PARIS — Paris paid tribute on Thursday to the firefighters who saved Notre Dame from the flames, while its rector said a temporary wooden cathedral could be erected until it can reopen.
Hundreds of firefighters and police who had taken part in Monday night’s rescue work marched into the Elysee Palace around midday for a private ceremony of thanks held by President Emmanuel Macron.
They would receive France’s Gold Medal for acts of courage and dedication, Macron wrote on Twitter afterwards.
Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo too paid homage to the city’s fire service, with a crowd gathered for the ceremony outside the capital’s city hall, the Hotel de Ville, cheering loudly every time they were mentioned.
“You have saved, at the risk of your lives — you have saved part of what we are,” Hidalgo told fire chief Jean-Claude Gallet and a group of firefighters. “We saw you going up to the flames despite the danger to your lives.”
Earlier, Hidalgo told Italian newspaper La Repubblica of the dramatic moment on Monday night when Gallet decided to focus firefighting efforts on stopping the blaze in the roof from reaching the north bell tower.
Officials have said that if the bell tower had gone up in flames, it could have been impossible to save the body of the cathedral.
In the end the cathedral’s roof and spire were destroyed, but its towers survived intact and its main body suffered only a partial collapse of its Gothic vaulted ceiling.
“He told us: ‘To save the tower we’ll have to send 10 men up, but we don’t know if they’ll come back alive,’” Hidalgo recalled.
Notre Dame was the “geographical, cultural and spiritual heart of our city,” as well as the symbolic heart of France and “the historic heart of Europe,” the mayor told the crowd at the Hotel de Ville.
“Dear Parisians, dear lovers of Paris, our heart has been injured,” she said. “Our heart is still beating. Tomorrow, it will beat more strongly.”
The rector of Notre Dame, Monsignor Patrick Chauvet, earlier told broadcaster C-News that a temporary wooden cathedral could be built on the square in front of Notre Dame to receive visitors while repairs are underway.
Macron wants the reconstruction work finished within five years, but some experts have suggested that that may be too ambitious.
Culture Minister Franck Riester confirmed that the possibility of a temporary building had been raised but said no decision had been taken.
A temporary cathedral could be “a place of welcome, a place where the faithful could pray,” he told RMC radio, adding that he hoped it would also be possible to visit Notre Dame itself again before the reconstruction was finished.
Public and church authorities were working together “so that every French citizen, every European, everyone in the world will be able to rediscover Notre Dame, in some way, during the works,” he said.
Riester said there were three major weak points in the structure of the cathedral after the fire.
The gable of the north transept, the most urgent, had already been propped up, he said.
Work was also required on the west gable, which was leaning, and authorities were planning to remove a statue of an angel to lessen the risk.
In addition, stonework in a corner of the southern bell tower got so hot that it was at risk of crumbling.
There was a danger that the stone carvings of fantastic beasts on the tower could collapse and crash through the vaulting into the cathedral below, he warned.
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