Notre-Dame Cathedral must reopen as planned in 2024, says Macron

Two years after the iconic Paris cathedral of Notre-Dame was partially destroyed in a huge cloud of fire and smoke, French president Emmanuel Macron has urged workers to help him hit a tough target for reopening in 2024.

“We're seeing here how, in two years, a huge job has been accomplished,” Mr Macron said as he climbed to the roof of the 13th-century edifice, now a construction site filled with scaffolding, nets and tarpaulin.

“We are also looking to the three coming years because we will have to meet our targets, and therefore there is a great mobilisation of very demanding and rigorous planning,” he told construction workers and architects.

Mr Macron is under pressure to meet an ambitious target for reopening he set in the immediate aftermath of the fire which sent shockwaves through France and the world in 2019.

He had then promised the reconstruction would be complete by the summer of 2024, when the Olympics will be hosted by the French capital. A year later, he reiterated that promise despite the coronavirus pandemic halting progress for months.

The fire also spread out large amounts of toxic lead on to Notre Dame and the surrounding area, sparking months of clean-up work before restoration efforts could start. Further delays were caused by bad weather, and officials now say the cathedral will be ready for worship on April 16, 2024, five years after the blaze, but reconstruction work, pictured below, will have to continue beyond that date.

“The goal is to celebrate a service in 2024. Which does not mean that everything will be finished, far from it,” Jean-Louis Georgelin, a former general handpicked by Mr Macron to oversee the reconstruction, told French radio.

“We will meet the deadline. We are reaching a critical point in the construction work, the end of the securing phase,” he added, although admitting it would require working at unprecedented speed.

It is unclear whether worshippers will have a roof over their heads during the planned 2024 service, or whether the cathedral will be ready to host some of the 20 million tourists it welcomed each year before the fire.

After the initial phase of preventing the building from collapsing is complete, the reconstruction work is expected to begin in late 2021. Officials say it could be another 20 years before it is fully complete.

In 2019, firemen narrowly managed to save the 600-year-old Gothic cathedral after the spire collapsed and much of the roof was destroyed.

More than 340,000 people, from the billionaire owners of French luxury brands Chanel and Dior to regular citizens from France and beyond, raised over €800 million (£694 million) after the tragedy to fund the restoration. All the funds will be needed, and the restoration team is still looking for donations, fearing they will dry out too soon.

Earlier this year, French forest experts also selected and cut down 1,000 oak trees from 200 French forests to rebuild the spire exactly as it was designed by architect Eugene Viollet-le-Duc in the 19th century.

After the fire, Mr Macron suggested the 96m (315ft) spire could be replaced since it was not a part of the original cathedral. That prompted much public debate but the president eventually said the spire would be reconstructed exactly as it was.

The causes behind the huge blaze are still unclear. The investigators do not believe it was arson, and current leads including an electrical glitch or a cigarette butt discarded by one of the construction workers involved in a previous renovation of the cathedral.

However, the size of the fire means much of the evidence police could work with went up in smoke with the building. Experts now say they may never find out what caused the inferno.