On the Wednesday after Notre-Dame burned, people gathered in front of churches all around France. From Reims and Rennes to Albi, Marseilles and Saint-Denis-de-la-Réunion, they stood in silence to listen to the bells ring. The time was 18:50, marking the exact moment, two days before, when the fire had broken out at what the art historian Sylvie Bethmont-Gallerand calls “l’église mère”. The knell lasted several minutes. Notre-Dame’s own bells hung still.
In the flurry of reconstruction that has since taken hold of Île de la Cité, people gathered once again on 12 September to watch the eight bells of the northern belfry return, newly gleaming and restored. They travelled in on a flatbed lorry from the Cornille-Havard foundry in Villedieu-les-Poêles-Rouffigny in Normandy, a three-and-a-half-hour drive on the A13.
The rector of the cathedral, Olivier Ribadeau-Dumas, greeted them in a hard hat. “Notre-Dame has her bells back,” he said. “The sky, which had fallen silent, will once again ring with this harmonious sound.” He then walked around them, carrying a leafy bouquet, swinging a brass censer on a chain, to bless them with holy water and incense.
These eight bells were cast in 2013 for the cathedral’s 850th jubilee celebrations. They replaced a previous grouping of four, which dated back to Napoleon III and had long been deemed out of tune. Virginie Bassetti, an artist renowned for her bell work, spent months in a 3m-deep pit in the Villedieu foundry, sculpting motifs in wax on a mould before the metal was poured. These fine decorative elements—crosses, keys, a Virgin with Child framed with stars—were honed to the millimetre, so as not to alter the notes the bells would ring.
In the summer of 2023, when the restoration had advanced to the stage where the belfry could be rebuilt, the bells were removed. All needed to be cleaned. Two required repairs. This was done via a heat treatment, a delicate structural task.
Once back in Paris, each bell had to be hoisted 50 metres up to the bell chamber, through four trapdoors that are not aligned, with a margin of error of mere centimetres. The bell expert in charge of the operation, Alexandre Gougeon, pointed out at the time that this was no picnic when dealing with a monster like Gabriel, which weighs 4.2 tonnes. Even the petit dernier, Jean-Marie, is an absolute unit, weighing 782kg.
The cathedral counts 21 bronze bells in total. Each sports a name that speaks to the monument’s history. The name Gabriel—after the angel of the Annunciation—goes back to the 1400s. Anne-Geneviève owes its composite moniker to the patron saint of the city and the mother of Mary. And several (Denis, Marcel, Benoît-Joseph, Maurice) recall bishops, cardinals and popes long passed.
In campanological terms, Notre-Dame is mostly famous for its outsized ambition—an obsession, as the musicologist and historian Maryvonne de Saint-Pulgent puts it, to boast the biggest and the best. “With time and usage, bells wear out and their sound deteriorates. At some point, they have to be replaced. So, throughout history, you see the monarchy taking a particular interest in renaming or gifting new bells. It was one of the ways successive monarchs could leave their mark on the cathedral.”
Cue the cathedral’s largest bourdon and oldest bell, which owes its 13-tonne heft to Louis XIV. In 1683 the king lavished his attentions on Notre-Dame by changing the bell’s name from Jacqueline to Emmanuel and making it even heavier. Its clapper alone weighs 500kg. It is the only bell to have survived the French Revolution, which saw all the others melted down. Every bell cast since has been tuned to Emmanuel’s fabled F sharp.
During the reconstruction, the US sound artist Bill Fontana has been recording the latent vibrations of the cathedral’s bells at rest, for a piece entitled Silent Echoes. When the piece was installed at the Centre Pompidou in 2022, Fontana said, “I’ve spent so many hours of my recent life listening to these bells. It’s this very beautiful, almost mystical sound.” As ecclesiastical life now returns to Notre-Dame, Parisians and visitors alike will once again be summoned by that sound, the monument’s spirit and its voice.
