Caen, St Etienne Abbey (Norman), begun 1068
Amiens, west front, finished 1236
This is not to belittle its achievements: Paris gave Gothic the flying buttress, it developed the plan of Suger’s St Denis and paved the way for the conclusion of its logic in Bourges as well as literally reaching to new heights. In this Cathedral is frozen the spirit not only of an experimental style but of a vigorous time when a rapidly urbanising and increasingly wealthy people were pushing religious, architectural and artistic precedent to the limits of what it could offer, while rapidly innovating and attempting to synthesise it all into a complete and finalised solution. But before its final rest the church was altered by another era that was grappling with change and that found an analogy with itself in the Gothic middle-ages.
Paris, pinnacles replaced by le-Duc with these turrets
Paris, reconstructed tribune
The Cathedral slowly deteriorated until the nineteenth century, surviving an attempt to burn it down and suffering, during the revolution, the conversion into a temple of reason. In 1831, the young Victor Hugo published the hugely successful novel ‘The Hunchback of Notre Dame’ sparking a widespread interest in the fate of France’s Gothic heritage and especially Notre-Dame. Between 1845 and 1853 a thorough restoration was carried out by the famous medievalist Violletle-Duc which often included his own personal interpretation of Gothic (what can be better for a work than its constant reinterpretation? And this so fitting in built form to Notre-Dame as a catalogue of architectural experimentation). Though he often took liberties, thanks to him and around eight million Francs, Notre-Dame was saved from a dismal state of affairs (and from becoming a romantic ruin for purist architects to swoon over), and having reached the current