Notre-Dame Cathedral history timeline: from 1163 to the fire of 2019 and the reopening of 2024

Architecture · 4 September 2026

Notre-Dame de Paris was begun in 1163 on the Île de la Cité, on the site of two earlier churches and a Roman temple, and essentially completed by 1260, with additions to about 1345; it is the cathedral of the archbishop of Paris, one of the first buildings to use flying buttresses, the church of Napoleon's coronation, the setting of Victor Hugo's novel, and, since the fire of 15 April 2019 that destroyed its roof and spire, the most watched restoration in the world, reopened on 7 December 2024. Below: a timeline from the first stone to the reopening, what the building is and what it invented, the people and events, the fire and the rebuilding, and the questions still open, with the cathedral in the Buildings by style collection and the style explained in Gothic architecture.

The medieval cathedral, 1163–1345

• 1160. Maurice de Sully becomes bishop of Paris and decides to replace the Carolingian cathedral of Saint-Étienne, and an older Notre-Dame beside it, with a single church in the new style of Saint-Denis, whose choir Abbot Suger had built in 1144. The old churches are demolished and the eastern tip of the island filled in.
• 1163. The first stone, laid in the presence of Pope Alexander III, exiled in France. The design, by an unnamed master, is a five-aisled basilica 128 m long with a nave 33 m high, higher than any yet built, on a plan without transepts projecting beyond the aisles.
• 1182. The choir consecrated and in use; 1196, Sully dies, leaving money for the lead roof.
• c. 1180–1220. The nave, then the west front, built by a second and third master; the flying buttresses, exposed arches carrying the thrust of the high vaults over the aisles to piers outside, are added to the nave around 1180–1200, among the first anywhere, and allow the walls to be opened into windows.
• 1200–1250. The west facade with its three portals, the Gallery of Kings of 28 statues of the kings of Judah, the west rose window of 1225, and the two towers, 69 m, finished about 1250 without the spires that were planned.
• 1250–1260. Jean de Chelles and then Pierre de Montreuil rebuild the transept ends with the great north and south rose windows, 13 m across, the north one keeping most of its 13th-century glass; the clerestory windows are enlarged, and a spire of timber and lead raised over the crossing.
• 1296–1345. The chapels between the buttresses, the choir screen with its painted reliefs of the life of Christ, and the buttresses of the choir rebuilt with the 15 m flyers that ring the apse. The cathedral is complete.

How such buildings were financed and built, and the masons who moved between them, is in how the cathedrals were built. Notre-Dame de Paris.

Kings, Revolution and neglect, 1345–1840

• 1302. Philip IV opens the first Estates General in the cathedral. 1431: Henry VI of England, aged ten, crowned king of France here during the Hundred Years' War. 1558: Mary Queen of Scots married to the Dauphin. 1572: the Protestant Henry of Navarre marries Marguerite de Valois at the door, six days before the St Bartholomew's Day massacre; as Henry IV he later attends mass inside.
• 1699–1725. Louis XIV fulfils his father's vow by rebuilding the choir in Baroque marble, destroying the medieval choir stalls and tombs; the 13th-century glass of the nave is replaced by clear windows to let in light.
• 1786. The medieval spire, rotten and swaying, is taken down.
• 1793. The Revolution turns the cathedral into a Temple of Reason: the 28 kings of Judah on the facade, mistaken for kings of France, are beheaded and the heads thrown in a pit (21 of them were found under a bank in 1977 and are in the Cluny Museum); the bells but one are melted for cannon; the building becomes a wine store.
• 1801–1804. Napoleon's Concordat returns it to the Church, and on 2 December 1804 he crowns himself emperor before the pope in a building hung with tapestries to hide its state.
• 1831. Victor Hugo publishes "Notre-Dame de Paris" (in English "The Hunchback of Notre-Dame") largely to save the building, which he describes as a ruin threatened by demolition; the novel makes it a national cause.

Viollet-le-Duc, 1844–1864

In 1844 the state gave the restoration to Jean-Baptiste Lassus and Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, thirty years old, who worked on the cathedral for twenty years after Lassus's death in 1857. They rebuilt the portals and the Gallery of Kings with new statues, restored the rose windows, put back the 13th-century form of the windows, built a new sacristy and, in 1859–60, a new spire of oak and lead 96 m high, taller and more elaborate than the medieval one, ringed by statues of the twelve apostles with Viollet-le-Duc's own face on St Thomas, the patron of architects. The gargoyles and chimeras on the towers, the brooding "Stryge" among them, which every visitor takes for medieval, are his invention of the 1850s; the medieval building had plain gargoyle spouts and no chimeras. Viollet-le-Duc's principle, "to restore a building is to re-establish it in a state of completeness that may never have existed", made the Notre-Dame of the 20th century, and the 2019 fire destroyed above all his work. Viollet-le-Duc.

The 20th century

The cathedral saw the Te Deum of 1918, the funeral masses of the Republic, and, on 26 August 1944, de Gaulle's Te Deum for the liberation of Paris, interrupted by shots inside the church. The organ, rebuilt by Cavaillé-Coll in 1868 with 8,000 pipes, was restored in 1992. The facade was cleaned in 1991–2000 and the sculptures found to be in worse state than expected; by 2017 the spire's lead and the flying buttresses' stone were crumbling, the archdiocese was raising money in the United States for a 150-million-euro programme, and scaffolding had gone up around the spire in 2018 to restore it. Thirteen million visitors came a year, the most of any monument in Europe.

The fire of 15 April 2019

At about 6:20 pm on Monday of Holy Week an alarm sounded; a guard sent to the wrong place found nothing; at 6:43 a second alarm found fire in the roof space, the "forest" of 1,300 oaks felled in the 12th and 13th centuries under the lead roof, and by the time the fire brigade arrived the attic was burning end to end. The spire fell at 7:50 pm through the crossing vault; 400 firefighters, some inside the towers at the risk of their lives, stopped the fire reaching the belfries, whose timber frames would have brought down the bells and the towers, at about 11 pm; the fire was out by the morning. The roof and spire were gone, the vaults had holes at the crossing and in the north transept, and 460 tons of melted lead had spread over the building and the neighbourhood; the walls, the towers, the rose windows, the organ, the choir stalls, the relic of the Crown of Thorns and most of the treasury survived. The cause was never established: an electrical fault in the spire's bells or a cigarette from the restoration site are the hypotheses, and arson was ruled out. President Macron promised rebuilding in five years, and 846 million euros were pledged in days, from French billionaires, companies, and 340,000 donors in 150 countries.

The rebuilding, 2019–2024

• 2019–21. Securing: the melted scaffolding of the spire removed piece by piece, the vaults propped, the lead dust cleaned, the flying buttresses braced with timber arches; a debate on whether to build a modern spire settled in July 2020 for rebuilding "à l'identique", as it was.
• 2021–23. A thousand oaks, chosen in the forests of France, felled in 2021, seasoned and hewn with hand axes into the 12th-century frame of the choir and the 13th-century frame of the nave and the spire, by carpenters using the medieval joints; the vaults rebuilt in stone from the same Paris-basin quarries; 2,000 workers in all.
• 2023. The spire's base raised in July and the golden cockerel, a new one with the old one's relics, set on its top on 16 December; the cross followed.
• 2024. The lead roof laid, the interior stone cleaned to a paleness not seen since the Middle Ages, the organ reassembled and tuned over six months, the new altar and furniture by Guillaume Bardet installed; the scaffolding came down in the autumn.
• 7–8 December 2024. The reopening with the archbishop striking the door with his crozier, in the presence of heads of state, and the first mass; visitors returned in the following weeks at 30,000 a day, and the 2019 attic, the "forest", exists again.

The cost was about 700 million euros, within the donations; the restoration of the exterior, the flying buttresses and the sacristy continues to about 2028.

Versions and theories

• The cause. Unknown, and likely to stay so: the roof space burned completely. The investigation found no evidence of a crime and considered a short circuit or a cigarette; conspiracy theories, of arson by one group or another, circulated within hours and have no support.
• The gargoyles are medieval. The spouts are; the chimeras looking over the city are Viollet-le-Duc's, from 1849–54, and the spire that fell was his of 1859. Medieval Notre-Dame was plainer and its spire smaller.
• The oaks. The claim that France had no trees big enough was made in 2019 and was wrong: the frame needed about 1,000 oaks of 50–100 cm diameter, which the national forests supplied from 2021 without difficulty.
• Lead poisoning. The fire spread lead across the Île de la Cité; schools were closed and cleaned, blood tests in children found a few elevated levels, and the new roof is again lead, which was debated and kept as the historic material.
• The beheaded kings. Found in 1977 in the foundations of a bank on the rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin, where a royalist had buried them in 1796; they are in the Cluny Museum, and the facade wears 19th-century replacements.
• Quasimodo was real. A memoir of the sculptor Henry Sibson, found in 2010, mentions a hunchbacked stone carver working at the cathedral in the 1820s called "Le Bossu"; Hugo may have known of him. Suggestive, not proven.

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