Notre-Dame Cathedral to reopen after 2019 fire. It's not the first time it needed saving

This weekend's reopening of the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris is the culmination of a repair and restoration effort more than five years after it was gutted by a catastrophic fire.

Notre-Dame is one of the Western world's most recognizable and beloved buildings — but it hasn't always been that way. After the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars at the turn of the 18th century, it was in such a state of disrepair that Paris officials considered demolishing it. 

According to historian Bradley Stephens, it was author Victor Hugo who helped restore both its structure and reputation with his 1831 novel Notre-Dame de Paris — better known by some by its original English title, The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

"Hugo was arguing that the cathedral still had huge symbolic value both for French culture, but also for French national identity," Stephens, a professor of French Literature at the University of Bristol, told CBC Radio's Day 6.

Echoes of those arguments could be found in French President Emanuel Macron's declaration immediately after the April 2019 fire devastated the cathedral, which positioned it as a nation-building exercise to unite the French people.

During the French Revolution, Notre-Dame had suffered several "mutilations," as Hugo described them. Many of its stained glass windows were smashed or stolen. The metal bells installed in its towers were melted down to be cast into cannons.

"Previously, Parisians were concerned that this cathedral had become quite ugly. You had aesthetic purists who felt that its mix of Romanesque and Gothic styles made it quite irregular, that it wasn't uniform, it wasn't in keeping with more neoclassical tastes that have been prevalent in more recent history in France," Stephens explained. 

"And Hugo says to his readers, 'No, these are the strengths of the cathedral. The cathedral's mixture of styles, the fact that it's been around for so very long testifies to a natural wonder and dynamism, and it also helps bear witness to France's changing history.'"

The novel helped galvanize the small, but growing number of people who shared Hugo's views. In the early 1840s, King Louis-Phillipe commissioned architect Eugene Viollet-le-Duc to oversee the cathedral's repair and restoration — a project that would take several decades.

Viollet-le-Duc's work remained the blueprint for the cathedral's modern restoration, including its now-iconic 19th-century spire.

"He was a genius," Philippe Villeneuve, the cathedral's chief architect since 2013, said of Viollet-le-Duc. "My role was to ensure that vision endured." 

After the fire, Macron made a decree to begin the most ambitious restoration in modern French history — to restore an edifice that took nearly 200 years to build originally, in just five years.

Villeneuve and his team installed cutting-edge fire safety systems in the cathedral to help protect it from future fires or other disasters.

The attic, now divided into three compartments — choir, transept, and nave — features advanced thermal cameras, smoke detectors, and a revolutionary water-misting system.