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Hundreds of millions pledged to help rebuild Notre Dame after fire More than €600m pledged to help rebuild Notre Dame after fire
(about 5 hours later)
Private donors have pledged hundreds of millions of euros to help rebuild Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris after it was devastated by fire. Wealthy industrialists and ordinary individuals have donated more than €600m in less than 24 hours to help restore Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, but experts have said reconstructing the building could take decades.
The French billionaire Bernard Arnault announced on Tuesday that he and the LVMH luxury conglomerate he controls would donate €200m (£170m) to the reconstruction efforts. On Monday evening a blaze tore through the 850-year-old Gothic cathedral, toppling its spire, destroying large parts of its vaulted roof and triggering a scramble to save its precious relics and artworks.
The pledge came after the rival fashion group Kering, founded by the billionaire François Pinault, offered €100m to help “completely rebuild Notre Dame”. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, promised France would “rebuild Notre Dame together”, describing the cathedral as “our history, our literature, the epicentre of our life … The cathedral of every French person, even those who have never visited it.”
The cost of reconstruction has been estimated at hundreds of million of euros, and as donations poured in looked as if there would be no shortage of funds. Notre Dame’s rector, Patrick Chauvet, said he hoped to celebrate mass there within a decade, but some experts predicted the project could take many times longer.
The French billionaire Bernard Arnault and his luxury goods group LVMH promised on Tuesday to donate €200m (£170m), hours after his longstanding rival François Pinault, the fashion and retail magnate, announced he was giving €100m.
The Bettencourt family, part-owners of L’Oréal, will contribute €200m, the energy group Total €100m, and the brothers Martin and Olivier Bouygues of the eponymous construction, media and telecoms firm announced a personal donation of €10m, as did an American couple, Henry and Marie-Josée Kravis.
The mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, said the city would provide €50m and organise an international donors’ conference to coordinate gifts from abroad. The Île-de-France region of which Paris is a part pledged a further €10m.
Macron has said a national appeal, likely to be accompanied by tax incentives, would be launched as soon as possible, and the privately run French Heritage Foundation said its call for donations had raised €2m from individuals by midday on Tuesday.
A range of further fundraising events have already been announced, including benefit matches featuring France’s World Cup football champions and a star-studded concert to be broadcast on Saturday night on French public television.
Unesco has said it will help France assess and repair the damage to the cathedral, which typically welcomes 13 million visitors a year, while Italy, Russia and Germany all offered to send restoration experts.
Eric Fischer, who heads a foundation restoring the 1,000-year-old Strasbourg Cathedral which recently underwent a three-year facelift, said he thought rebuilding Notre Dame would probably take several decades.
“The damage will be significant,” Fischer told Agence-France Presse. France was “lucky to still have a network of excellent heritage restoration companies”, he said, and the work would depend on the the plans, diagrams and other data available to them.
Some have expressed hope that detailed 3D maps of Notre Dame created in recent years by academics such the late US art historian Andrew Tallon, who used laser scanners to create a model of the building accurate to with five millimetres, could help – as could similar near-perfect computer models generated for video games such as Assassin’s Creed Unity, which is set in Paris.
But Patrick Palem, a former chief executive of Socra, a restoration company, estimated the total length of the project at between 15 and 20 years, while Stéphane Bern, a TV presenter and the government’s heritage representative, put it at 10 to 20 years. “It will be rebuilt for future generations,” Bern said.
Much would depend on the choices made by the architects, other experts said. François Janneau, one of 40 state architects responsible for France’s major monuments, said Nantes Cathedral, devastated by fire in 1972, was partly reopened three years later, though its timber roof beams were replaced with concrete.
Notre Dame: experts assess damage after fire extinguished - live updatesNotre Dame: experts assess damage after fire extinguished - live updates
The French president, Emmanuel Macron, vowed on Monday night that the monument would be rebuilt after its spire and roof collapsed in the blaze, thought to be linked to extensive renovation work. Amid calls for the “forest” of wooden beams that made up the gutted roof frame of Notre Dame’s nave to be replaced like for like, Sylvain Charlois, of the Charlois group, France’s biggest producer of oak, said he was worried about available stocks.
The gothic edifice had been undergoing an €11m overhaul financed by the French state to repair damage inflicted over time by the weather and pollution. About 1,300 oak trees were used to construct Notre Dame’s roof, Charlois said. “To constitute a big enough stock of oak logs of that quality will take several years.” He called on France’s timber merchants to make donations in kind.
The mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, said the city would make €50m available and would propose holding an international donors’ conference in the coming weeks to coordinate the pledges to restore the building. The Île-de-France region, comprising the greater Paris area, is to provide a further €10m. Jack Lang, who was culture minister under François Mitterrand, said talk of a decade or more of rebuilding was “a joke. We have to do the same thing as Strasbourg here, not in 10-15 years but three years. You have to set a short deadline.”
The privately run French Heritage Foundation has launched a call for donations.
Specialised craftsmen and rare materials are expected to be needed to restore the monument, which welcomes more than 13 million visitors each year – an average of more than 35,000 people a day.
The head of a French lumber company told FranceInfo radio it was ready to offer the best oak beams available to rebuild the intricate lattice that supported the destroyed roof, known as the “forest”.
“The work will surely take years, decades even, but it will require thousands of cubic metres of wood. We’ll have to find the best specimens, with large diameters,” Sylvain Charlois of the Charlois group in Murlin, central France, told the radio station.
The UN’s Paris-based cultural agency Unesco has also promised to stand “at France’s side” to restore the site, which it declared a world heritage site in 1991.
“We are already in contact with experts and ready to dispatch an urgent mission to evaluate the damage, save what can be saved and start elaborating measures for the short- and medium-term,” Unesco’s secretary general, Audrey Azoulay, said Tuesday.
The renovation work is likely to cost hundreds of millions of euros over several years, if not decades, though experts said the damage could have been even worse.
Officials urged the government to quickly mobilise the resources to restore the cathedral. “Since yesterday I’ve been hearing that it will take a decade, what nonsense,” the former culture minister Jack Lang said on Tuesday.
He called for an ambitious three-year project to rebuild the destroyed roof and its towering spire, which collapsed as a burning ember around two hours after the blaze erupted.
“You have to set a short deadline, as we’ve done in the past with other exceptional works,” he said.
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