The people who helped resurrect Notre Dame
This week on 60 Minutes, correspondent Bill Whitaker goes inside Paris's Notre Dame Cathedral. After five years of careful work to clean and restore the damage caused by a fire in 2019 — and to wipe away decades of dirt and grime — the cathedral is again ready to open its doors to the public.
Once it does, the adoration at her altar may very well extend to the people who made it possible.
It has taken hundreds of craftspeople to pull off a restoration so fast, so meticulous, and so true to Notre Dame's past. On Île de la Cité, they are known as compagnons, a shorthand for the Compagnons du Devoir, or the Companions of Duty. These workers are part of a French organization of craftsmen and artisans that dates from the Middle Ages and keeps alive medieval skills like stone carving and iron forging.
At Notre Dame, these carpenters, roofers, and art restorers have been guardians of history. The stained-glass windows glow once again. The stone walls, now scrubbed of fire's soot and time's grime, are newly bright. The organ has its own choir of 8,000 pipes, each freshly calibrated.
Each of the compagnons has been key to resurrecting Notre Dame ahead of the cathedral's doors reopening to the public this month. A few shared an up-close look at their work with Whitaker and 60 Minutes.
Marble, metal, and painting
In the very heart of the cathedral, just in front of Notre Dame's main altar, 60 Minutes met Olivia Salaun, who has spent most of this year carefully restoring an elaborate marble piece called a "marquetry," which was created in the 17th century.
"It is quite rare in France to have such a beautiful marble marquetry," Salaun told Whitaker during an interview last month.
She explained that she and other marble restorers had to wait for scaffolding near the altar to come down before they could begin their work. As a result, they had to work quickly, completing their restoration between February and July 2024.
Salaun showed Whitaker a specific spot on the floor where a piece of marble had been knocked out. She and her colleagues carved a new piece to fit the gap perfectly and make it appear as though it had always been there.
"It had to have the same rendering so the eye would not be attracted by a new marble," Salaun told Whitaker.
This sort of meticulous attention to detail can be found everywhere in the restored Notre Dame — even the part facing the heavens.
On the roof, 60 Minutes met Philomene Thivet Mazzantti, a teenager who spent parts of this year as an apprentice metalworker, helping to make the lead ornamentation that's now atop the cathedral's roof. Just 12 years old when Notre Dame burned, Mazzantti is part of a generation feeling the "Notre Dame effect," a draw to traditional crafts and trades because of the work they're seeing at the cathedral.
"Yes, the Notre Dame effect had a lot of impact on young people," Mazzantti told 60 Minutes, explaining that she feels proud of her own small role. "You say to yourself that you left your mark on this historic monument."
Painting restorer Diana Castillo has made her own impact on the cathedral by helping to bring Notre Dame's masterpieces back to life. She has been working in the cathedral's many small chapels, where centuries ago murals were painted onto stone walls and ceilings. Time, soot, and humidity from the water used to extinguish the flames left many of the paintings ashen and damaged.
In some places, restorers had to inject glue through a syringe to carefully reattach dry, peeling paint back onto the walls. They also had a lot to clean. To see how much, 60 Minutes compared photographs Castillo took of the paintings before she and other restorers began their work to their incredibly vivid appearance now.
Castillo emphasized that they simply cleaned the paintings and did not otherwise enhance their pigments. The real colors, she said, were vibrant in the Middle Ages.
"I'm sure many people will be shocked," Castillo said.
Notre Dame's history of renovation
This is not the first time in its history that Notre Dame has needed a wholesale restoration.
Built in the 13th century, the cathedral was in need of restoration by the time of King Louis XIV, who began renovation work in 1699.
A few decades later, Notre Dame's original spire had become so damaged that it was removed in the late 1700s. At the time, the spire was not the only thing in great disrepair. During the first French Revolution, rioters looted and vandalized the cathedral after Catholic worship was banned in Paris. A mob tore down and beheaded the statues of 28 Judean kings, created in 1230 and originally placed on the west façade, because the crowd mistakenly believed the statues depicted French kings.
By the second French Revolution of 1830, revolutionaries had damaged the cathedral so badly that Parisian authorities considered demolishing the building.
That is, until a writer stepped in.
"Victor Hugo is the reason why she's still standing," French journalist Agnes Poirier told 60 Minutes in early 2023.
A politician and formidable campaigner, Hugo wanted to preserve the cathedral. In a pamphlet titled "War on the Demolishers," Hugo wrote that, "A building has two things: its use and its beauty. Its use belongs to its owner, its beauty to everyone; to destroy it is to overstep one's rights."
After releasing his pamphlet, Hugo in 1831 published his novel "The Hunchback of Notre-Dame," known as "Notre-Dame de Paris" in French. The novel was an immediate success. Not only did it make Quasimodo known throughout France, as illustrations of the novel's central characters were mass printed — but it also turned Notre Dame Cathedral into a national symbol.
By 1842, the French government decided to restore the cathedral, and two years later, they selected a young architect named Eugène Viollet-le-Duc to complete the work. During his architectural education, Viollet-le-Duc had travelled around France, making detailed drawings of the medieval monuments and cathedrals he saw. This background meant that, when Viollet-le-Duc added a new spire to Notre Dame in 1859, it looked as though it had been original to the cathedral.
Viollet-le-Duc's transformation of Notre Dame took more than two decades to complete; the current restoration took just five years. The day after Notre Dame burned in 2019, French President Emmanuel Macron pledged that Notre Dame would be rebuilt by 2024, and thanks to the tireless work of the compagnons — and the thousands of donors who helped fund the restoration — Macron's plan has come to fruition.
"This is the core of what a nation is for me: a group of people with the same history, the same values, the same language, and having done a lot of great things together and ready to do other new things together," Macron told 60 Minutes. "This is a big thing we did together during the past five years."
Photos and Videos courtesy of Diana Castillo, AFP and Getty Images
The video above was produced by Brit McCandless Farmer and edited by Scott Rosann.