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Apr 15, 2019 · A massive blaze at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris devastated large parts of the 850-year-old church. The fire is now out, but the cathedral’s iconic spire fell during the hours it took to battle ...
Apr 17, 2019 · The glass windows are pictured inside the damaged Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, Tuesday, April 16, 2019. Firefighters declared success Tuesday in a more than 12-hour battle to extinguish an inferno engulfing Paris’ iconic Notre Dame cathedral that claimed its spire and roof, but spared its bell towers and the purported Crown of Christ.
Apr 12, 2024 · Notre-Dame's transformation five years after fire. Five years after a devastating fire at the iconic Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris, video shows the progress of renovation work. The 850-year-old ...
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- HISTORY Vault: England's Great Wall
In the 1790s, anti-Christian forces all but tore down one of France’s most powerful symbols—but it survived and returned to glory.
It’s one of France’s most powerful religious, architectural and cultural symbols—and images of Notre Dame de Paris in flames evoke questions about how the city, and the cathedral, will move forward. But the fire isn’t the first time the cathedral has faced destruction.
During the French Revolution in the 1790s, angry mobs and revolutionaries looted the medieval Gothic church—and even declared that it wasn’t a church at all—during a bloody push to remove France’s close ties to the Catholic church. More than two dozen statues affixed to the church facade were publicly decapitated the same year as Marie Antoinette.
Origins of the French Revolution
Before a furious crowd stormed the Bastille in Paris in 1789, the Church wielded extraordinary power in France. The vast majority of French people were Catholic, Catholicism was the state religion, and the Church owned vast swaths of property and collected heavy tithes from most people’s incomes without paying taxes of its own. But a growing number of French people had tired of the Church’s almost inconceivable power.
As the monarchy toppled, then fell, a small group of radical revolutionaries who had been influenced by Enlightenment-era philosophies of freedom of religion and a reason-based society saw their chance to strip the Church of much of its authority. They embarked on a dechristianization campaign, confiscating Church property, trying to get all clergy to swear their loyalty to the new state, and removing the Church’s control over the birth, death and administrative records it had held for so long.
Stretching roughly 80 miles across northern England, Hadrian's Wall split the country in two during ancient times. Did the Roman army build the wall to protect their new province, or to build up the phenomenal ego of Emperor Hadrian?
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Apr 15, 2019 · A massive blaze at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris devastated large parts of the 850-year-old church. The fire is now out, but the cathedral's iconic spire fell during the hours it took to battle ...
Notre-Dame fire. On 15 April 2019, just before 18:20 CEST, a structural fire broke out in the roof space of Notre-Dame de Paris, a medieval Catholic cathedral in Paris, France. By the time the fire was extinguished, the cathedral's wooden spire ( flèche) had collapsed, most of the wooden roof had been destroyed, and the cathedral's upper walls ...
May 24, 2024 · Notre-Dame de Paris is a cathedral church in Paris. The most famous of the Gothic cathedrals of the Middle Ages, it is distinguished for its size, antiquity, and architectural interest. A fire in 2019 destroyed most of the cathedral’s roof and the entire 19th-century spire.
