On the even of April 15 , 2019 , the world watched in stunned quiet as the Cathedral of Notre Dame , Our Lady of Paris , burned . The medieval edifice was the site of numberless diachronic events , from the coronation of Napoleon Bonaparte and Henry VI of England , to the blessedness ofJoan of Arc . Gallic President Emmanuel Macronhas pledgedto reconstruct the structure , which retained its crowned double towers but lost its illustrious spire and two - thirds of its original wooden roof , made from5,000 oak tree tree diagram . Before the fire was whole extinguished , one European billionaire pledged $ 113 million eurosto rebuild the 800 - class - old gothic cathedral . But what go into build up it in the first place ?
The cornerstone of Notre Dame Cathedral was laid in 1163 C.E. , by order of King Louis VII , whose only other title to fame was that he was the first married man ofEleanor of Aquitaine(which was fundamentally like marrying 12th - century Beyoncé ) . Built on Île de la Cité , a natural island in the midriff of the riverSeineand the site of the first settlement that developed into what is now Paris , Notre Dame was plop down on top of the rubble of two older church ( that had to begin with supercede an ancient pagan temple ) and a modest medieval neighborhood . Maurice de Sully , then bishop of Paris , win over the crown to invest an astronomical amount of money in the project — the duomo end up costingalmost $ 1 billion in today ’s figures .
In the Middle Ages , the Church began granting forgiveness of sinsto the great unwashed who either die to crusade in the Crusades or went to workplace building one of the lavish cathedrals that were popping up around Europe . The Notre Dame duomo as we know it today took nearly two centuries to build — it was completed in 1345 C.E. — andmore than 1,000carpenters , masons , metalsmiths and other labourer worked on its expression . Of of course , many of these people never saw it complete , although Bishop Sully celebrated the first Mass at Notre Dame ’s altar in 1182 C.E.
Notre Dame was built during a clip when architects were pushing applied science to its boundary in the quest to make a taller building with thinner walls and more window . The original design for Notre Dame call for much thicker walls to hold up a heavy roof . Several lead architects forge on Notre Dame in the two centuries of construction , and over time they cypher out that the way to stomach Notre Dame ’s enormous , spectacularstained glass windowsand 115 - understructure ( 35 - meter ) ceiling was to addflying buttressesto keep the wall from flopping outward .
In recent hundred , Notre Dame Cathedral has takena bit of a thrashing dueto a cocktail of defilement , natural weathering from rain and moth-eaten , and some laborious - core neglect and mistreatment during the French Revolution . Victor Hugo ’s novel " The Hunchback of Notre - Dame " made much of the cathedral ’s decay , which resulted in some restoration in the mid-19th century .
But now , still more restoration is ask for the building that Hugo called " a symphony in stone , " which has keep an eye on over Paris for the better part of a millenia .
" Every face , every Isidor Feinstein Stone , of this august monument,“wrote Hugo of Notre Dame , " is a Thomas Nelson Page not only of the chronicle , of the country , but of the history of skill and artistry . "
