Can the basilica that inspired Notre Dame return to glory?
Inside a 180-year quest to restore the world’s first Gothic church
The Basilica of Saint-Denis, just north of Paris, attracts few visitors, considering its profound historical import. Not only is it the final resting place for dozens of French kings and queens—it’s often called the royal necropolis of France—Saint-Denis is also the birthplace of Gothic architecture. The pointed arches, the lofty ribbed ceiling vaults, the light pouring in through tall stained glass windows—all of those innovations first came together here in the 12th century. Soon they were imitated at churches across France and Europe, most famously at Notre Dame, six miles to the south. They still can be admired to this day at Saint-Denis. But the basilica’s most prominent Gothic feature cannot: the bell tower at its north front corner, topped by a stone spire that once soared to nearly 300 feet. “It’s a scalped monument,” says eminent historian Jean-Michel Leniaud, author of several books on Saint-Denis.
For nearly 180 years, both the church and the town of Saint-Denis have been without that landmark steeple. Damaged by storms, it was dismantled in 1847, supposedly so it could be built back better. That never happened. The French government’s historic monuments service always found it had more urgent demands on its funds, even as a succession of Saint-Denis mayors pleaded for help. “The loss of that tower has remained in the town’s memory, like an amputation,” says historic monuments architect Jacques Moulin.
Now, thanks to a plan devised by Moulin, the wound is being healed. From a shed behind the basilica, the thump and clang of mallet on chisel and chisel on stone echo off the ancient walls. Inside, artisans carve building blocks by hand. High up on the front facade, on the stump of the vanished tower, masons lay the first blocks of what is meant to be as authentic a replica as possible. By 2030 or so, Saint-Denis should have its spire back.
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The new tower will survey a vastly changed landscape. Saint-Denis, once a village centered on its namesake abbey, is now a working-class suburb with a large population of immigrants, many of them Muslim. But the basilica remains the town’s central attraction—a potential economic engine as well as a spiritual sanctuary. With no financing available from the French national government, which owns the building, Saint-Denis’s current mayor, Mathieu Hanotin, has drawn mostly on regional government support to cobble together a 38-million-euro budget for the new tower and visitors center. “We’re doing what we always should have done,” says architectural historian Mathieu Lours. Just 180 years late.
Until he retired in 2024, Moulin was one of several dozen “chief architects of historic monuments” in France who oversee restoration projects at hundreds of historic sites. He worked on the château of Fontainebleau and the gardens of Versailles, as well as Saint-Denis, where he restored the west facade and the stained glass. The way he tells it, the story of how the church lost its steeple is a slightly sordid one. It’s a tale of the “harshness of men” and what he calls the “original crime” committed by France’s vaunted monuments service, the agency to which Moulin himself devoted his career.
Saint-Denis is named for the first bishop of Paris, a third-century martyr who was decapitated for preaching the Gospel to skeptical Parisians. According to legend, Denis picked up his own severed head and walked with it four miles north to what became his grave site. By the sixth century, a small church stood above the grave, and by the 12th century, the church was part of a prestigious abbey and crowded with pilgrims. That’s when it underwent a crucial transformation, at the hands of a visionary abbot named Suger. In just over a decade, from roughly 1130 to 1144, Suger dramatically expanded the building, adding a massive and richly decorated facade to the west front and a Gothic apse to the east end.
His choices were a bold departure from the darkness of the prevailing Romanesque style, with its massive walls and small windows. Suger believed that beauty in this world could transport people to a higher one and that sunlight flooding into Saint-Denis would show the way to “the true light,” that is, to God. His vision survived intact for nearly seven centuries.
But on June 9, 1837, lightning ripped through the Saint-Denis spire, piercing three large holes, including one more than six feet high. As the bolt jumped to a nearby building, it exploded a gargoyle. Within a year of the storm, François Debret, an architect who had been restoring Saint-Denis since 1813, had dismantled and rebuilt the spire.
The monuments service, though, which had been established in 1830, didn’t thank him. What its ambitious leaders really wanted, Leniaud has found, was to take control of one of France’s most coveted restoration projects. To do that, they had to oust the old guard: Debret. In 1845, when a series of storms again damaged the steeple, the service blamed the weight of Debret’s restored spire (wrongly, according to Moulin). Debret was forced to dismantle it. Then they replaced the 69-year-old pioneer with their handpicked 32-year-old phenom, Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, who had just begun a two-decade-long restoration of Notre Dame. Viollet-le-Duc dismantled the tower under the spire too, saying he intended to rebuild the whole steeple. Instead, he sold off the stones.
“Viollet-le-Duc hated Debret,” Leniaud says. “That’s clear.” Saint-Denis was their battleground, Moulin has argued, “and the steeple paid the price.”
Viollet-le-Duc’s own status as a pioneer in the monuments service is unassailable. His restoration of Notre Dame was masterful, albeit with many additions of his own, including the gargoyles and a new spire. Nor is there any disputing the service’s tremendous work preserving France’s rich heritage. But especially in the past half century or so, its doctrine has evolved and, Moulin believes, gotten too rigid and too devoted to restoring monuments only to their “last documented state”—preserving changes made through their previous history but adding as few new ones as possible. Consider how Philippe Villeneuve, chief architect of historic monuments at Notre Dame, described the restoration he led after the 2019 fire: “We leave no trace of our passage.”
Moulin favors a more interventionist approach, and from the start, his plan to rebuild Debret’s spire at Saint-Denis has faced blowback. In 2017, when he first presented the plan, the national commission on historic monuments rejected it, arguing that Saint-Denis’s steeple had been gone so long, its absence had become part of the church’s history. Rebuilding it now, the commission said, would be “problematic in terms of … the authenticity and materiality of the monument.”
The monuments commission is well respected, but its opinions are only advisory, and by 2021, two successive presidential administrations had endorsed the project and the culture ministry had authorized it. That’s when the national newsweekly Le Point published a letter of outraged opposition signed by 128 experts. “The Basilica of Saint-Denis doesn’t need a spire,” it began. Mathieu Lejeune, a young historian who did his Ph.D. on Gothic spires, was one of the petition’s two co-authors and remains opposed to the project. “It’s an intact monument,” he said last spring, shortly after construction began, “and it’s being denatured just to build a neo-Gothic spire.”
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The city government sees the steeple as an economic development project that will help revitalize the city center. Nicolas Matyjasik, director of Suivez la Flèche (Follow the Spire), the nonprofit that’s managing the project, predicts it will double annual attendance to around 300,000—still only a tiny fraction of the 12 million expected at Notre Dame this year.
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One afternoon in May, on top of the basilica, architect Christophe Bottineau knelt down on what’s left of the front wall of the north tower. With Moulin now retired, Bottineau, 56, has taken over the project. He was examining one of the first new stones to be added to the wall, and he wasn’t happy: Its top surface was perfectly smooth.
The “authenticity” he and Moulin are aiming for in the new tower is a matter not just of historical documentation but also of craftsmanship. Moulin is dismayed by what he perceives as the shoddy work of some restoration projects. “I’ve seen horrors,” he says. Among the most common: building stones cut by mechanized saw into perfect rectangular blocks, then distressed with a power tool to make the visible face look old. This method was used even at Notre Dame after the 2019 fire. It offends Moulin.
Medieval churchbuilders carved every block by hand, and they wasted no energy on things no one would see. They put a final, smooth finish only on a block’s visible face. The back faced inside the hollow wall, so they’d leave it lumpy and unformed, then they’d roughly shape the four sides with a large chisel and join them by mortar to neighboring blocks. The irregular blocks create a visual effect—“a vibration,” Bottineau calls it—that is easy to distinguish from the ruler-straight joints of the machine age.
He and Moulin want the new tower to have that vibe. Their goal is not to go full medieval; it’s to achieve the original chiseled look with practical methods available today. Power saws are forbidden, but 85 percent of the 15,200 stones for the new steeple will be cut off-site using handheld pneumatic chisels. The remaining 15 percent of the stones will be cut in the shed at Saint-Denis, without any machines.
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It was a gorgeous spring afternoon, five months before the construction site was opened to the public last October, when I went up into the scaffolding with Bottineau. A few miles south, at Notre Dame, crowds of tourists would be queuing on the plaza, waiting to get in. We looked down at the square in front of Saint-Denis: It was empty. On the stone pavement, a festive graphic in blue-and-white stencil outlined the shape of the missing steeple. Someday soon the new one will cast its shadow there when the sun rises behind it once again.
