What happened to Notre-Dame in 2019?

On the evening of 15 April 2019, fire broke out in the roof of Notre-Dame. It burned away the medieval oak frame above the stone vaults and brought the spire down through the vault into the church. Firefighters saved the towers and the building, nobody died, and the Crown of Thorns was carried out. After five years of rebuilding to the old design, the cathedral reopened on 7 December 2024.

The alarm sounded at 6.18, but its code was read wrongly and a guard went to the sacristy instead of the attic of the nave. Almost thirty minutes passed before anyone found the mistake, and by then the roof frame was alight: a lattice of beams so dense it was called the forest, cut from about a thousand oaks between 1220 and 1240. At 7.50 the spire fell. What lit the fire has never been settled. Investigators found no sign of arson, and the two theories are a cigarette and an electrical fault.

The night turned on the north tower. General Jean-Claude Gallet, commander of the Paris fire brigade, had already let the roof go to concentrate on the towers. Soon after nine the flames reached the north belfry, where eight bells hung on wooden beams. Had the beams given way, the falling bells could have wrecked the tower, and the firefighters feared the cathedral would be lost.

It could only be fought from inside. Paris firefighters are soldiers, and around 9.30 Gallet told his deputy they risked the deaths of twenty to fifty men, a risk for the President, as head of the armed forces, to accept or refuse. By Gallet's account, Emmanuel Macron replied: "OK, go ahead, General. We trust you."

At that point, it was clear that some firefighters were going to go into the cathedral without knowing if they would come back out.

About twenty climbed the tower with hoses, one team forcing a gate on the way. Gallet said it was settled in a quarter of an hour, as the flames in the belfry sank and went out. At 10.50 he declared the towers saved. The fire burned for fifteen hours, and one firefighter and two police officers were hurt.

Laurent Prades, the cathedral's general manager, went in wearing town shoes and a firefighter's helmet. Under a slow rain of glowing sparks that he likened to snowflakes, he slipped the Nail of the Passion, another relic, into his parka pocket and walked out with the Crown of Thorns under his arm. Fifty-six objects came out that night.

The roof could be rebuilt exactly because two architecture students, Rémi Fromont and Cédric Trentesaux, had measured it by hand in 2014. About a thousand oaks were chosen in French woods and squared with axes, as in the Middle Ages, and France chose to rebuild the old spire rather than design a new one. At the reopening, the Archbishop of Paris knocked three times on the doors with a crozier made from a beam that survived the fire, and they opened.

Where to stand

A few steps up the left-hand aisle inside, the belfry the firefighters saved is right overhead. In the chapel behind the high altar, a cedar shrine keeps the Crown of Thorns, shown on Friday afternoons. Under the south rose window, look up at the crossing, where the spire came through. That vault was rebuilt in the last few years. Finish halfway across the Pont de l'Archevêché, behind the cathedral, facing the rebuilt spire. Its sixteen copper statues had been craned down four days before the fire.

Hear it where it happened

The Notre-Dame Cathedral tour is 11 stops, about 47 minutes of listening. Four of its stops tell this story: the north tower, the Crown, the students in the roof and the spire.

A free preview of the tour plays on this page, and your first tour in the app is free.