Notre-Dame After the Fire: What Was Lost, What Was Found, and What the New Windows Actually Mean

It’s like many big events in history, you remember where you were and what you were doing. I remember where I was when Michael Jackson died, when the Twin Towers were hit, and also when Notre Dame was on fire. I remember refreshing my phone over and over, watching the spire fall on a livestream in horror.

Seven years on, the scaffolding is down, the doors have reopened, and the latest argument is about glass. Six new stained glass windows, commissioned to replace the 19th-century ones in the south aisle, have split opinion in France between those who see them as a thoughtful continuation of the cathedral’s long habit of reinvention and those who see them as vandalism dressed up as progress.

So much has happened, including a near-total loss, a forensic reconstruction, sarcophagi pulled from under the transept floor, and the fact that no generation in the cathedral’s eight-hundred-year history has ever left it alone.

The Notre-Dame Night the Roof Came Down

The fire started in the attic, somewhere near the base of the spire, just before 6.20 pm on a Monday in Holy Week. Within an hour, the roof was a furnace. The spire, the one Eugène Viollet-le-Duc had added in the 1860s, leaned, cracked, and fell at 7.50 pm, punching through the vaulted ceiling below. 

Parisians on the Pont de la Tournelle sang the Ave Maria while it burned. By the time the firefighters of the Brigade de sapeurs-pompiers de Paris brought it under control around 9.45 pm, the roof and the spire were gone.

What survived was a near miracle of triage. A chaplain of the Paris fire brigade, Father Jean-Marc Fournier, went into the burning nave with a small team to retrieve the Crown of Thorns and the Blessed Sacrament. 

The great rose windows held, and the bronze rooster atop the spire, which had contained relics, was found dented but recognizable in the rubble the next morning. The three medieval rose windows, north, south, and west, all came through, though the south rose had to be dismantled later for restoration.

The forest, though, was lost. That was the name carpenters gave the attic timber framework, more than a thousand individual oak beams, some cut from trees that had been seedlings during the reign of Charlemagne. When that burned, with it went a piece of forest from 12th-century Île-de-France, a record of medieval woodland that no archive can replace.

What They Found in the Floor

Before reconstruction could begin in earnest, the floor had to come up. INRAP, the French national institute for preventive archaeology, moved in. What they found in 2022, under the transept crossing, was completely unexpected.

Two lead sarcophagi, anthropomorphic in shape, the older of them roughly 14th century. One contained the remains of a high-status canon named Antoine de la Porte, who died in 1710 and whose name was inscribed on a plate fixed to the lead. 

The other, more startlingly, contained a younger man, probably in his thirties, who had been embalmed, whose pelvis showed signs of long hours on horseback, and whose skull had been sawn open in the way you do when you remove the brain for funerary preparation. The press immediately christened him le cavalier. 

Sadly, he hasn’t been identified. He was buried with care and at the center of the cathedral, which means he mattered to someone in power. The current best guess places him in the 16th century, but the investigation is ongoing.

The archaeologists also pulled up fragments of the medieval rood screen that had separated the nave from the choir until the early eighteenth century, when it was dismantled on the orders of Louis XIV’s son, Le Grand Dauphin, to open up the sightlines. 

Painted faces from a Resurrection scene, gilded drapery, a sculpted hand. These had been used as rubble fill under the later floor, which is what people did with stone they no longer wanted. They are now in the Louvre’s reserves. A cathedral that everyone thought was thoroughly documented turned out to be still keeping things from us.

Rebuilding the Forest, Beam by Beam

President Macron’s announcement that Notre-Dame would be rebuilt within five years was treated, at the time, as political theater. It turned out to be roughly accurate. The cathedral reopened on December 7, 2024, with a Mass led by the Archbishop of Paris, Laurent Ulrich, and a civil ceremony attended by heads of state, including, in a detail that will date this article, both the outgoing American president and his successor.

The choice that defined the rebuild was made early. The framework would be restored à l’identique, identically, using oak, hand-cut by carpenters working with axes rather than power saws, joined with wooden pegs rather than metal fixings. 

Around two thousand oaks were felled across French forests, including from estates that had been growing them for the navy two centuries ago. Carpenters from companies like Le Bras Frères and Asselin used techniques recovered from medieval treatises and from the surviving timbers themselves, which had been laser-scanned by the late architectural historian Andrew Tallon before the fire. 

His scans, made between 2010 and 2015 with a tripod-mounted device, are the reason the new roof sits where the old one sat to within a few millimeters.

I went up to Paris in January to see the interior for myself. The thing that stops you is the stone. The limestone of the vaults, scrubbed of eight centuries of soot and candle smoke during the cleaning, is almost white. 

It looks almost wrong, until you remember that this is what it would have looked like in 1260, when it was new, and that every generation of Parisians who knew this cathedral before us knew a darker, dimmer building than the one standing there now. 

The Argument About the Windows

Which brings us to the glass. In December 2023, Macron announced that six windows in the south aisle of the nave, currently fitted with nineteenth-century grisaille glass designed under Viollet-le-Duc, would be replaced with contemporary works by a living artist. 

A competition was held, and in 2024, the painter Claire Tabouret was selected to work with the Atelier Simon-Marq in Reims, which has been making stained glass since 1640. Her designs depict the Pentecost: figures, flames, the descent of the Spirit, in a palette that leans heavily on blues and oranges.

The objection, most forcefully voiced by the Commission nationale du patrimoine et de l’architecture in July 2024, is that the existing Viollet-le-Duc windows survived the fire intact. To remove undamaged historic glass to make room for new commissions, the commission argued, contravenes the Venice Charter of 1964, the international agreement on the conservation of historic monuments, which France itself helped draft. 

More than 240,000 people signed a petition to keep the original windows in place. The Archbishop of Paris and the President have pressed on regardless. The Viollet-le-Duc windows, the cathedral has said, will be conserved and displayed in a future museum of the works of Notre Dame.

What nobody disputes is that this is how Notre-Dame has always worked. The building you walked into before the fire was substantially a 19th-century reinvention. Viollet-le-Duc, given the job in 1844 with Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Lassus, added the spire that fell in 2019, designed the gargoyles tourists photograph, replaced statuary smashed during the Revolution, and produced the grisaille windows now being argued over. 

The medieval cathedral he restored had already been remade in the 17th century, when Louis XIV’s father, Louis XIII, vowed to redecorate the choir if granted an heir, a vow eventually executed by his son and called the Vœu de Louis XIII. The rood screen came out then. Tombs were moved. Walls were repainted. 

The cathedral that burned in 2019 was a composite, layered, contested object, not a fixed medieval monument.

Every Generation Has Remade This Building

It helps to remember how close Notre-Dame came to being demolished, more than once. By the late 18th century, the cathedral was a wreck. Revolutionaries decapitated the statues of the Kings of Judah on the west front in 1793, believing them to be French kings (the heads, buried by a royalist sympathizer, were rediscovered in 1977 during construction work on the rue de la Chaussée-d’Antin and are now in the Musée de Cluny). 

The building was rededicated as a Temple of Reason, then a Temple of the Supreme Being, then used as a wine warehouse. Napoleon crowned himself there in 1804 partly because reclaiming the cathedral made a political point, but by the 1820s the structure was so dilapidated that there were serious proposals to pull it down.

What saved it was a novel. Victor Hugo published Notre-Dame de Paris in 1831, with the cathedral itself as protagonist and the medieval city as its body. Public opinion shifted. Within a decade, the restoration commission was at work, and Viollet-le-Duc was on site. 

He gave the cathedral the silhouette tourists would later recognize. The spire he designed in 1859 was not a copy of the medieval one that had been removed in 1786; it was his own composition, taller, more elaborate, signed in lead with his own face among the apostles.

The restoration just completed by chief architect Philippe Villeneuve rebuilt that 19th-century spire identically, lead and all. They could have built something contemporary. They chose to rebuild a Romantic-era invention because, by 2019, it had become the cathedral’s face. Authenticity at Notre Dame is a moving target.

The 13th-century builders would not recognize the building. Viollet-le-Duc would not recognize what came before him. The people arguing over Claire Tabouret’s windows in 2026 are doing exactly what every previous generation has done, which is fighting over which version of Notre-Dame should stand for their own time.

I think about the canon Antoine de la Porte, lifted out of the transept floor in his lead coffin in 2022, three centuries after he was buried in a cathedral that already looked nothing like the one he would have known as a young man.

He outlived the rood screen, but the building outlived him. It will outlive the current row about the south aisle, and someone in 2150 will be arguing about whether to keep Tabouret’s blues and oranges or replace them with whatever the next idea of sacred art happens to be.