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Notre-Dame Appears Structurally Sound After Fire, as Investigators Look for Cause
In Aftermath of Notre-Dame Fire, Macron Urges Unity in Fragmented Nation
(about 2 hours later)
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
PARIS — President Emmanuel Macron asked French citizens on Tuesday night to come together in the aftermath of the calamitous fire at Notre-Dame Cathedral and to move beyond the divisions that have wrenched the country during months of violent street protests.
• Officials are treating Monday’s fire at Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris as an accident, not a deliberate act. President Emmanuel Macron said he hoped the cathedral could be rebuilt within five years — though at least one expert said it could take three times that long.
Mr. Macron, who has faced a virtual uprising against his pro-business government, sought to rally a country still devastated by the fire and turn the profound, yet undoubtedly fleeting, moment of national mourning and unity to his advantage.
• After an initial fire alarm sounded at 6:20 p.m. on Monday, checks were carried out in the cathedral but no fire was found. The fire was discovered only after a second alarm 23 minutes later.
Like his predecessor, François Hollande, who steered France through two terrorist attacks, Mr. Macron suggested that politics be forgotten in the aftermath of the fire and called attention to the grand national rebuilding project — vowing to restore the gargantuan Gothic gem in a mere five years.
• A construction expert said that Notre-Dame did not have automatic sprinklers in the wooden framework of its roof, where the fire started, and that its attic space was not compartmentalized with fire-breaking walls, which could have prevented a blaze from spreading.
“So yes, we will rebuild Notre-Dame Cathedral, more beautiful than ever, and I want this to be finished in five years,” Mr. Macron said. “We can do it, and we will mobilize to do so.”
PARIS — A day after a monstrous fire roared through Notre-Dame cathedral, destroying its roof and lacy spire and leaving three holes in its sweeping vaulted ceiling, officials on Tuesday were trying to determine what caused the catastrophe.
After an inspection Tuesday, with firefighters still searching for smoldering embers, the French authorities declared the 850-year-old cathedral structurally sound, if wounded by three troubling “holes” in the sweeping vaulted ceiling.
The cathedral appeared to be structurally sound, officials said, after an inspection. With the fire extinguished, they now began what the Paris prosecutor, Rémy Heitz, told journalists would be “a long and complex investigation,” though for now he said they were considering the disaster an accident.
How the fire started remains under intensive investigation, though the authorities were treating the disaster as an accident, focusing on workers who were carrying out another round of nearly constant renovations at the scaffolding-shrouded site.
“Nothing at this stage suggests a voluntary act,” he said.
Wealthy benefactors — the billionaire Pinault family of France, the French energy company Total, L’Oréal, the Bettencourt-Schueller Foundation and the family of Bernard Arnault — quickly pledged hundreds of millions toward restoration of what, even in its charred state, remained a national and global treasure.
The Paris prosecutor’s office said on Tuesday evening that investigators had questioned about 30 witnesses so far. These included workers from the companies involved in the restoration of the cathedral not long before the fire broke out, and staff at Notre-Dame in charge of security.
None of the simmering questions and recriminations about whether the landmark was properly fitted with fire-safety measures — the authorities had decided against sprinklers amid the timbers under the roof where the blaze spread — have yet been turned on Mr. Macron.
A spokesman for the cathedral said it would take at least 48 hours before the building was safe to enter.
Mr. Macron, who went to the site even as it still burned on Monday evening, has presented himself as the image of control and authority. The tragedy may even offer a fillip of support to a president who polled low even before the months of violent “Yellow Vest” protests erupted late last year. The question is for how long.
The first fire alarm on Monday was set off at 6:20 p.m., and checks were carried out but no fire was found, Mr. Heitz said.
“I believe very deeply that it is up to us to transform this catastrophe into a moment to become — while reflecting deeply on what we have been, and what we should be — better than what we are,” the president said in a nationally televised address, deploying the typically abstract language that has hurt him politically.
A second alarm went off at 6:43 p.m., he said, and fire was discovered in the wooden framework of the attic, ancient beams beneath the lead roof known as the “forest.”
“It is up to us now to rediscover the thread of our national project — what made us, what unites us,” Mr. Macron said.
As investigators faced the difficult task of determining a cause in the apparent absence of evidence, destroyed by the roaring flames, officials, citizens and visitors continued to congregate on the banks of the Seine River to contemplate the mutilated monument, an unequaled jewel of Gothic architecture.
Backing Mr. Macron’s words, politics indeed stopped on Tuesday, with the political parties declaring a truce as though it were wartime and the country had been attacked.
The cathedral’s rector, Msgr. Patrick Chauvet, said on Tuesday that fire monitors routinely inspected the cathedral. “Three times a day they go up, under the wooden roof, to make an assessment,” he told France Inter, a radio station.
One after another, on the left, right and center, the parties canceled their meetings, their attacks on Mr. Macron and their campaigning for the European elections.
He also said there was an on-site firefighter at the cathedral, although he did not say how often that person was there, where that person was normally stationed, or whether that person was present on Monday.
Mr. Macron himself shelved a much anticipated speech he was supposed to give Monday night outlining his analysis of what his government called the Great National Debate — three months in which citizens voiced their grievances, mostly over taxes.
“For security, I don’t think we can do more,” he said. “But there is always an incident that you can’t predict.”
The president was all set to announce measures to meet these grievances and calm the Yellow Vests — lower taxes, higher pensions, an opening up of institutions.
[Here’s what we know and don’t know about the fire.]
But then the fire struck, the speech was canceled and Mr. Macron himself joined the truce declared by the other political parties.
The cathedral spokesman, André Finot, said the on-duty firefighter at the cathedral had access to an alarm system that indicates which specific fire detector has gone off. When it does, the firefighter can dispatch a security agent, also at the cathedral, to check.
But this appeared to have little to do with Mr. Macron, and much to do with the national grief over Notre-Dame.
Mr. Finot added that large investments made by the French state several years ago to increase fire security at the cathedral included installing “sensors, detectors everywhere.”
“We’re all living this moment, collectively, as a moment of mourning,” said a leader of the center-right Republican Party, François-Xavier Bellamy, on the French television channel LCI Tuesday.
“Twenty-four hours out of 24, someone was watching,” he said.
The truce is likely to be only temporary, in the estimation of analysts.
Frédéric Létoffé, the co-president of a group of French companies that specialize in work on older buildings and monuments, said Notre-Dame had fire detectors that functioned continuously and was equipped with dry risers — empty pipes that firefighters can externally connect to a pressurized water source.
The protests revealed such high levels of discontent, and of “fragmentation” in the “French archipelago,” as the leading pollster Jérôme Fourquet put it in an influential recent book on French disunity, that whatever boost the president gets is likely to be short-lived.
But he said that the cathedral — like many others in France — did not have automatic sprinklers in the wooden framework of the roof, and that its attic space was not compartmentalized with fire-breaking walls, which could have prevented a blaze from spreading.
“He wants to make the national reconstruction project a Macron project,” Gérard Grunberg, a political scientist, said after listening to Mr. Macron’s speech. “He wants to make it his project. It’s a project for France that he wants to put himself at the head of: ‘I’m the one who will give you back your cathedral.’”
Mr. Létoffé added that contractors working on construction sites had to follow strict guidelines when using electrical tools, and that after finishing for the day, contractors working with heat must remain on site for two hours.
But Mr. Grunberg was skeptical that the mission would take hold with a French public that remains deeply skeptical of Mr. Macron, a youthful former investment banker who captured the presidency two years ago as France’s political party system collapsed around him.
Whatever the cause of the fire, Parisians awakened to the new reality at the heart of their damaged capital: the city’s symbolic center damaged as never before in its more than 800 years of history, not by the furious revolutionaries who once defaced it nor by misguided restorers who denatured it.
“It’s very rare for a chief of state to have a great national project around which everybody can rally,” Mr. Grunberg said. “Since the beginning, I’ve been struck by how difficult it has been for him to enlarge his majority,” which received only 24 percent in the first round of voting in 2017, he added.
“It’s exposed to the sky — it’s an absolute tragedy, beyond anything we could have imagined,” said Stephen Bern, who has served as an adviser on France’s monuments to President Emmanuel Macron.
Mr. Macron is now above that in the polls, but not by much, even after undertaking an extended speaking tour of France.
Mr. Bern said that the contractor for the building’s scaffolding was “serious,” and that safety regulations were “codified.” But “it all depends on human beings,” he said.
Other reactions suggested that the moment of national unity may already be waning.
Two police officers and one firefighter were injured in the five-hour battle to gain control over the blaze, but no one was killed.
“It seems to me that five years to reconstruct a cathedral is a little bit short; five years to have to put up with Emmanuel Macron’s speeches is a bit long,” said Manuel Bompard, a leader of the leftist party France Insoumise, or France Unbowed.
After the fire, Mr. Macron made an immediate effort to heal the psychic wound, promising late Monday to rebuild the cathedral, a beloved symbol of the city for more than eight centuries.
Mr. Macron sought to place the national tragedy of Notre-Dame’s near destruction in the context of the great sweep of French history, as he often does, a habit intended to reassure citizens of his long-term vision for the nation.
Standing outside the still-burning structure, he said an international effort to raise money for reconstruction would begin on Tuesday.
“In the course of our history, we’ve built cities, ports, churches,” Mr. Macron said. “Many have burned or were destroyed in wars, revolutions or by man’s mistakes. Each time, each time, we’ve rebuilt them.”
“We will rebuild Notre-Dame,” he said, “because that is what the French expect.”
“The fire at Notre-Dame reminds us that our history doesn’t end, doesn’t end,” he added.
At a news conference on Tuesday night, Mr. Macron said he hoped the rebuild could be completed in the next five years.
But the grief that the French were experiencing in the wake of the fire was much more personal than Mr. Macron’s abstractions suggested.
Mr. Létoffé, the construction expert, said earlier that he expected full restoration work to take 10 to 15 years.
On Tuesday night, hundreds congregated for song and prayers in the Place Saint Michel, opposite Notre-Dame. During the day, hundreds more had massed at the bridge leading on to the church plaza.
The billionaire Pinault family of France pledged 100 million euros, or about $113 million, to the effort, as did the French energy company Total, and L’Oréal and the Bettencourt-Schueller Foundation, which was established by the family that founded the cosmetics giant.
On Monday night, watching the flames in horror from the river bank, many were in tears, as if they had been struck personally by the disaster.
The family of Bernard Arnault, owners of the luxury goods group LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, plan to contribute €200 million.
“It’s a thousand years of memory that’s going,” said Marlene Ruat, a 34-year-old hospital worker. “It’s causing me a lot of pain,” she said. “You can see here,” she said, pointing at the crowd. “Everybody is quiet.”
The most urgent measure needed, said Dany Sandron, a professor of art history and architecture at Sorbonne University, “is to put an umbrella on top of the cathedral, because the vaults are at risk in the open air.”
For others, the symbolism of the destruction, and what it said about the current condition of France, and its political and economic management of the balance between its glorious but sometimes burdensome history and the need to renew and move forward, was inescapable.
That alone could take weeks, he said.
“There have been three cases like this in 10 years,” said Pierre Housieaux, the president of the Paris-Historique historic preservation society, citing other disastrous fires at historic monuments.
[Notre Dame, the university, knows what it’s like to be devastated by fire.]
“We’re seeing monuments ravaged by fires that are always tied to renovation work,” he said, “and we still haven’t taken the measure of things.”
Notre-Dame, which was built in the 12th and 13th centuries on the foundations of an earlier church and Roman ramparts on an island in the Seine, is visited by about 13 million people a year.
In addition to damaging the building itself, the fire put at risk its relics and stained-glass windows, with panes held together by lead that melts at high temperatures. While one treasure, a relic of the crown of thorns said to have been worn by Jesus during his crucifixion, was saved, the status of some other historic items is unclear.
[The blaze threatened the cathedral’s vast collection of Christian art and relics.]
The architect who oversaw work on the cathedral in the 1980s and 1990s said he believed much of the building and its furnishings could be saved. Photos of the interior showed that many flammable fixtures, like pews and a pulpit, remained intact.
“The stone vaulting acted like a firewall and it kept the worst heat away,” said the architect, Bernard Fonquernie.
Stunned Parisians and visitors, along with countless people around the world watching live on television, had looked on in horror as the cathedral, with its famous flying buttresses built to support the relatively thin and tall walls of its era, burned days before Easter Sunday services were to be held.
[As a French landmark went up in flames, the symbolism for the troubled country was hard to miss, our architecture critic writes.]
Hundreds of bystanders gathered near Notre-Dame on Tuesday morning, many struggling to fathom what had happened.
“I was stunned when I came to see the fire last night, and I’m still so shocked this morning,” said Serge Roger, a 67-year-old Parisian retiree.
As tears started to fill Mr. Roger’s eyes, Pascale Defranqui, 59, gave him some ashes that she had collected near the cathedral the previous evening. Like Mr. Roger, she said she had struggled to sleep. She cycled around the cathedral at dawn on Tuesday, she said, to pay tribute to “the most beautiful lady of Paris, still standing.”
She had studied the cathedral’s architecture in art history classes at the Louvre, she said, and would marvel at its towers on her way home.
“I’m not sure I want to know what happened,” Ms. Defranqui said. “I just want to see it renovated as quickly as possible.”
