People come to Reims for Champagne; they often stay for the cathedral of Notre-Dame. A masterpiece of High Gothic, begun in 1211 on the ruins of a building destroyed by fire, it was raised in a little under a century, which gives it a rare unity of style. Its west front is a picture book in stone: it carries more than two thousand three hundred statues.
The Smiling Angel
Among all these figures, one has become the face of the city: the Smiling Angel, on the north portal. Beheaded by the fire of September 1914, when German shelling set the roof timbers ablaze, it was restored and put back in place in 1926. Its almost mischievous smile has since stood for Reims wounded and then raised up again.
Ancient light and Chagall windows
Inside, the nave rises to thirty-eight metres. The cathedral blends eras: medieval glass, a great 13th-century rose window, but also contemporary work. In the late 1960s and the 1970s Marc Chagall designed the deep-blue windows of the axial chapel; other bays were more recently entrusted to the German artist Imi Knoebel, a gesture of reconciliation between the two countries.
Burnt in 1914, raised again in 1938
On 19 September 1914, German incendiary shells set alight the scaffolding around the west front, then the roof timbers. The lead of the roofs melted and ran out through the gargoyles; the “forest” of wood that carried the roof was gone within hours. For four years the cathedral stayed under fire, within artillery range of the front line.
The rebuilding, backed in part by the American Rockefeller foundation, was finished in 1938, the year of the reopening. The new roof frame was cast in reinforced concrete, invisible from the nave. It is this story that the Smiling Angel came to stand for: its head broken off by the fire, it was back in place, still smiling, in 1926. The cathedral had barely reopened when another war loomed; this time it came through without major damage.
A shared listing
Since 1991, UNESCO has listed as World Heritage a group of three Reims monuments: the cathedral, the former archbishop’s Palace of Tau (now the museum of the coronation) and the Basilica of Saint-Remi with its museum. The basilica, Romanesque and far longer than the cathedral, stands in the Saint-Remi quarter, south of the centre: the contrast between its warm gloom and the soaring light of the cathedral is worth the walk on its own.
Allow about an hour for the cathedral, more if you climb the towers (guided visit, by reservation, from April to November). Entry to the building itself is free.
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Photo : Ludovic Péron — CC BY-SA 3.0 · Wikimedia Commons