The people who helped bring Notre Dame back to life

This week on 60 Minutes, correspondent Bill Whitaker enters Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. After five years of painstaking work to repair and restore damage caused by a 2019 fire – and clear away decades of dirt – the cathedral is ready to reopen its doors to the public.

Once this is the case, worship at its altar may well extend to the people who made it possible.

It took hundreds of craftsmen to carry out the restoration so quickly, so carefully and so faithfully to Notre Dame’s past. On the Île de la Cité they are known as Companionsan abbreviation for Compagnons du Devoir or Companions of Duty. These workers are part of a French organization of craftsmen and artisans that dates back to the Middle Ages and keeps alive medieval skills such as stone carving and ironsmithing.

At Notre Dame, these carpenters, roofers and art restorers are guardians of history. The stained glass windows shine again. The stone walls, now freed from the soot of fire and the dirt of time, shine with new splendor. The organ has its own choir with 8,000 pipes, each freshly calibrated.

Everyone who Companions was key to Notre Dame’s revitalization before the cathedral’s doors reopen to the public this month. Some gave detailed insight into their work with Whitaker and 60 Minutes.

Marble, metal and painting

In the heart of the cathedral, just in front of Notre Dame’s main altar, 60 Minutes caught up with Olivia Salaun, who has spent most of this year painstakingly restoring an ornate marble piece called “Marquetry,” created in the 17th century.

“It’s quite rare in France to have such beautiful marble marquetry,” Salaun said in an interview with Whitaker last month.

She explained that she and other marble restorers had to wait for the scaffolding near the altar to fall before they could begin work. Therefore, they had to work quickly and complete the restoration between February and July 2024.

Salaun showed Whitaker a specific spot on the floor where a piece of marble had been chipped out. She and her colleagues carved a new piece that fit perfectly into the gap, making it look like it had always been there.

“It had to have the same rendering so the eye wouldn’t be drawn to a new marble,” Salaun told Whitaker.

This kind of attention to detail can be found throughout the restored Notre Dame – even in the part that faces the sky.

On the roof, 60 Minutes met Philomene Thivet Mazzantti, a teenager who spent parts of this year as an apprentice metalworker, helping make the lead ornamentation that now hangs on the cathedral’s roof. Mazzantti was just 12 years old when Notre Dame burned. He belongs to a generation that feels the “Notre Dame effect”: an attraction to traditional crafts and professions because of the work they see in the cathedral.

“Yes, the Notre Dame effect had a big impact on young people,” Mazzantti told 60 Minutes, explaining that she was proud of her own small role. “You tell yourself that you have left your mark on this historical monument.”

Painting restorer Diana Castillo has made her own impact on the cathedral, helping to bring Notre Dame’s masterpieces back to life. She has worked in the cathedral’s many small chapels, where murals were painted on stone walls and ceilings centuries ago. Time, soot and moisture from the water used to extinguish the flames left many paintings ashen and damaged.

In some places, restorers had to inject glue with a syringe to carefully reattach dry, peeling paint to the walls. They also had a lot of cleaning to do. To see how much, 60 Minutes compared photos Castillo took of the paintings before she and other conservators began their work to determine their incredibly vivid appearance.

Castillo emphasized that they merely cleaned the paintings and did not otherwise enhance their pigments. The true colors were vibrant in the Middle Ages, she said.

“I’m sure a lot of people will be shocked,” Castillo said.

The Renovation Story of Notre Dame

This is not the first time in its history that Notre Dame has needed major restoration.

Built in the 13th century, the cathedral was in need of restoration during the time of King Louis XIV, who began renovation work in 1699.

A few decades later, Notre Dame’s original tower was so damaged that it was removed in the late 18th century. At that time, not only the tower was in great disrepair. During the First French Revolution, rioters looted and destroyed 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 installed on the west facade, because the crowd mistakenly believed the statues represented French kings.

By the Second French Revolution of 1830, revolutionaries had damaged the cathedral so badly that Paris authorities considered demolishing the building.

Until a writer stepped in.

“Victor Hugo is the reason she’s still standing,” French journalist Agnes Poirier told 60 Minutes in early 2023.

As a politician and outstanding activist, Hugo wanted to preserve the cathedral. In a pamphlet entitled “War Against the Destroyers,” Hugo wrote: “A building has two things: its usefulness and its beauty. Its usefulness belongs to its owner, its beauty to all; to destroy it is to exceed its rights.”

After publishing his pamphlet, Hugo published his novel The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, called Notre-Dame de Paris in French, in 1831. The novel was an immediate success. Not only did it make Quasimodo famous throughout France, as illustrations of the novel’s main characters were printed in large quantities, but it also made Notre Dame Cathedral a national symbol.

In 1842, the French government decided to restore the cathedral and two years later commissioned a young architect named Eugène Viollet-le-Duc to complete the work. During his architectural training, Viollet-le-Duc traveled around France and made detailed drawings of the medieval monuments and cathedrals he saw. This background meant that when Viollet-le-Duc added a new tower to Notre-Dame in 1859, it looked as if it had originally come from the cathedral.

Viollet-le-Duc’s transformation of Notre Dame took more than two decades; The current restoration only took five years. The day after the Notre Dame fire in 2019, French President Emmanuel Macron promised that Notre Dame would be rebuilt by 2024 thanks to the tireless work of the Companions – and the thousands of donors who helped finance the restoration – Macron’s plan worked.

“That, for me, is the core of what a nation is: a group of people with the same history, the same values, the same language, who have done many great things together and are ready to do other new things together,” Macron told 60 minutes. “This is a big thing we’ve done together over the last 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.