“It’s the project of a lifetime”: a Mayenne company participated in the reconstruction of the Notre-Dame spire

It is a project that will mark these Mayenne carpenters forever. For more than two years, fifty employees of the Cruard Charpente company in Simflé, in southern Mayenne, worked on the reconstruction of the spire of Notre-Dame-de-Pariswhich collapsed during the building fire on April 15, 2019.

“Employees have postponed their retirement to be able to participate”

Today, the arrow is not in the workshops… she returned to the cathedral almost a year ago already. However, the memory of this extraordinary project is still in everyone's minds. Damien Leveau has been a carpenter with the company for ten years. “It was truly exceptional. The work that went into these parts is enormous in terms of precision, they are very technical assemblies. This is the maximum that we can do in carpentry, we know that we will only do this once in our life“, he confides.

The bosses of Cruard Charpente, Florian and Aurélien Lefèvre, know that this episode has had an impact on their employees. “On a typical construction site, there will be two teams, six people maximum. There, it was the first project that brought together so many people, fifty people around the same objective.” An experience which brought the teams both on a human and professional level. “It brought people together, it helped young people progress. There are two retirees who extended for a year to be able to work on the building. It shows that it is a work of a lifetime, and a beautiful human adventure“, concludes Florian Lefèvre.

The same arrow as that of Viollet-le-Duc!

By receiving the call for projects with three other companiesthe two brothers were aware of the immense challenge that awaited them. “It’s such a technical project, so prestigious too. Afterwards, it's great to be selected, you have to be able to do the work“, smiles Aurélien Lefèvre. The challenge, first of all, lay in the wingspan of the arrow. Its highest point is at 96 meters. ” And it's about 56 meters high. There are also more than 2000 assemblies, each more complex than the last. As soon as you have a piece that intersects, that meets another piece, it has to fit together perfectly.“

The challenge was high: to reproduce the arrow identically… The same as the one designed by French architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc during the restoration of the cathedral in the 19th century. “There were quite a few archives from the time, and that was really very good. We also had a 3D scan of the arrow which had been done in 2018, and that helped the teams a lot“, explains Aurélien Lefèvre. The installation of the spire framework took place a year ago and until this summer the teams worked on the finishing and decorative elements: nearly 30,000 hours of work for Mayen carpenters.