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In 2019 a devastating fire consumed the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, one of the towering symbols of French identity, and it seemed that one of the greatest cultural monuments in Europe had, literally, gone up in smoke. But after only two short years, it has now been restored and John has been to see – and celebrate – the result.  

The old Notre Dame had evolved over many centuries and lived through dramatic times.  Sacked during the Revolution, it was returned to glory for Napoleon’s coronation.  John not only discusses these aspects of its history with Clive but probes the contribution of the great 19th-century restorer Eugene Violet-le-Duc, a rationalist whose approach was unlike that of his English contemporaries, John Ruskin and William Morris. Whereas the latter believed that old buildings bore witness to the lives of the masons who created them, and that every ancient stone was therefore sacred and irreplaceable, Violet-le-Duc held that a cathedral such as Notre-Dame could be returned to an ideal medieval state.  So he ruthlessly swept away later work.  Not all that he did was bad.  As Victor Hugo attests, the state of the cathedral in 1831, when The Hunchback of Notre-Dame appeared, was lamentable.  Viollet-le-Duc, working there for 20 years, put it back in shape; but much of the decoration and roofline – the spire that has fallen, for example, as well as the gargoyles and carved monsters on the roof – were his.  

Now a new layer of history has been added to the great medieval edifice. What does John make of it?