The more than five-year reconstruction of Notre Dame cathedral has featured some near-miraculous recoveries, as well as several controversies. Ahead of the official reopening of the cathedral on Saturday, we look at some of the key moments:
THE SAVIORS
Photo: AFP
Paris firefighters won universal praise for their swift and decisive action on the evening of April 15, 2019, with officers later saying they thought they were only 30 minutes away from seeing the structure collapse.
Battling smoke and the risk of falling debris, they formed a human chain with church officials to evacuate the most precious artifacts and religious treasures, helping preserve most of the cathedral’s irreplaceable contents.
Others saw divine intervention in how a copper statue of a rooster that had sat atop the building’s incinerated 19th-century spire was found afterwards intact amid the scorched rubble.
Photo: AFP
Its contents — three relics, including a small piece of the Crown of Thorns supposedly worn by Jesus before his crucifixion — also survived, with the battered rooster now on display in a Paris museum. Inside the cathedral, images the day after the blaze revealed that a giant gold cross on the altar was still standing amid the still smoldering wreckage, a symbol of hope and defiance for many on a dark day for Christians and the country at large.
CONTESTED DESIGN CONTEST
French President Emmanuel Macron called the fire “an opportunity to come together” but any sense of national unity after the disaster quickly broke down.
His suggestion that an “element of modern architecture” be included in the rebuild drew immediate criticism from conservatives who demanded that the reconstruction be faithful to the last major update by architect Eugene Viollet-le-Duc in 1844.
The army general put in charge of the rebuild publicly fell out with the lead architect over the redesign, while entries for an architectural competition to select a new spire resulted in lurid headlines.
One suggestion shown by First Lady Brigitte Macron to then-culture minister Roselyne Bachelot resembled a “phallus with its base surrounded with golden balls,” Bachelot wrote in a book.
In the end, a replica of the old spire was built. Six new stained glass windows are set to be installed featuring work by contemporary artists — a modest nod to modernity and Macron’s original vision.
LEAD ROLE
Notre Dame’s roof and spire were covered by around 400 tonnes of lead, a toxic heavy metal that melted and vaporized with the heat of the fire, with some of it thought to have polluted the surrounding area.
Authorities cleaned nearby schools and advised local residents to wipe surfaces in their homes because of the risk of poisoning.
A health charity joined forces with a union and parents of local schoolchildren to lodge a criminal complaint in 2022 that accused authorities of failing to take every precaution to prevent pollution.
Charges are possible if authorities or contractors are found to have been negligent in protecting the health of residents or workers sent in to decontaminate the site, with an investigating magistrate overseeing a probe.
CAUSE UNKNOWN
The chief Paris prosecutor at the time of the fire, Remy Heitz, said shortly after the inferno that he believed that an accident such as an electrical fault or a cigarette butt was the most likely cause.
Some of the workers renovating the roof at the time of the fire were known to have smoked on site, but investigators have never been able to pinpoint the exact starting point.Speculation about an arson attack has been investigated during five years of forensic analysis, but no evidence was found.
The current chief Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau said in April that “the closer we have got to the spot the fire started, and the more results of analyses come back, the more weight is lent to the theory of an accident.”
FEE ROW
Culture Minister Rachida Dati has proposed that visitors to the restored cathedral pay a five-euro (US$5.25) entry ticket, with the funds set to be routed to some 4,000 churches in need of repairs around France.
Charging for entry — entering Notre Dame was previously free — would bring the tourist attraction into line with St Paul’s cathedral in London or Milan’s Duomo.
But senior French church leaders have criticized the idea, with a senior bishop saying churches and cathedrals had “always been places open to all” and making money from visitors would be a “betrayal of their original vocation.”
The French state owns Notre Dame and has the final say.
China’s military launched a record number of warplane incursions around Taiwan last year as it builds its ability to launch full-scale invasion, something a former chief of Taiwan’s armed forces said Beijing could be capable of within a decade. Analysts said China’s relentless harassment had taken a toll on Taiwan’s resources, but had failed to convince them to capitulate, largely because the threat of invasion was still an empty one, for now. Xi Jinping’s (習近平) determination to annex Taiwan under what the president terms “reunification” is no secret. He has publicly and stridently promised to bring it under Communist party (CCP) control,
In Taiwan’s politics the party chair is an extremely influential position. Typically this person is the presumed presidential candidate or serving president. In the last presidential election, two of the three candidates were also leaders of their party. Only one party chair race had been planned for this year, but with the Jan. 1 resignation by the currently indicted Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) of the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) two parties are now in play. If a challenger to acting Chairman Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) appears we will examine that race in more depth. Currently their election is set for Feb. 15. EXTREMELY
They increasingly own everything from access to space to how we get news on Earth and now outgoing President Joe Biden warns America’s new breed of Donald Trump-allied oligarchs could gobble up US democracy itself. Biden used his farewell speech to the nation to deliver a shockingly dark message: that a nation which has always revered its entrepreneurs may now be at their mercy. “An oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms,” Biden said. He named no names, but his targets were clear: men like Elon Musk
On Sept. 27 last year, three climate activists were arrested for throwing soup over Sunflowers by Vincent van Gogh at London’s National Gallery. The Just Stop Oil protest landed on international front pages. But will the action help further the activists’ cause to end fossil fuels? Scientists are beginning to find answers to this question. The number of protests more than tripled between 2006 and 2020 and researchers are working out which tactics are most likely to change public opinion, influence voting behavior, change policy or even overthrow political regimes. “We are experiencing the largest wave of protests in documented history,” says
RSS