The world got its first glimpse on Friday of the newly renovated Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris.
President Emmanuel Macron of France took viewers on a televised tour of the cathedral’s dazzlingly clean interior and rebuilt roofing, five years after a devastating fire.
“I believe you are seeing the cathedral like it has never been seen before,” Philippe Jost, the head of the reconstruction task force, told Mr. Macron.
The French president and his wife, Brigitte, gushed with admiration and craned their necks as they entered the Gothic monument alongside the mayor and archbishop of Paris.
More than 450,000 square feet of limestone inside the cathedral have been meticulously stripped of ash, lead dust and centuries of accumulated grime, leaving its soaring vaults, thick columns and tall walls almost startlingly bright.
Mr. Macron’s visit before the monument is scheduled to reopen next week was an opportunity for him to shift focus away from the country’s political turmoil and budgetary woes. It will put the spotlight on a bet that he made, and that appears to have paid off, to rebuild the cathedral on a tight five-year deadline.
Mr. Macron was expected on Friday to address an assembly of over half of the 2,000 workers and craftsmen from around France — and beyond — who contributed to the cathedral’s reconstruction.
The April 2019 fire completely destroyed Notre-Dame’s wooden roofing — a lattice of ancient medieval beams known as “the forest” — and its lead covering, which went up in toxic smoke.
The cathedral’s spire, a 19th-century addition, crashed through the vaults and slammed charred debris into the ground below. The cathedral was drenched in water used by firefighters to stop the blaze. Gables were threatening to topple.
“The damage was indeed considerable,” Philippe Villeneuve, the chief architect in charge of Notre-Dame’s reconstruction, told Mr. Macron as he showed him before and after pictures of the cathedral’s interior. But the rest of the cathedral, like the great organ and the iconic stained glass windows, were “miraculously protected,” Mr. Villeneuve said.
“There was hope,” he added. “That’s when I thought that the five-year deadline — which was an obsession for all of us from the beginning — seemed feasible to me.”
Mr. Macron started his tour in the plaza in front of the cathedral, which is also in the process of being redesigned to open it up toward the Seine River and to help millions of visitors flow through more easily and comfortably by mitigating the effects of climate change.
Renovation of the cathedral’s exterior will continue for several more years.
Inside, the forest of scaffolding that had been erected after the blaze was gone on Friday. Mr. Macron was taken up into the new attic and to the base of the new spire. Like the rest of the cathedral, it was rebuilt so that it is nearly identical to the pre-fire structure, using over 2,000 oak trees from around France.
“Each piece is unique, and each piece is made with one tree,” Jean-Louis Bidet, the technical director of Ateliers Perrault, the company that built the choir roofing, told Mr. Macron as he showed him the ax traces left on beams that were hewed by hand, like in the Middle Ages.
The cathedral will reopen next week during an official ceremony, broadcast to the world, followed by a string of Masses, concerts and other events.
About 15 million yearly visitors are expected at Notre-Dame, which was already among the world’s most visited monuments before the fire.
The investigation into the cause of the 2019 blaze is continuing, but a definitive cause may never be determined. The leading theories among investigators are that it was sparked by an electrical short-circuit or a discarded cigarette.
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