“Great edifices, like great mountains, are the work of the ages.”
― Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre Dame
This week we’re continuing our tribute to Notre Dame Cathedral – posted straight from Paris! Your host is currently leading a tour for this show’s #1 fan. (Hi Maman!) Keep an eye out on the show’s Facebook page for updates from the trip.
Thank you again to everyone who made a contribution on Patreon! I had to pay my income taxes last month, which meant adding up my total expenses for the podcast over the past year – it’s a lot. Your Patreon contributions are the only income I receive for the show, and thanks to your support, I don’t have to use advertising. Boo, advertising! We’ve all got Casper mattresses already, right? We fall asleep on them listening to Audible books…you get it.
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Notre Dame through the ages
Notre Dame, as viewed in the Middle Ages.
Transcript
Bienvenue and welcome back to The Land of Desire! I’m your host, Diana, and this week’s episode is coming to you from Paris! By the time you hear this, we’ll have just arrived. My mother, longtime fan of the show, has never been to Paris before, so I’m excited to show her all the places she’s come to know through previous episodes. Among other landmarks, of course, we’ll be stopping by Notre Dame, getting as close as the city will let us get to pay our respects. Though a terrible fire may have ripped through the cathedral last month, Notre Dame is still standing. And as with any medieval cathedral, Notre Dame is really a series of cathedrals, different versions stacked on top and rubbing up next to other versions of itself, a palimpsest of history. As we’re about to learn today, there IS no such thing as‘the original Notre Dame’ – and those visionaries behind her construction knew that would always be the case. Right from the start, natural disaster, political distractions and competing artistic visions meant that Notre Dame was in constant flux. The first disaster to strike the cathedral? You guessed it: a massive fire, sweeping through the carpentry in her attic, before the cathedral was even finished. But it was just part of the process, the eternal life of a cathedral, and it wasn’t long until progress continued.
Last week, we learned about Louis VII, failed crusader, ex-wife of Eleanor of Aquitaine, heirless King of the Franks at a time when Paris was nothing more than a crowded, cramped trading post in a backwater territory. After praying hard for a son, Louis VII sought to get back into God’s good graces by building Paris the vast Gothic cathedral she deserved. The offering worked, and within two years of the first cornerstone being set at Notre Dame de Paris, Louis’s only son and heir, Philippe Auguste, arrived. Philippe Auguste would do more than any man before him to transform Paris entirely. As Notre Dame made her way into the world, so too did Paris: growing into a major center of commerce, religion and art, and the beating heart of a new nation. If the first, premodern age of Paris was one of swampy territorial squabbles, the age of Philippe Auguste was one of medieval splendor and power. Philippe Auguste would transform the physical landscape of the city, and by the time his grandson, Louis IX took over, Paris would be the center of Europe. And at the center of the center? A Gothic jewel, stretching from the rapidly changing streets of Paris towards heaven, signaling the arrival of a new, modern city, full of wealth and God’s favor: Notre Dame de Paris.
When the aging Philippe Auguste reached the end of his long and glorious reign, he spent his days in the Palais de la Cité, the royal palace of the 12th century. Back then, the royal palace sprawled across the center of the Ile de la Cité. If the king looked out the window in one direction, he could see his father’s cathedral being constructed, with multiple teams of masons building up all four corners of the cathedral at once. If he looked out another window, Philippe could see the Louvre, the old guard tower which Philippe had demolished in order to replace with a fortress guarding the Seine against the English. If he looked out another window, he could see off in the distance the massive roofs of Les Halles, the enormous marketplace he’d constructed to feed the great belly of Paris. Out yet another window, he could see the roofs of the University of Paris, sheltering anxious students and hungry, underpaid professors. Surrounding all of this, of course, Philippe could see the slithering path of his great wall, encircling the city and protecting it from outsiders. If he stood at the end of one window and squinted, depending on the quality of the air and how poorly his vision was doing at the time, Philippe could make out the road to Saint-Denis, to the great Gothic cathedral which his father Louis VII had helped open, and in which he was now buried, and in which Philippe, too, would one day join him. Looking out over the vast, sprawling landscape, there was only one thing which King Philippe Auguste could not see: an end. Over the last remarkable 43 years of his reign, Philippe inherited the Frankish lands of his father, took back the lands his father had lost to his ex-wife and her new husband, picked up new territory in the north, picked up even more new territory in the south, and consolidated all of these lands into a single, unified political entity, more powerful than any other in Western Europe: a place called France. And at the heart of this country? Paris, Philippe Auguste’s beloved home, his pet project, and his personal legacy. No other king had ever done so much for the city, loved it so well or given it so much attention. Philippe’s love affair with Paris lasted through foreign wars, a crusade in the Middle East, and fights against enemies, popes, and wives. And it all began years earlier, when Philippe was only 20 years old, only a few years into his reign, as he stood in this same royal palace and stuck his head out the window.
In 1185, Philippe was a young man fresh on the job. Having inherited the throne from Louis VII when he was just 15, Philippe nevertheless inspired confidence in those who saw him. When Louis had taken the throne, he had been a small, quiet, pious man, reeling from the loss of his brother – and the career in the church he so desired. Philippe, on the other hand, was completely different. Contemporaries described him as“a handsome, strapping fellow, bald but with a cheerful complexion, and a temperament much inclined towards good-living, wine and women. He was generous to his friends, stingy towards those who displeased him, well versed in the art of stratagem, orthodox in belief, prudent and stubborn in his resolves. He made judgements with great speed and exactitude.” He was about to make one of those quick judgements now.
Sticking his head out the window, twenty year old Philippe was assaulted – by the smells of the streets below. Thanks to the fate of Philippe Auguste’s namesake, his father’s dead brother, there were no longer any wild pigs roaming the streets of the Ile de la Cité, but otherwise the scene was unchanged except, if you can believe it, everything was even more crowded. As the great historian Alistaire Horne points out,“In a medieval Europe accustomed to evil-smelling streets, Paris had prize-winning qualities that were to endure through the ages.” He notes the sheer number of street names reflecting the horrors within: Rue Merderelle, Rue Tire-pet, Rue Fosse-aux-Chieurs, a.k.a. Crappy street, Big Fart Avenue, Dog Pit Lane, and so on. To call these little alleys‘streets’ was an overstatement. In the 12th century, most streets were simply dirt paths, in which the droppings of horses, stray animals and people made for a particularly revolting mud. Every disgusting byproduct from the butchers, the tanners, the candle makers, and more was poured into the streets and mixed into that mud. And yes, every once in awhile one of those forbidden pigs would creep back onto the island to root around and scare the bejeesus out of the royal princes. And when it rained! Heaven help you when it rained. Earlier Frankish kings didn’t always spend too much time in Paris, and who can blame them. But Philippe Auguste couldn’t ignore the nightmare going on under his very own window, and right away, he delivered one of his firm judgements: Paris, we’re going to pave your streets. And we’re going to start with MY streets, and we’re going to start now. Within his lifetime, Philippe saw the biggest streets in Paris paved with cobblestones, making transportation faster, and less deadly to the senses. It was the first of many, many practical city planning projects Philippe would execute over the course of his long reign. In Philippe, Paris finally found an advocate.
If the city of Paris found an advocate in Philippe Auguste, individual residents felt differently. Specifically, Jewish Parisians, who would end up funding the king’s vast civic improvements, whether they wanted to or not. Even in the context of medieval Europe, Philippe Auguste was awful to the Jewish communities in Paris, which had established themselves in the Ile de la Cite centuries ago. Philippe’s father, Louis VII, left the Jews on his doorstep more or less alone, and at the time of his death the Jewish community owned approximately half of the private property in Paris. Put another way, a lot of Parisians were in debt to the Jewish community. Philippe Auguste realized that seizing property from Jewish people and then kicking them out of the country entirely was a great way to fund his civic projects and get a ton of Parisians on his side by freeing them from their debts. By the end of his massive sweeps, he’d collected the equivalent of a year and a half’s government revenue from Jewish pockets. He put that stolen money to work, funding most of the big medieval projects which still survive in Paris today. As always, when you look up at a great historical monument, ask yourself: who built this? who paid for it?
Which brings us to back to the construction site of Notre Dame. I’ve heard a number of people muttering in recent weeks about the building process, that the men who built Notre Dame were underpaid, injured and killed to make Notre Dame Cathedral. I cannot emphasize this enough: it was the 12th century. Literally every possible vocation was underpaid and dangerous. We are talking about a time when the heir to the throne was killed by a poop-covered pig. Life was hard, and brutish, and short, and working on the cathedral had much more to recommend it than other occupations at the time, not least of which was a promise of grace to a lot of people who believed in the holiness of their task. Although money plundered from Jewish moneylenders by the king contributed a lot of the funding for Notre Dame, by no means did it contribute all of it. Great Gothic cathedrals were often funded by small donations from individuals and local groups looking for good PR. As one contemporary put it,“The cathedral of Paris was largely built with the farthings of old women.” Trade guilds would often band together to raise money amongst themselves – both to ensure blessings from God and get an advertisement on the wall of the hottest building in town. Everybody wanted in on the action – and I do mean everybody: apparently the prostitutes’ guild offered to pay for a window. The church officials were glad to take the money, but that was it. A shame, really. I’d give a lot to see THAT stained glass.
By the time Philippe Auguste ascended to the throne in 1180, the cathedral in progress was spreading its footprint across the Ile de France. First, Bishop Sully created an entirely new street, Rue Neuve-Notre-Dame to accommodate the enormous loads of material being dragged into the middle of the crowded medieval maze. To start, there was all that rock: the precious Parisian limestone which makes up Notre Dame Cathedral, the Louvre, and all the grand, pale Haussmann buildings which line Paris’s massive streets. All that limestone had to be dug up from quarries. We last discussed the limestone quarries in episode 21,“The Road to Hell”. You may remember, the limestone quarries underneath the city streets began collapsing in the 18th century, most memorably when a giant sinkhole sucked a few Parisians below the unfortunately, but appropriately named, Rue d’Enfer, or‘Road to Hell’. The very same excavation process which would one day send so many Parisians down into Hell was the process which would raise up the world’s most famous temple to heaven. The men digging limestone out of the earth were usually the lowest-skilled and lowest-paid workers, but it’s worth noting that they were paid. Once the limestone was dragged up from below, it was loaded onto boats and floated down the Seine, so famous for its ability to carry heavily laden vessels. Eventually the rock rolled off the Seine and down the Rue Neuve-Notre-Dame where was redistributed to whichever portion of the cathedral was going up at that time. There, the limestone would be hauled onto wheels or cranes resting on the ground. The masons would go up, up, up with the stone and a lot of mortar, to glue everything in place. Most importantly, however, the stone masons added that wondrous new innovation: the flying buttress.
Though perhaps the most famous architectural feature of Notre Dame, we don’t know whether they were part of the original design. Timelines get muddy in the 12th century, and flying buttresses were so innovative, so avant garde that it’s hard to know whether the buttresses were intended from the start or whether one of the early master architects saw an example, lost his mind, and rethought the whole cathedral. Those lovely swooping stone wings coming out of Notre Dame don’t just give a grand dramatic effect: they transfer the weight of those heavy stone walls, so that instead of squishing on one another, like the unluckiest cheerleader at the bottom of the human pyramid, the weight gets transferred into the ground. All of a sudden, to the medieval imagination, the sky’s the limit. Flying buttresses allowed the walls to climb so high that Notre Dame de Paris remained the tallest building in Paris until the Eiffel Tower was built half a millennia later. So much more space for windows and all that heavenly light to come in!
When Philippe took the throne, the walls of the choir of Notre Dame were just about finished, and the first official masses were taking place in the new cathedral. Work was about to begin on the transept and the nave of the church. If you’re like me and you have no idea what that meant, remember that from above a cathedral looks like a giant cross. The transept is the part that looks like arms, the short segment that intersects the long segment and sticks out on both sides. The nave is the main part of the cathedral, the spot where most people sit down. By the time Philippe became king, the general floor plan of Notre Dame was finished, the walls were raised high, and it was time for the masons of Paris to step back and make way for the next group of master builders: the carpenters.
As one enthusiastic historian of oak trees – bless his heart – explains:“The roof of any building[in the European Middle Ages] was a carpenter’s test and the place he could best show his imaginative understanding of invisible forces. Composed of rafters, collars, purlins and tiles, the roof was usually the heaviest part of the building not pegged directly to the ground. It exerted the strongest forces, both straight down and outward. And it was always the part most exposed to wind and storm…As buildings grew in size, the knowledge necessary to keep them standing became more crucial and more difficult.” In other words, when a building is wider than the height of a single tree, how do you knit wood? And it gets harder: you can’t leave the wooden rafters exposed to rain and lightning. Bishop Sully left money in his will for lead tiles that would line the roof. Lead was considered the perfect roof material, if you could afford it, since lead didn’t erode very quickly, and it didn’t burn. The problem was, lead was heavy. By the time the cathedral was finished, Bishop Sully’s lead roof tiles would weigh half a million pounds. How could you possibly support such a structure?
You start with a lot of trees. This would require not only carpenters, but farmers and 12th century lumberjacks. As it turned out, Europeans in the 12th century felt squeezed in. Sure, the city centers were cramped and full of thousands of people, pushcarts and pigs, but most Europeans still lived off the land – and the land was running out. Between the years 1000 and 1300 – roughly the span of time between Anna of Kiev’s arrival and the completion of Notre Dame – the population of Europe doubled. French soil needed to support more French people, and medieval mindsets held that forests were a waste of good land. As on 14th century poet wrote,“Day by day they kept forcing the woodland to creep further up the hillside, surrendering the lower reaches to tillage.” Forests weren’t seen as beautiful refuges of nature: they were scary places full of wild animals, and God had commanded man to tame the wilderness. Modern scientists estimate that in the year 500, approximately 50% of the useful soil in France was covered by forests. By the time Anna arrived, only 39% of the useful soil was forested. And by the time Notre Dame finished? A mere 16% of the arable soil in France was still covered by forests. A good percentage of those trees ended up in Notre Dame herself. As soon as construction began, the order went out to the woodlands: trees, as many as you can, as quickly as you can. Within ten years, France had felled over 13,000 enormous oak trees, each one about 300-400 years old, just for the cathedral. Each beam in the cathedral’s roof was carved from a single, individual tree, and it didn’t take long for the vast entanglement to earn a fitting nickname:“the forest”. But the people of medieval France were right about one thing: the forest was dangerous – these wooden cathedral attics caught fire regularly. The cathedrals of Orleans and Vezelay had already burned spectacularly, though those were nothing compared to the cathedral of Mainz, in Germany, when the candles for the dedication ceremony burned the cathedral to the ground on its opening day. So it was with a resigned sigh, I assume, that the masons and carpenters came to work one morning around 1200 to find that the magnificent forest of Notre Dame Cathedral caught fire. With a“what can you do?” attitude, they went right to work salvaging as many rafters as they could, signaling to the countryside that they could use even more of those trees. Within Philippe’s lifetime, the forest of Notre Dame was entirely rebuilt, and the first crisis of her long lifespan had passed.
Over the course of 40 years, Notre Dame had risen amidst a Paris undergoing dramatic changes, visible in every direction. The Paris whose smells had so assaulted a young King Philippe was unrecognizable, replaced with a city twice as big, surrounded by an enormous wall, filled with marketplaces, a university, courts, palaces, fortresses and, at last, a magnificent cathedral. When Philippe’s great-grandmother arrived so many centuries ago, Paris had been nothing more than the struggling central village of a swampy backwater, a handy port surrounded by millions of acres of forests, filled with yokels, murderous pigs, and an ancient, crumbling church. By the time Philippe passed away in 1223, he had built Paris into a modern, vibrant city, central to the political framework of Europe. At its heart was a new cathedral, an awe-inspiring, Gothic masterpiece drawing the power of both church and state to its front steps. 700 years later, a new generation of city planners installed a plaque in front of the doors to Notre Dame. The plaque marked the starting point for any measurements of distance within French borders: Kilometre Zero. Nearly a millennia after its completion, Notre Dame Cathedral was still the center of France herself.
Thanks for listening to The Land of Desire! I’ve got to go now, so I can lead my mom a few blocks down the street to the center of the center, the heart of Paris, Notre Dame. Keep an eye on the show’s Facebook page, where I’ll be sharing some photos from our travels. When we’re back home, I’ll continue this series with the story of Philippe Auguste’s grandson, Louis IX, who would lead Paris through a golden century of learning, wealth and innovation – right before disaster struck. Notre Dame would be, as always, at the heart of it all: providing inspiration, common ground, and eventually, comfort in a time of grief. As we’ll discuss next time, Notre Dame has always been there for the city when the city needed her, and today, we’ll be there for her. Thanks for listening to this very special Parisian dispatch of The Land of Desire, and until next time – au revoir!
Further Reading
This series gave me an excuse to pick up my favorite single volume history of Paris, Alistair Horne’s The Seven Ages of Paris. I first read this book at 19. Like the Hermione Granger that I am, I figured how better to prepare for moving abroad than studying? This book helped me understand how to move through an ancient city properly, and it’s still my #1 recommendation when anyone asks for a book to read before visiting Paris for the first time.
Also, duh, it’s time to re-read Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame if you haven’t done so already. It’s dramatic! It’s outrageous! It’s really a lot more medieval architectural history than you were expecting! It’s the reason we have any Notre Dame at all and not a Haussmann apartment block!
Building A Cathedral, Nicolas Kemper – I was halfway through the script when this essay was published. It’s startling how much it crystallizes exactly what I was struggling to say! A tremendous essay and one I hope I can pay reasonable tribute to.
