Philippe Villeneuve, the tattoed maverick whose job it's been to bring Notre-Dame back
The quasi-ecclesiastical fervour that has gripped the world's media at the sight of the cathedral remade will fade—but not for its lead architect and biggest fan
For the first in my Interviews section, I’ve decided to go with Philippe Villeneuve, whom I interviewed for a cover story for the Art Newspaper’s special Notre-Dame edition, which came out on Sunday 1 December. He, along with everyone else I spoke to, gave me far more than I could possibly use in one long read, and it was all too good to just file away.
My brilliant editors, whom I love unreservedly, picked “Out of the ashes” as the headline for my piece on the Notre-Dame restoration. As metaphors go, the phoenix-church is a keeper.
She, cette grande dame, newly coiffed and behatted, is magnificent. Laurent Ulrich, who was only named Archbishop of Paris in May 2022 and before the fire, had never paid much attention to the building, mostly remembered it as a darkened space. Visiting its newly cleaned interiors in the weeks before the opening he marvelled at its incomparable lightness and spaciousness. People who did know the cathedral well, he told Radio Notre Dame listeners, won't recognise the gleaming golden chandeliers or the 19th-century paintings in the ambulatory chapels, if only because decades of grime hid them from view. "Expect to be surprised," he said.
I’ve never actually been inside. But this Tuesday, tickets will be released for free* visits and I’m determined to get my kid** and I there on our way down to Valleraugue for Christmas.
There are countless reports detailing what happened when the flames engulfed the church on 15 April 2019, not least Joshua Hammer’s excellent exposé in GQ, which describes the “thousands of Parisians at the scene and millions watching around the world,” who '“looked on as the 680-tonne spire, made of 1,230 oak beams, blazed, teetered, snapped like a matchstick, and crashed through the roof.”
My editors gave me free reign to pull at whichever threads of what has transpired since that I found most interesting. There were so many.
I ended up writing separate pieces about the bells and about Axelle Ponsonnet’s drawings, which I’ve mentioned here before and will no doubt come back to again (look out for my interview with her in a forthcoming Guardian Saturday magazine, maybe December 14th’s?).
For the lead piece, I interviewed art historians, musicologists, sociologists and two of the three chief architects for France’s national monuments, Villeneuve and Pascal Prunet (Sadly, I didn’t get to speak with Rémi Fromont whose work on the charpente (wooden roof structure) is its whole own story, which Hammer above tells beautifully).
As Architectes en Chef des Monuments Historiques, Fromont, Prunet and Villeneuve are employed by the state and each have a number of edifices under their purview. Villeneuve was assigned to Notre-Dame in 2013, so he’s been the chief chief on the restoration chantier (construction site) from the get go. When, on the day after the fire in 2019, Emmanuel Macron said it would all be fixed in five years, Villeneuve took a beat then brought Prunet and Fromont in to help.
Of course they didn’t rebuild the cathedral all on their lonesome. It’s been a superlatively communal effort, involving hundreds of particularly dedicated craftspeople. At Villeneuve’s insistence, everyone has tutoied each other (as opposed to using the more formal vous, not a common thing in the French workplace). Go back to watch the videos on the Rebatir Notre-Dame IG account for spotlights on campanistes (bell specialists), charpentiers (carpenters) and other artisans and workers. They’ve all got this light in their eyes. Totally wonderful. See this beautiful shot of all of them, in the nave last Friday. “You did it,” Macron told them. “You managed what everyone thought impossible.” I’ve little time for political spin, but this was not that. It is literally true.
Macron has, it is clear, placed himself right bang in the middle of all of this, making it, as Villeneuve put it, the presidential chantier. Historian Maryvonne de Saint-Pulgent told me that this was, in fact, in keeping with how the French state has often, its obsequious laïcité notwithstanding, conceived of l’église mère, the mother church. In 1918, at the close of the Grande Guerre, the radically secular prime minister, Georges Clémenceau, couldn’t stomach having his ministers celebrate France's victory in the cathedral. But he did send their wives—!—along with his generals.
This is what I wanted to dig at, the politics of it all, the unexpected blurring of church and state. But also, I was fascinated by Villeneuve and his approach to protecting built heritage. His work has honoured that of his predecessor, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, who famously restored the cathedral in the 19th century, but he has also broken entirely new ground, by firmly sticking to very old ways. He has ushered in a new heritage paradigm, which he’s calling “authentic restitution”, and which mirrors in an exciting way the approach long taken in Japan to preserving cultural treasures and know-how.***
We spoke on Zoom exactly 39 days before this week’s public reopening. I’d imagined he’d be mad busy. But he wasn’t. “Bof,” was essentially his vibe.
“I’m not really counting the days anymore,” he said. “I’m not worried. We’ve time yet to sort out the little things.” He mentioned a few bits and bobs so small he didn’t even consider them real things. He said they were looking ahead to starting on the westwork after the festivities were over. You know a monument is in good hands, he said, when it is constantly the subject of careful scaffolds.
Villeneuve is a singular dude. At 61, he has a large tattoo of the church on his forearm. He also keeps the model he made of Notre-Dame when he was 16—a maquette of balsa wood and painted plexiglass with lighting and sound capability. He would do field recordings of mass being celebrated in the real church on his Walkman then re-stage the services in the maquette, using Papier d’Arménie for incense on normal Sundays, and the real stuff on high days and holidays. This passion, he said, was born when he was six years old:
“Viollet-le-Duc recounts that once when he was little, he was sitting on his nanny’s shoulders in the cathedral, looking up at the south rose window, when suddenly, the big organ went ‘bam!’ And this little kid, Viollet-le-Duc, got the fright of his life and started crying. Well, for me, it was the exact opposite. I came to the cathedral, I was there, and I fell in love.”
He’d actually asked to be taken to the cathedral because he was what we’d call a fou furieux—a stan—of organ music and, specifically, of Pierre Cochereau’s improvisations fleuves (a beautiful term, that, “river improvisations”). Cochereau was the legendary titular organist for the cathedral from 1955 to 1984. On YT you can find all kinds of recordings of sessions, private and public, that he did for visiting dignitaries, the president of France and, once, Soviet officials in the USSR. I love the thought that a six year old obsessed over this grey-haired owl with the long, long fingers who could conjure forests, cities and entire galaxies from the stacked keys at their tips. I know littles like the little boy Villeneuve was. They’re the best.
Learning all of this, of course, made sense of what I’d heard Villeneuve say early on in interviews, about how he’d died the day Notre-Dame burned. “I felt like I was in a coma,” he told me. “I couldn’t bear to watch footage of the fire, the spire collapsing, my cathedral burning up. I really couldn’t.”
When he talks about the wounds of the building being his own, you sense, beyond that incomparable gallic flair, something real. When they closed up the broken vaults, he remembered closing up the vaults on his maquette almost half a century ago and was overcome with emotion. When he stood in the newly reconstructed charpente over the choir, he says it suddenly felt as if it had all been a bad dream, from which he was now awakening, like the fire had never happened and everything was once again right with the world.
“Being the chief architect on Notre-Dame was a childhood dream. It so happens that, miraculously, it was granted to me, and then, that that dream became a nightmare. But I do not regret these five years spent working up close and down deep and in every corner of the cathedral. I don’t regret any of it. It has been demanding and exhausting but at least, I know why I was put on this earth.”
I write as much about heritage—old buildings, old rituals—as I do about contemporary art and culture and I’ve spent the weekend thinking about why that is. About what bridges them, apart from an obvious interest in, well, beauty. Looking through the extraordinary photographic collections of the Warburg Institute, and the art historian Aby Warburg’s Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, I came to think that it’s about erasure. That’s what draws me in: the loss of what is not just beautiful but meaningful to people. Whether it’s rethinking art histories in terms of all the figures so long precluded by Eurocentric neatness or contemporary state mechanisms willfully destroying things that matter to specific peoples, in a bid to contain, control or simply deny their belonging.
In 2020, director of Berlin's Haus der Kulturen der Welt Bernd Scherer characterised the Bilderatlas Mnemosyne as a seisomographic record of its time, with Warburg himself the seisomograph. If Warburg drew his conception of art history as an unformed thing—a non-linear, non-singular tale—from the tumult of the early 20th century, it makes sense his Mnemosyne be forever unfinished. Though it bears the name of the river of memory, it strikes me that it might also be described as its opposite, an atlas of gaps, an Amelēs-syne, a Lethe-zine.
Erasure is as fundamental a trait of this century as it was of the last. In December 2025, Armenians the world over will mark the 20th anniversary of Azerbaijan's destruction of Djulfa, the vast 6th-century Armenian cemetery with its thousands of khachkars that graced a hillside on the banks of the Araxes in the Azerbaijani exclave of Nakhichevan. Uyghurs, meanwhile, will mark the 27th anniversary of the closure of Ordam Padishah, one of their most important mazar (sufi shrines), that the Chinese state has, since 2017, been wiping entirely from the sands of the Taklamakan desert.
Neither people has the political clout, the financial recourse, or the international public’s undivided attention****, to see their own treasured places rise like phoenixes from the ashes of a government’s destructive disdain—a pattern all too familiar for so many.
Go look at US photographer Lisa Ross's photographs of Uyghur mazar sites and rituals or read the now disappeared Uyghur academic, Rahile Dawut’s ethnographic explorations of what going to shrines like Ordam Padishah was like. Spend time with historian Argam Ayvazyan's documentation of ancient Armenian khachkars or watch The Tears of Araxes on YT about Djulfa.
Delve into the extraordinary work Ghanaian architect Kuukuwa Manful is doing to retrieve the archival records of the built environment in Accra, among many other projects. Her mission to rewrite the history of African archicture, is critical to changing the world’s perceptions so long blinkered by colonial erasure. So too, that of Zimbabwean archaeologist Shadreck Chirikure, who recently edited a new reference work, the Oxford Encyclopedia of African Archeology, an exhilarating tome you can consult online. In this remarkable piece about Chirikure’s excavations of the Great Zimbabwe site, the author writes:
“Shadreck Chirikure was born in 1978, some 60km from Great Zimbabwe in Gutu, a town in eastern Zimbabwe. At school he learned little about the site. His first visit was as a student, aged 22. He has since made up for lost time. A renowned archaeologist, Mr Chirikure is a professor at the University of Cape Town and the University of Oxford. He has worked across Africa. But he is always drawn back home.”
“That is because, says Mr Chirikure, Great Zimbabwe should be a “symbol”, not just of Africa’s power and potential, but of how outsiders have too often told Africans’ stories—and got them wrong. His work at Great Zimbabwe is revealing new truths about one of the most important places in Africa’s past. In doing so he hopes to overhaul ideas about the continent’s future.”
When I interviewed Chirikure, he told me his encyclopedia was a statement of hope. It guards against forgetting. That’s exactly why all this matters.
Notes
*The separation of church and state is enshrined in what is know as the law of 1905. This stipulates that all religious beliefs be respected; that all citizens be equal in law without consideration given to religious profession; that all be guaranteed religious freedom; and that there be both no official religion or state salary for the clergy. Interestingly, sociologist Fabrice Raffin highlights that, contrary to what much heightened debate in France around religious symbols in the public sphere might lead you to think, this law really does guarantee religious freedom. It also, much to the current culture minister Rachida Dati’s chagrin, guarantees that places of worship stay freely accessible. You can’t make people pay to enter, it’s the law!
**My kid is a big Katherine Rundell fan, so we’ve spent a lot of time dreaming with her Rooftoppers and Skysteppers about what life atop the cathedral—in among the chimeras and pigeons and 3m-tall statues—could be like if you lived in the clouds and the trees and only ever made land under duress.
***Every 20 years, Ise Jingu Shinto shrine in Mie Prefecture, Japan, is rebuilt from scratch, along with all the treasures it contains, a feat of knowledge and skills transmission, that has been uninterrupted for 1,300 years, or, according to some sources, as many as 2,000 years. Read Hammer’s piece to understand, in mesmerising detail, how Villeneuve’s approach to rebuilding the charpente echoes this Japanese thinking. He opted for the same methods, the same green wood and the same structure as its medieval creators first deployed. An extraordinary process.
****20 million people visited the cathedral, annually, before the fire. Can you imagine how many are going to go now that it’s fixed?
World of echo
Organ obvs! On Saturday night I went to see Yo La Tengo’s Georgia Hubley perform, with Ira and James, as Little Black Egg (the magic, I tell you), so we’ll start there.
Then, there’s Colleen, an artist I’ve loved a long time, and shared bills with:
And Organ Octet that me and Brad and Damien and, well, five other people used to play in.
Thank you, Dale, for a this interesting, well written and ongoing story.