“Notre-Dame’s exterior will be covered in scaffolding for two to three more years, especially the chapel, behind the cathedral’s choir,” said Sylvie Bretones, executive director of the Fondation Notre-Dame, one of the entities authorised to collect funds for the cathedral’s restoration. This “phase 3” of restoration will be financed by surplus donations collected after the April 15, 2019 fire which ravaged the cathedral’s roof and toppled its spire.
In the wake of the fire, President Emmanuel Macron vowed the masterpiece of Gothic architecture would be fully restored. He launched a national fundraising campaign and set the ambitious goal of restoring the cathedral in five years. The campaign was wildly successful, garnering €846 million in donations after the catastrophe.
Amid the outpouring of support for the historic building, donations came from everywhere from the United States to Saudi Arabia, and from very wealthy figures and more modest individuals. The money was collected by four organisations: the Fondation du patrimoine (Patrimony foundation), the Fondation Notre-Dame (Notre-Dame Foundation), the Fondation de France (France Foundation) and the Centre des monuments nationaux (Centre for national monuments). The project itself was of such magnitude that a public institution Rebâtir Notre-Dame de Paris (Rebuild Notre-Dame) was founded to manage the reconstruction.
Roughly €700 million has been spent on reconstruction. There were “two initial phases: securing the cathedral to avoid its collapse after the fire, and the restoration itself”, special presidential adviser Philippe Bélaval said during a mid-November press conference on the reopening of Notre-Dame.
‘Weakened’ flying buttresses
The leftover funds worth €140 million euros, “will be spent on a Phase 3 of a restoration of the façades, the roof of the sacristy, as well as the flying buttresses and the choir”, Bélaval said.
“Sculptures and decorative features eroded over the years by the Parisian environment”, are also concerned, Rebuilding Notre-Dame president Philippe Jost said in an interview with French television station BFMTV.
WatchThe renaissance of Notre-Dame Cathedral: Behind the scenes of a monumental restoration
The cathedral’s reopening on December 8 will be the culmination of the titanic restoration project, but it doesn’t mean construction work on the cathedral is over. Set for January 2025, “Phase 3” was programmed even before the fire, Bélaval said. Yet it took on another dimension after the disaster, which “weakened” the entire structure.
Notre-Dame was already in a critical state before the fire. According to Bélaval, the flying buttresses of the choir, “which are extremely important in forming the silhouette of the cathedral”, are “weakened … They were already fragile before the fire, and their reinforcement was part of the work the previous president of the republic had ordered. It was this work – consolidating the scaffolding around the spire – which probably caused the fire,” Bélaval said.
A new 2025 fundraising campaign
The surplus funds will thus be used to support vital future preservation work for Notre-Dame. The colossal amount had led some to imagine putting the money to different use. Some of the funds could be devoted to the restoration of some 60 communal cathedrals in France as well as other works of religious heritage, Édouard de Lamaze, the president of the Observatoire du Patrimoine Religieux (Observatory for Religious Heritage Protection), suggested.
Yet a law passed in July 2019 stipulated that the money collected through the national fundraising campaign can only be used to finance conservation and restoration work on Notre-Dame.
“Even if other needs exist in terms of restoration and preservation, it is really fundamental for us to respect the intention of donors. When someone donates for the restoration of Notre-Dame, they are not giving it for a cathedral in another city,” Bretones said.
According to the Notre-Dame Foundation, the remaining funds of over 140 million come from major benefactors including François Pinault, Bernard Arnault, L’Oréal, the Bettencourt Schueller Foundation and the TotalEnergies Foundation, “who agreed for their donations to be used for Phase 3”.
The charity, which was already collecting donations for Notre-Dame before the fire, plans to launch a new fundraising campaign in 2025 to finance the renovation of the exteriors of the sacristy and the presbytery. Additional works are also necessary, and their costs are still being estimated.
This article was translated from the original in French by Sonya Ciesnik.
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