intermissions outside the cathedral.
The tenor Benjamin Bernheim sang Schubert’s Ave Maria and the cellist Yo-Yo Ma played Bach, before Pharrell Williams sang his hit Happy with a 60-person choir.
The bright yellow, red, blue and green geometric forms on the clergy’s clothes, designed by Jean Charles de Castelbajac, were the only flashes of colour in the whitened nave. The massive brownish new altar, and other liturgical furniture, were conceived by Guillaume Bardet. The first mass was held on Sunday morning, the day of celebration of the Immaculate Conception, ahead of a week of ceremonies.
The splendour and pride over an unquestionably amazing achievement have managed to silence the bickering and controversy that has dogged so much of the work over the past five years.
