Notre-Dame de Paris

The relic is a circlet of woven rushes about 21 centimetres across, bound in gold thread and now kept in a crystal-and-gold reliquary; the thorns that tradition attached to it were long ago detached and dispersed as separate relics across Europe. Its recorded history begins in Constantinople, where it was among the Passion relics kept in the imperial chapel of the Pharos.

When the Latin emperors who seized the city in 1204 fell into debt, the Crown was pledged to Venetian financiers, and in 1239 King Louis IX of France redeemed it for an enormous sum. He received it barefoot at Sens and carried it into Paris, then built the Sainte-Chapelle, itself a reliquary in stone and glass, to enshrine it.

The Church venerates the Crown as a relic of the Passion while making no scientific claim about its authenticity. Transferred to Notre-Dame in 1806, it was displayed for veneration on the first Friday of each month, every Friday in Lent, and on Good Friday, carried by the Knights of the Holy Sepulchre. Since the cathedral's reopening it rests in a newly commissioned reliquary in the axial chapel.

On the evening of 15 April 2019 fire broke out beneath the cathedral's roof, most likely from an electrical fault or a discarded cigarette during restoration work. Within hours the nineteenth-century spire and the medieval oak roof, the timbers nicknamed "the forest", had collapsed, though the stone vaults, the twin towers and the great rose windows survived.

As the fire spread, a chaplain of the Paris fire brigade, Father Jean-Marc Fournier, and a chain of firefighters entered the burning building to bring out the Crown of Thorns and the tunic of Saint Louis, which were carried to safety and later stored at the Louvre. A five-year, state-led restoration followed, replacing the roof and spire in oak to the original design and cleaning the fire-stained interior. Notre-Dame reopened for worship on 7 December 2024 in the presence of heads of state, and the Crown of Thorns was returned to the cathedral within days and installed in the axial chapel. The fire and recovery renewed worldwide attention on both the building and the relic it guards.

Notre-Dame was among the first great buildings to use the flying buttress, the external prop that carried the thrust of the high vaults outward and let the walls open into vast windows. Built over nearly two centuries, it fuses early and high Gothic and gave Paris a cathedral to match the growing prestige of the Capetian monarchy whose island city it crowned. It has been the stage of coronations, royal weddings, state funerals and the self-coronation of Napoleon in 1804, and its nineteenth-century restoration by Eugene Viollet-le-Duc, prompted in part by Victor Hugo's novel, gave it the spire that fell in 2019.

As the cathedral of the Archbishop of Paris it remains an active place of worship as well as the most visited monument in the city. It stands within the UNESCO World Heritage property "Paris, Banks of the Seine," inscribed in 1991, which recognises the architectural ensemble strung along the river through the heart of the capital.