A few fatal sparks burst forth in the attic of Chartres Cathedral, at the start of the afternoon of Saturday, June 4, 1836. Escaped from the stove of the plumbers who had come to weld in the heights of the monument, these flaming butterflies were enough to provoke a great fire which will devour the cover of the building.
The fiery devastation consumes the frame and lead roof of Chartres Cathedral, ravaging the interior of the two towers and carrying their bells.
Barely saved, on the morning of June 5, by the tireless action of the firefighters and residents, the smoking ruin of what then remains of the Gothic monument arouses a stir and a shared emotion.
And an immediate consensus: restore Notre-Dame de Chartres to its dignity.
How to go about it ?
183 years before the Notre-Dame de Paris fire, the same questions are already being asked as those we have seen germinate in recent years.
Should we rebuild identically?
What place should be given to modernity within this building inherited from the past?
Should we soberly "
adapt to the techniques and challenges of the time
", as Edouard Philippe mentioned, or even consider "
a contemporary architectural gesture
", as Emmanuel Macron once proposed?
Less controversial than the current Parisian construction site, the one that opened in 1836 around Chartres cathedral crystallizes several conceptions of the restoration of ancient monuments, at a time when French heritage awareness was being formulated.
Read also: Inventory of French heritage ravaged by flames over the past twenty-five years
In Paris, the Minister of Justice and Worship Paul Jean Pierre Sauzet was fired on June 5, 1836 from the Hôtel de Bourvallais by the prefect of Eure-et-Loir Gabriel Delessert.
This is not just a monumental emergency, but a matter of state.
At that time, since the Revolution and the establishment of the Concordat regime, cathedrals no longer belong to the Church, but to the State which owns them.
It is therefore up to him to straighten and restore this Gothic building which, patiently built between 1134 and 1260, had fallen under the Consulate in the purse of public services.
Rebuild, okay.
But how ?
Was it necessary to work in the old fashioned way, by renewing the marriage of lead and white oak?
Or, on the contrary, to tap into the amenities and assurances of modernity?
Anonymous,
Chartres Cathedral after the fire of 1836
, 1836, drawing, 36.5 x 42.5 cm, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Chartres.
The drawing depicts, from along the Eure, the cathedral without its cover, following the disaster.
Chartres Museum of Fine Arts
“
There was no debate on the frame: we immediately made the choice of a non-combustible material
,” says Juliette Clément.
Publishing director of the Archaeological Society of Eure-et-Loir, Chartraine has examined the reports and bills relating to the reconstruction of Notre-Dame de Chartres.
Responsible for the reconstruction of the cathedral, the former inspector general of historical monuments Ludovic Vitet, then deputy and rapporteur of the commission in charge of the works, opens the way and the credits for the restoration of the building.
Advised by the locksmith-entrepreneur Mignon - a familiar with the Royal House who had worked in the attic of the Battles gallery of the Palace of Versailles -, Ludovic Vitet allocated in two stages nearly 1.5 million francs for the construction of a metal frame and a roof in copper plates;
modern, solid materials with their own aesthetic qualities.
The time, it is true, lends itself very well to these innovations.
Read also: Notre-Dame de Paris, by Victor Hugo: when writing becomes architecture
The fire at Chartres Cathedral took place in the heart of the July monarchy, while the industrial revolution set off at full steam across France, sowing factory chimneys in the land of cathedrals.
Iron production, which increased tenfold in France from the 1820s onwards, was found in the metal roofs of buildings such as theaters or buildings of power such as the Palais-Royal and the Chamber of Deputies.
At the same time, a heritage revolution began to take shape in France.
In the early 1830s, two schools of thought became involved, agreed and - sometimes - opposed on the emerging question of the safeguard of built heritage.
A balance had to be created between modernity - the State - and heritage conservation, the local level
Jean = Michel Leniaud, architectural historian and director of studies at the Practical School of Advanced Studies
On the one hand, supported by rapidly expanding learned societies, committed personalities - Napoleon Didron, Arcisse de Caumont, Charles de Montalembert, Victor Hugo - take up the cause for respect for architectural and regional traditions;
on the other, several state actors, in the wake of the Inspectorate General of Historical Monuments founded in 1830 by François Guizot, advocate a centralizing vision of heritage.
Guizot, in particular, asks Ludovic Vitet and then Prosper Mérimée to find a happy medium.
"
It was necessary to create a balance between modernity - the State - and the conservation of heritage, the local level
", explains the historian of architecture and director of studies at the Practical School of Advanced Studies Jean-Michel Leniaud .
However, if all the actors agree on the need to save the heritage - medieval preferably, and Gothic moreover - they differ on their conception and the methods of the restoration of the monuments.
Notre-Dame de Chartres in 1830, under the brush of Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot (detail) and today: the lead roof.
Bridgeman Images / Leemage / / DeNoyelle / Godong / Leemage / Fred de Noyelle / GODONG
In both cases, one point is not the subject of any debate: we must rebuild, rather than simply put in safety.
If the choice of iron is essential, it is because it constitutes a material as modern as it has been tested throughout the Restoration.
In sacred architecture alone, before the fire in Chartres in 1836, several projects, completed or in progress, offer eloquent examples of the use of new industrial materials.
"
We already have a certain number of experts who have produced various metal roofs here and there
", indicates Jean-Michel Leniaud.
A pioneer in the field, the architect Jean-Antoine Alavoine worked, from 1824, to build a monumental cast iron spire for the cathedral of Rouen, after having adorned Notre-Dame de Sées with iron.
And in Paris, the metal roofs of the Church of the Madeleine serve as a benchmark in the estimation of the price of the iron roofing planned for the cathedral of Chartres.
Read also: Notre-Dame de Paris: the spire should be rebuilt identically
But this modernity of the industrial era is not unanimously accepted.
In his text
Du vandalisme et du catholicisme en art, which
he published in 1833 in
La Revue des Deux Mondes
,
Charles de Montalembert virulently scolded, in the wake
of Victor Hugo's
War on the Demolishers
, the “
restorative vandalism
” of the work carried out in his time, assimilated to a debasement of the cathedrals and of the Christian art of the Middle Ages, this art "
above all Catholic
".
One of the counter-examples cited by Montalembert in his libel is precisely the Church of the Madeleine, mentioned in the preparatory work for the restoration of the cathedral of Chartres, which the pamphleteer designates with the gloomy qualifier of “
shapeless mass
”.
Political master builder of the Chartres cathedral construction site, Ludovic Vitet is reassuring: "
The first merit of a restoration is to go unnoticed
", he says.
1/3 - The metal frame of Chartres Cathedral, made in 1837-1841, and the medieval oak frame of Notre Dame de Paris, which has now disappeared.
City of Chartres / Artedia / Leemage / Pascal Lemaitre
2/3 - The metal frame of Chartres Cathedral, made in 1837-1841, and the medieval oak frame of Notre Dame de Paris, which has now disappeared.
City of Chartres / Artedia / Leemage / Pascal Lemaitre
3/3 - The metal frame of Chartres Cathedral, made in 1837-1841, and the medieval oak frame of Notre Dame de Paris, which has now disappeared.
City of Chartres / Artedia / Leemage / Pascal Lemaitre
To guard against any criticism, he sweeps the track with a wooden frame covered with lead or tiles, invoking the "
incombustible
"
virtue
- at least one imagined at the time - of the iron frame: not worth is it better not, in fact, to prefer a modern and solid substitute for the authentic but fallible material of origin?
This issue and this constraint underline a cautious position, which is still very topical in the case of Notre-Dame de Paris, as was moved in July 2020 by the medievalist Julien Le Mauff, in an article published in
Le World.
"
Reconstructing the wooden frame would be a choice unrelated to the sole mission of such a site: to protect the heritage, that is to say everything that was not destroyed by the previous disaster
," he warns.
The wood would perpetuate the major risk of seeing the cathedral burn down, this time perhaps without reprieve
”.
Read also: After the fire at Nantes cathedral, concerns about the condition and safety of churches
The project validated in Paris, the management of the site is entrusted, in Chartres, to Claude Jean Accary, known as Baron, enigmatic departmental architect, and perhaps a former pupil of François Debret, the restorer of the basilica of Saint-Denis under the Restoration.
“
We hardly speak of him in the stories.
He was a talented person and a very powerful worker, even if what he proposed was supervised from Paris
, underlines Juliette Clément.
One wonders if it is good enough, if it is up to a great historical monument.
There are a lot of controls.
"
A technological and aesthetic success
From the drawings sent to him by the locksmith Mignon, Ledit Baron began preparing his first metal frame projects in August 1836.
The architect was assisted by another locksmith, Fauconnier - with whom he refined his structural projects during the fall-winter 1836-1837 - as well as by the engineer and industrialist Émile Martin who supplied the cast iron site since his Fourchambault foundry, in Nièvre.
The first months following the fire of June 1836 were thus devoted to clearing work and the installation of temporary structures, a covering of planks then a concrete liner.
The actual restoration began in 1837 and was carried out with a bang, both in Chartres and in Paris.
Three test farms are thus carried out in the capital by the locksmith Mignon, in charge of the metal carpentry.
"
Everything is done in Paris and sent directly to Chartres
", by convoy, specifies Juliette Clément.
Chartres Cathedral seen from Place Châtelet
, positive print by Henri le Secq des Tournelles, 1852, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Chartres.
The photograph dates from the work carried out by Jean-Baptiste Lassus, 16 years after the fire of 1836. Musée des Beaux-Arts de Chartres
Made of rolled cast iron with wrought iron rafters, the metal roofs form a solid frame that is covered with laminated copper plates, preferred to zinc.
The installation of these copper blades was supervised from 1838 by the Parisian boilermaker Pierre-Antoine-Théodore Quénéhen.
The bells which had been melted in 1836 were rebuilt in 1840 and, from 1841, the work of the frame was in turn completed, only four years after the start of the work, and five years after the fire.
An incredible speed, industrial indeed, which testifies to a great mastery of the techniques employed.
As stated by Sayuri Kawase, guest researcher at the University of Tours who has just defended a thesis on the metal frames of 19th century cathedrals, “
the metal frame of Chartres Cathedral is a beautiful fruit of effort and development. 'ingenuity of several protagonists such as Fauconnier, Baron, Mignon and Martin
”.
“
It was very, very well designed
, abounds Jean-Michel Leniaud.
It is in perfect condition.
This restoration is the general admiration: it is a technological and aesthetic success.
"
Read also: Notre-Dame de Paris: Emmanuel Macron visits the site Thursday, two years after the fire
A landmark modernity
However, the work carried out hardly impresses the most skeptical of contemporaries.
Victor Hugo had grown weary of it in advance during a visit he made to Chartres in June 1836: "
We will make an iron roof, sad expedient, which, fortunately at least, will not be seen from the outside as this. deplorable Rouen steeple
, ”he lamented, not without throwing a pike at the metal work of Jean-Antoine Alavoine.
As Sayuri Kawase indicates in the summary of his thesis, the metal frame project developed in Chartres nevertheless "
exerted a considerable influence on the later frames of medieval monuments during the 19th century
".
It thus finds an echo in François Debret who, at the basilica of Saint-Denis where he has worked since 1813, was inspired by the metallurgical work of Chartres to create an iron and copper roof from 1844.
“
An examination of the attitude of diocesan architects during the restoration of frames in medieval monuments during the 19th century also confirms that most of them did not hesitate to replace wood with metal
,” notes Sayuri Kawase.
Their attitude shows that with regard to the restoration of the roof frames, they did not condemn the change of materials
. "
Detail of the copper cover of Notre-Dame de Chartres, as it appears today.
Juliette Clement
Despite the practical fortune of this modern solution, the emergence in the 1840s of a new generation of architects championed by Mérimée sounded the death knell for what Jean-Michel Leniaud called "
the phase of monumental restoration of the nineteenth century which corresponds to the industrial revolution
”.
Around Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Lassus and Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, a neo-Gothic vision of architecture emerges, which no longer focuses on the technological means of their time but on the use of traditional materials and ancient techniques.
Appointed diocesan architect in Chartres in 1848, Jean-Baptiste Lassus hardly tasted the nature of the work carried out by his predecessor;
if he spared a new large building site to the frame, he nevertheless replaced the system of cast iron gutters by gargoyles.
A fairly modest denial in view of the extensive work carried out by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc at the basilica of Saint-Denis, which takes over or even eliminates the restorations by François Debret.
"The
whole of the July monarchy consisted of trying to unify the body politic around the national past while guaranteeing a lot of modernity
", observes Jean-Michel Leniaud.
This compromise shattered in 1848.
Read also: François Debret, the architect who made his artistic revolution in Saint-Denis
Proof, if necessary, that architecture is a living science, different currents made school in the decades which followed the completion of the works of Chartres, from the neo-Gothic radiant of the Second Empire to the Ruskinian thought of the end of the century, passing by the contemporary fashion of concrete and, perhaps, the new turning point in wood.
"
Restoring the wooden frame of Notre-Dame de Paris
is a real turning point in monumental history
," says Jean-Michel Leniaud.
We are in a new phase: there are still 40 years we would have aggressively promoted concrete;
this is what we used
in Nantes
, at the Parliament of Rennes… It is an important revolution in the history of restoration.
»Amid the renewals of the discipline and a good distance from the virulent debates which still animate the construction site of Notre-Dame de Paris, the metal framework of the cathedral of Chartres remains largely intact and virtually unchanged since 1841, a testimony soon to be bicentennial of the solid restoration of which it was the object.
“
The roof hasn't collapsed, it's a beautiful green;
it all holds up
, ”Juliette Clément cheerfully remarks.
Renovated wonderfully until today, Notre-Dame de Chartres will undoubtedly still stand for a long time, in the landscape of Eure-et-Loir, its proud silhouette so skilfully built.