The fire of 1831 spared Notre-Dame cathedral.The rioters had climbed on the roof, overthrew a giant iron cross;Then they had broken stained glass, destroyed a statue of Jesus, reduced in pieces another from the Virgin Mary.But they wanted above all at the Archbishop of Paris, absent - hence the sacking of his palace, located south of the church, along the Seine.Finally, they had set fire to it.The palace has disappeared today.In its place is now a 75 m crane.
There is a drawing of the scene of this night of February 14, 1831, seen on the other side of the Seine.He is the work of Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, the man who, thirteen years later, was going to lead a restoration of the cathedral for twenty years.Viollet-le-Duc was only 17 years old when he attended the attack on the crowd.In his sketch hastily drawn in the pencil, small flesh -fury men storm the palace, throwing furniture and other valuables through the windows and in the river.Behind this show stands Notre-Dame, then six centuries old.
In 1980, when he was also 17 years old, Philippe Villeneuve visited an exhibition dedicated to Viollet-le-Duc at the Grand Palais, in Paris.He wants to become an architect, but does not yet know that we can specialize in historic monuments.Today, he is one of the thirty-five in chief architects of the Historical Monuments of France.Philippe Villeneuve has been at the head of catering sites in Notre-Dame since 2013, but this work has been a magnitude and an unprecedented emergency since the fire in the spring of 2019, which destroyed the roof of the cathedral.The building being today stabilized, the reconstruction is about to start.
"It was Viollet-le-Duc who invented the restoration of historic monuments," explains the architect."Before, it didn't exist.Before, people repaired them, and repaired them in the style of their time.Or they did not repair them and demolished them.
Dans la France du 19esiècle, le gouvernement créa d’abord des institutions pour s’attaquer systématiquement à une question qui nous concerne tous : quelle partie du passé mérite d’être préservée et transmise à la postérité ? Quel devoir avons-nous envers les créations de nos ancêtres, quelle force et quelle stabilité tirons-nous de leur présence – et quand, au contraire, deviennent-elles un poids nous empêchant de créer un monde qui nous est propre ? Cette question, chacun de nous y est confronté à sa petite échelle, dans sa vie personnelle et professionnelle.A bit like in an interior historic monuments service, each of us fights to find out what to keep and throw away, what change to resist and to adhere.Simply, very often, we are not really aware of it.
In its time, Notre-Dame was revolutionary. Elle a été construite à la fin du 12eet au 13esiècle, alors que la France devenait une nation et que Paris était la plus grande ville européenne.Notre-Dame was the first great masterpiece of a new French architecture, where crosses of warnings and butts allow the walls to rise and refine, to the windows to be considerably enlarged and toThe light to enter flowers.The Italians, jealous, called it "Gothic", which meant "barbarian", but the French style conquered Europe.
Au début du 19esiècle, cependant, Notre-Dame était particulièrement mal en point.Decades of depredation and negligence, beginning even before the Revolution of 1789, had left it in a state of worrying dilapidation.Victor Hugo was furious, to the point that he wrote an entire novel around the cathedral.Notre-Dame de Paris was published in 1831, a month after the fire in the archbishopric.Throughout France, the churches seized during the revolution had been looted for their stones.With his text "War to demolishers", Victor Hugo helped to launch a movement whose watchword was: "Enough!»».Eugène Viollet-le-Duc threw himself headed.
So he saved Notre-Dame: he rebuilt the buttons and the stained glass windows, replaced the statues demolished by the revolutionaries, added others.And when he built a new wooden arrow, which exceeded the medieval original by 15 m, he also added copper statues larger than life of the twelve apostles.Eleven of them look outside;The twelfth is that of Saint Thomas, the apostle who doubted.Viollet-le-Duc gave him his own face and makes him contemplate the arrow, his master work.He was an atheist, but he saved the queen of French cathedrals.
