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Notre-Dame was Paris's iron lady 700 years before the Eiffel Tower

Iron, in the 1160s

The scale of the building rests on three things: early sexpartite rib vaults, flying buttresses, and iron. The first two are in every guidebook. The third was invisible until someone dated it.

Forged in regional bloomery furnaces and set into the masonry from the 1160s, the staples tie stone courses to each other. They are not repairs and not later reinforcement — they were part of the design from the start. The carbon-14 dating is what settles it, because it dates the carbon trapped in the iron rather than the building around it.

The cornerstone was laid in 1163 under Bishop Maurice de Sully. The choir altar was consecrated in 1182. Construction was not formally finished until 1345, nearly two centuries later.

The gargoyles are Victorian

The chimeras along the towers — the brooding, chin-on-hands creatures that appear on every postcard — were designed and carved in the nineteenth century, during Eugène Viollet-le-Duc's restoration between 1844 and 1864. They are not medieval, and they were never functional waterspouts.

Viollet-le-Duc's restoration is also why the spire that burned in 2019 was not a medieval spire. The original was dismantled in 1797 after centuries of decay. What collapsed on live television was his replacement.

What the 2019 fire actually destroyed, and what it didn't

The fire began in the attic on 15 April 2019, during renovation work. It destroyed the spire and the medieval timber roof frame — a lattice of oak known as la forêt, built from around 1,300 oak trees.

What survived is the part worth knowing:

• All three great rose windows are structurally intact. The stone vaulting beneath them absorbed

the thermal shock. They needed cleaning to remove toxic lead soot, not replacement.

• When the vaulting above the crossing collapsed, the high-altar cross and **Nicolas Coustou's

Pietà** were undamaged. The photograph of the cross lit up in the smoking ruin became the image of the night.

The cathedral reopened on 7 December 2024. Archbishop Ulrich struck the doors open with a crosier carved from a charred oak beam salvaged from the roof that burned.

What the rebuilding dug up

Clearing the crossing for reconstruction in 2022 turned into an excavation. Inrap archaeologists, under Christophe Besnier, found fragments of the medieval rood screen — the carved barrier dismantled in the Baroque remodelling of 1699-1725 to open up the view of the altar — along with lead sarcophagi beneath the floor.

One of them is a puzzle. Skeletal and pathological evidence points strongly to the sixteenth-century poet Joachim du Bellay. But isotope analysis of his teeth says he grew up around Paris or Lyon, and du Bellay's childhood in Anjou is well documented.

[The identification is unresolved. The dossier records it as an open question, and so does this page.]

Five things almost everyone believes that aren't true

What to look at, if you only have twelve minutes

Stand where the crossing is and think about what is above you: a roof rebuilt from oak, replacing one that stood for eight centuries, over stone vaulting that saved the windows by absorbing the heat that would have destroyed them.

Then look at the walls and remember they are stapled together with iron forged in the 1160s — the detail that had to be radiocarbon-dated before anyone believed it.

The Crown of Thorns that Louis IX bought in 1239, and built Sainte-Chapelle to hold, was kept here for two centuries after the Revolution. It was carried out of the burning building in 2019.