The cathedral that reopened in December 2024 is not the one that closed on the evening of 15 April 2019. It is, in several respects, a building no living person had ever seen. Visitors who knew the old Notre-Dame, dim, smoke-darkened, candle-lit, are often startled by the first impression: light.
The stone
Centuries of soot, dust and the residue of the fire itself were cleaned from the interior, and the limestone returned to something close to its original blond colour. The effect changes the architecture. Vaults that once dissolved into shadow now read clearly from the floor, and the famous rose windows, themselves cleaned and restored, hang in a much brighter frame. Some find it almost too new; we find it the closest anyone has come in centuries to what the medieval builders intended.
The roof and the spire
The nineteenth-century spire by Viollet-le-Duc, whose collapse became the defining image of the fire, was rebuilt to his exact design, and the medieval oak framework above the vaults, the structure carpenters called la forêt, was reconstructed using traditional hand techniques, with timber from some two thousand French oaks. Almost none of this is visible from inside, which is itself a very French form of perfectionism.
What is genuinely new
The restoration was also an opportunity. The liturgical furniture, altar, lectern, cathedra, is new, a sober bronze ensemble by the designer Guillaume Bardet. The Crown of Thorns, saved from the fire by the Paris fire brigade, is displayed in a new reliquary setting. The chapels along the nave were repainted, reviving decorative schemes that had gone grey under a century of grime, and a project for contemporary stained glass in some of the side chapels has been commissioned, and warmly debated, as every change to this building has been since the twelfth century.
Visiting now
Entry remains free, and a free timed reservation, booked online, is the difference between walking in and standing in line on the parvis. Mornings before ten and evenings are the calmest. Guided groups inside the cathedral are deliberately kept small, which suits us, as our own tours are private and never large. The towers reopened with a new visitor circuit and are worth the climb on a clear day.
The deeper change is harder to name. Notre-Dame was always a monument; for five years it was a wound, and a construction site watched by the whole world. Walking through it now, you are seeing the ending of that story, and the beginning of a building's next eight hundred years.