Rouen Cathedral (photo courtesy of Deborah Cordwell)
In the late morning of Thursday, July 11th, a fire broke out in Rouen Cathedral in northern France.
The cathedral is one of the most famous in the country. Though first consecrated in the eleventh century, in the presence of the Duke of Normandy William the Conqueror, the structure was built and rebuilt over many centuries, exhibiting several styles of architecture, including Gothic, Flamboyant, Renaissance, and even nineteenth-century Gothic Revival. After the spire was reconstructed in the nineteenth century, for a few years Rouen Cathedral was the tallest building in the world. However, many criticized the architect Jean-Antoine Alavoine’s design of a cast iron spire, with the writer Gustave Flaubert calling it “the dream of a metalworker in a delirium”. The cathedral is a significant part of art history not only for its architectural significance but also as the subject of some of Claude Monet’s most famous paintings. Between 1876 and 1880, Monet executed a series of paintings showing the church at different times of day, in different weather and light. Parts of this series are now on display in museums worldwide, including the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rouen itself.
It is currently unknown how the fire started, but it initially broke out in the spire, where construction and renovation works are ongoing. Security footage shows smoke beginning to waft from the construction area at around 11:05 am. Emergency services evacuated the building and managed to prevent the fire from spreading to the rest of the church. Many people, particularly across France, may have recalled the unpleasant memories of the 2019 Notre Dame fire. One eyewitness interviewed by local television confirmed this: “The first thing we thought was what happened in Paris, it was a shock of course.” Fortunately, the Rouen fire was nowhere near as extensive as the one at Notre Dame; damage was minimal. The spire is made primarily out of cast iron, which kept the fire contained. It seems like the cast iron design so widely lambasted during its construction kept the cathedral from meeting a fate similar to Notre Dame. It was mainly the scaffolding and white construction tarp around the spire that were damaged. With the reconstruction of Notre Dame wrapping up in time for the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris, it would have been devastating to some if yet another example of French architecture were damaged or destroyed.