Other French temples such as Reims Cathedral (centuries XIII-XIV), burned down as a result of the German bombardment on September 19, 1914, receiving 288 hits until the end of the war, it was rebuilt between 1919 and 1938; the cathedral of Amiens (13th-14th centuries) was also hit, albeit slightly, by German fire in the 1918 and 1940 offensives; or the Strasbourg Cathedral (12th-15th centuries), hit by an American bombardment in 1944, can be considered works of greater artistic and technical quality than the Parisian headquarters. For this reason the importance of Notre-Dame is essentially symbolic as an exponent not only of a certain idea of France, but as a world icon in the magnificent setting that constitutes the center of the French capital.
Notre-Dame and the revolutionary fury
And, as is logical due to its situation, it has not been left out of social upheavals, especially throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. During the French Revolution , the cathedral suffered the effects of social changes. Although the opening of the Estates General was solemnized with the celebration in the temple of a Veni Creator on May 4, 1789, and that Bishop Antoine Leclerc de Juigné (1728-1811) supported the first revolutionary decisions to try to reinstate social peace, Notre-Dame, both the building and its functions, would be overwhelmed by events. The assets of the Church will be nationalized on November 2, 1789; the cathedral chapter will be suppressed on November 21, 1790; Bishop Jean Baptiste Gobel (1727-1794), elected by a majority of the reformist clerics to the see of Paris on March 27, 1791, will approach the Jacobins and the Convention before being engulfed by it and guillotined by order of Maximilien Robespierre (1758-1794) in the proceedings against his opponent Jacques-René Hébert (1757-1794); Notre-Dame will be looted , beheading the statues of the kings of Judea identified as French monarchs, and looting the treasure, which will begin to be replenished at the beginning of the Empire with pieces from the Sainte-Chapelle; converted into a temple for the cult of Liberty and Reason; It will serve as a covered market and warehouse for fifteen hundred barrels of wine destined for the Army of the North; and the bells of the towers, next to the main bell Marie , they will be dismantled in 1791-1792, the bronze being destined for the foundry of cannons. When the constitutionalist clerics tried to resume religious practices in 1795, the building was in very poor condition:shattered windows, cracked floors, walls covered with inscriptions and a great deal of dirt, a situation that will not improve due to the confrontation between different sectors of the reformist clergy. But, in spite of everything, the cult of theophilanthropy directed by the Friends of God and of men will be combined in it. with the reformist trades, and will even host two councils of members of the clergy of the so-called Church of Grégoire in 1797 and 1801, until the first consul urged its dissolution.
After the signing of the Concordat between France and the Papacy on July 15, 1801, the cathedral was the scene of the proclamation ceremony of the concordat on April 18, 1802, when the metropolitan church of Paris was reintegrated into Catholic worship, its main bell Emmanuel being restored , saved from the revolutionary requisitions, which resonated after ten years of silence, and hastily arranged curtains barely concealed the damage suffered by the side chapels. Despite the return to Catholicism, the temple was not intervened, and Charles Percier (1764-1838) and Pierre François Fontaine (1762-1853), architects and set designers of the splendors of the first Empire, had to make an effort to improve the appearance of the interior to the ceremony of the coronation of Napoleon , on December 2, 1804, through the installation of wood panels, hangings and tapestries, since no restoration work had been carried out, which would reach, during the Empire, other cathedrals, such as that of Strasbourg, which lost 235 statues destroyed by the iconoclastic fury during the Revolution and whose restoration work began in 1811, although the fundamental part of the work will be directed between 1837 and 1872 by the architect Gustave Klotz (1810-1880), including the damage suffered by a bombardment during the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, when Klotz adopted German nationality after the annexation of Alsace in order to continue his work.
During the Bourbon Restoration (1814-1830) the cathedral continued its process of degradation as a result of the growing contempt for Gothic architecture that permeated French society, imbued with the artistic currents of neoclassicism and romanticism, which led to the demolition of numerous medieval buildings as a result of the urban speculation. Architecture that was seen as a representation of the Ancien Régime , as had meant the demolition in 1789-1790 of the Bastille fortress, built between 1370 and 1380; and why Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863) included the silhouette of Notre-Dame in his work Liberty Leading the People to the Barricades (1830), exaltation of the three glorious days of July of the same year, in which the towers of the cathedral appear in an impossible perspective, as the battles against the troops of Charles X (1757-1836) commanded by Marshal Auguste de Marmont (1774-1852) took place in the opposite direction.
The reconstruction of Notre-Dame
Aware of the loss of the medieval legacy, and the real possibility that the cathedral was demolished, Victor Hugo (1802-1885) took advantage of the contract signed in 1828 with the publisher Charles Gosselin (1795-1859) to write a work with a historical setting along the lines of the historical novels set in the Middle Ages by Walter Scott (1771-1832), by great success in France. After the revolution of July 1830 that meant the fall of the Bourbons, he wrote in a few weeks Our Lady of Paris , published on March 16, 1831. In Book III of the work, set in Paris in 1482, Hugo makes a detailed description of the cathedral and the city at the end of the 15th century, the result of detailed documentation; and in the prologue he developed a forceful defense of medieval architecture that resulted, due to the success of the novel, in the recovery of society's favor towards Gothic art and later in the structuring of neo-Gothic architecture that would dominate the civil architectural panorama and religion in France –and also in Europe– during the second half of the 19th century. The popular impact of Hugo's work, much more social than historical in drawing a fresco of French society during the end of the reign of Louis XI (1423-1483), a time when the Valois consolidated the absolutist monarchy – a regime whose last expression had definitively expired a few months earlier– contributed to the consolidation of Notre-Dame Cathedral as a determining element in the collective imagination, facilitating the start of the first large-scale restoration works, repeatedly interrupted by the cost of the works and the difficulties to document and remake the sculptural series.
Eugène Viollet-le Duc (1814-1879) and Jean Baptiste Antoine Lassus (1807-1857), will be in charge of designing and directing the works, which will last between 1844 and 1864. The architects had to solve the problems of stability of the land in the construction of a new sacristy, the state of degradation of the stone and the loss of numerous architectural and sculptural elements. In the restoration, the Early Gothic parts were joined by the Neo-Gothic elements introduced by Viollet-le-Duc, such as the spire, a symbol of its recent destruction, and the new sculptural series. But probably the element that best contributed to the visual enhancement of the cathedral was the demolition of the nearby buildings by order of Baron Georges Eugène Haussmann (1809-1891) between 1860 and 1870, opening the large esplanade that currently extends between the main facade of the cathedral and the Police Prefecture, within the hygiene and urban sanitation measures that transformed the urban planning of the city.
Four years after the completion of the restoration, during the Paris Commune , the advance of the Versailles troops provoked the beginning of widespread destruction at the hands of the Communards who, like Louise Michel (1830-1905), affirmed that "Paris will be ours or it will not exist". Along with the residences of prominent members of the nobility, the bourgeoisie and the political class, the representative buildings of the powers of the State were destroyed, such as the Tuileries Palace, the Richelieu Library, the Palace of Justice and the Hôtel de Ville, among others. others. Several fires were started in the Notre-Dame cathedral on May 24, 1871, but a group of interns from the pharmacy department of the nearby Hôtel-Dieu hospital, Delaure, Defresne, Duque, Courant, Dupoux and Yvon, managed to gather a small number of volunteers and put out the flames before they spread irreparably. Unscathed in a sea of ruins after the crushing of the Commune, Notre-Dame Cathedral definitively acquired its status as a symbol of state power and social cohesion, an example of a certain way of understanding grandeur republican as exemplified by the promises of financial contributions for its reconstruction amounting to more than one billion euros raised in a few days. A figure that, given the social problems and the protest against a certain form of political action that have marked French news in recent months, can once again make Notre-Dame a symbol of the Ancien régime .