It isn’t so surprising then, both for their strong symbolic association with the aristocratic and religious elites and pragmatically for the making of canons that, in 1792, Notre Dame’s smaller bourdon in the southern tower (baptised Marie and first cast in 1472) and the eight bells of the northern tower were among the cathedral’s 19 melted bells. In fact Emmanuel is the cathedral’s only bell to have survived the Ancien Régime : confiscated during the Revolution’s turmoil it was re-installed in 1802 under a Napoléon Bonaparte decree. Emmanuel towered over Paris alone till 1856 when four new bells, gifts by Napoléon’s nephew, Napoléon III to celebrate his son’s baptism, were installed in the northern tower. These are the same four bells that, till last winter, called the daily offices, every quarter of the hour and the angelus. 5 What the current project hopes to do by replacing these four bells with eight new ones and by adding a second bourdon in the southern tower, is to recover the cathedral’s former pre-revolutionary harmonic formation. * Restoring the cathedral’s eighteenth century sonic landscape isn’t a uniquely contemporary enterprise. In 1845 while working on the cathedral’s renovations, Viollet-Le-Duc had started a similar initiative, to no avail. If he was perhaps simply hoping to fill the empty towers, today the project finds its justification in the four 1856 bells’ assessed poor quality. Out of tune with Emmanuel as well as with one another, made of poor and wearing metal and faulty by quantity and size, Notre-Dame has put forward a number of arguments backing the return of what once was. This is somewhat controversial among bellfounders. Philippe Paccard, owner of the Fonderie Paccard, told the New York Times “the tradition dictates that bell makers never renew bells in identical ways”. 6 Given the technical prowess necessary for the exact recasting of a bell, the tradition doesn’t seem so preposterous. Overall the casting of Gabriel, Anne-Geneviève, Denis, Marcel, Étienne, Benoît-Joseph, Maurice, Jean-Marie and Marie, will have required twenty-three years of work. Managed by the cathedral, the research involved in-depth historical and
Since its erection in the late twelfth century the cathedral has produced numerous soundscapes with many bells. As the most important building within the region’s episcopal hierarchy, Notre Dame has always sheltered the largest bell in the area and, even before it was completed, had numerous smaller bells emphasising its presence. In 1378 it acquired and installed Jacqueline, its main bourdon (a large bell), at the top of its southern tower. As is customary in traditional bell-founding, Jacqueline was melted and re-cast differently many times over the next three centuries. In the 1680s it was moulded to be significantly heavier – reaching the total weight of 13 tons – for a lower tone and re-baptised Emmanuel-Louise-Thérèse (after no other than its god-father Louis the XIV th and his wife Maria-Teresa). If campanologists still consider Emmanuel as having impeccable timbre, at 327 years-old next March its aging structure means it resonates only on extraordinary occasions such as the end of World War II, Christmas, Easter, 2 or Papal visits and funerals (it rang 84 times for Jean-Paul II’s passing at age 84). Emmanuel was lucky. Like France’s aristocracy, most of the country’s Ancien Régime bells never made it past the French Revolution and subsequent wars. 3 For the greater part of the past millennium in Europe whoever tolled the bells controlled the community. While church bells obviously called prayer, historian David Garrioch has argued that the broader implication of this was that these sonic objects regulated the social behaviour of those who heard them – for instance the chiming of the angelus began and ended the day. Understanding the various tolls of one’s church was also vital, as a way of belonging to one’s community as well as remaining alert to potential threats: they indicated storms, plagues, fires, the opening and closing of the city gates and the rigid town curfews in place. Furthermore bells re-enforced the established order. The weddings of the rich (but rarely of the poor) were musical, funeral-chimes were gendered (two pulls for a women, three for a man) and the birth of a French heir could lead to subsequent kingdom-wide all-nighter celebrations (for the birth of Louis Le Dauphin in 1729 every bell in Paris rang for three consecutive days and nights). 4
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