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The people who helped resurrect Notre Dame
This week on 60 Minutes, correspondent Bill Whitaker goes inside Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral. After five years of careful work to clean and restore the damage caused by a fire in 2019 — and to wipe away decades of dirt and grime — the cathedral is again ready to open its doors to the public.
Once it does, the adoration at her altar may very well extend to the people who made it possible.
It has taken hundreds of craftspeople to pull off a restoration so fast, so meticulous, and so true to Notre Dame’s past. On Île de la Cité, they are known as compagnons, a shorthand for the Compagnons du Devoir, or the Companions of Duty. These workers are part of a French organization of craftsmen and artisans that dates from the Middle Ages and keeps alive medieval skills like stone carving and iron forging.
At Notre Dame, these carpenters, roofers, and art restorers have been guardians of history. The stained-glass windows glow once again. The stone walls, now scrubbed of fire’s soot and time’s grime, are newly bright. The organ has its own choir of 8,000 pipes, each freshly calibrated.
Each of the compagnons has been key to resurrecting Notre Dame ahead of the cathedral’s doors reopening to the public this month. A few shared an up-close look at their work with Whitaker and 60 Minutes.
Marble, metal, and painting
In the very heart of the cathedral, just in front of Notre Dame’s main altar, 60 Minutes met Olivia Salaun, who has spent most of this year carefully restoring an elaborate marble piece called a “marquetry,” which was created in the 17th century.
“It is quite rare in France to have such a beautiful marble marquetry,” Salaun told Whitaker during an interview last month.
She explained that she and other marble restorers had to wait for scaffolding near the altar to come down before they could begin their work. As a result, they had to work quickly, completing their restoration between February and July 2024.
Salaun showed Whitaker a specific spot on the floor where a piece of marble had been knocked out. She and her colleagues carved a new piece to fit the gap perfectly and make it appear as though it had always been there.
“It had to have the same rendering so the eye would not be attracted by a new marble,” Salaun told Whitaker.
This sort of meticulous attention to detail can be found everywhere in the restored Notre Dame — even the part facing the heavens.
On the roof, 60 Minutes met Philomene Thivet Mazzantti, a teenager who spent parts of this year as an apprentice metalworker, helping to make the lead ornamentation that’s now atop the cathedral’s roof. Just 12 years old when Notre Dame burned, Mazzantti is part of a generation feeling the “Notre Dame effect,” a draw to traditional crafts and trades because of the work they’re seeing at the cathedral.
“Yes, the Notre Dame effect had a lot of impact on young people,” Mazzantti told 60 Minutes, explaining that she feels proud of her own small role. “You say to yourself that you left your mark on this historic monument.”
Painting restorer Diana Castillo has made her own impact on the cathedral by helping to bring Notre Dame’s masterpieces back to life. She has been working in the cathedral’s many small chapels, where centuries ago murals were painted onto stone walls and ceilings. Time, soot, and humidity from the water used to extinguish the flames left many of the paintings ashen and damaged.
In some places, restorers had to inject glue through a syringe to carefully reattach dry, peeling paint back onto the walls. They also had a lot to clean. To see how much, 60 Minutes compared photographs Castillo took of the paintings before she and other restorers began their work to their incredibly vivid appearance now.
Castillo emphasized that they simply cleaned the paintings and did not otherwise enhance their pigments. The real colors, she said, were vibrant in the Middle Ages.
“I’m sure many people will be shocked,” Castillo said.
Notre Dame’s history of renovation
This is not the first time in its history that Notre Dame has needed a wholesale restoration.
Built in the 13th century, the cathedral was in need of restoration by the time of King Louis XIV, who began renovation work in 1699.
A few decades later, Notre Dame’s original spire had become so damaged that it was removed in the late 1700s. At the time, the spire was not the only thing in great disrepair. During the first French Revolution, rioters looted and vandalized the cathedral after Catholic worship was banned in Paris. A mob tore down and beheaded the statues of 28 Judean kings, created in 1230 and originally placed on the west façade, because the crowd mistakenly believed the statues depicted French kings.
By the second French Revolution of 1830, revolutionaries had damaged the cathedral so badly that Parisian authorities considered demolishing the building.
That is, until a writer stepped in.
“Victor Hugo is the reason why she’s still standing,” French journalist Agnes Poirier told 60 Minutes in early 2023.
A politician and formidable campaigner, Hugo wanted to preserve the cathedral. In a pamphlet titled “War on the Demolishers,” Hugo wrote that, “A building has two things: its use and its beauty. Its use belongs to its owner, its beauty to everyone; to destroy it is to overstep one’s rights.”
After releasing his pamphlet, Hugo in 1831 published his novel “The Hunchback of Notre-Dame,” known as “Notre-Dame de Paris” in French. The novel was an immediate success. Not only did it make Quasimodo known throughout France, as illustrations of the novel’s central characters were mass printed — but it also turned Notre Dame Cathedral into a national symbol.
By 1842, the French government decided to restore the cathedral, and two years later, they selected a young architect named Eugène Viollet-le-Duc to complete the work. During his architectural education, Viollet-le-Duc had travelled around France, making detailed drawings of the medieval monuments and cathedrals he saw. This background meant that, when Viollet-le-Duc added a new spire to Notre Dame in 1859, it looked as though it had been original to the cathedral.
Viollet-le-Duc’s transformation of Notre Dame took more than two decades to complete; the current restoration took just five years. The day after Notre Dame burned in 2019, French President Emmanuel Macron pledged that Notre Dame would be rebuilt by 2024, and thanks to the tireless work of the compagnons — and the thousands of donors who helped fund the restoration — Macron’s plan has come to fruition.
“This is the core of what a nation is for me: a group of people with the same history, the same values, the same language, and having done a lot of great things together and ready to do other new things together,” Macron told 60 Minutes. “This is a big thing we did together during the past five years.”
Photos and Videos courtesy of Diana Castillo, AFP and Getty Images
The video above was produced by Brit McCandless Farmer and edited by Scott Rosann.
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Soccer stadium stampede in Guinea kills at least 56 people, officials say, including several children
Conakry, Guinea — Fifty-six people were killed and several injured in a stampede at a soccer stadium in southern Guinea following clashes between fans, the military government of the West African nation said Monday. Authorities were conducting an investigation to establish who was responsible for the stampede on Sunday, Communications Minister Fana Soumah said in a statement read on national television.
Several children were among the victims, according to local media and a coalition of political parties.
The stampede broke out Sunday afternoon at the stadium in the city of Nzerekore during the final of a local tournament between the Labe and Nzerekore teams in honor of Guinea’s military leader, Mamadi Doumbouya, Guinea’s Prime Minister Amadou Oury Bah said on social media.
Social media/Reuters
“During the stampede, victims were recorded,” Bah said, without giving details. Regional authorities were working to restore calm in the area, he added.
Local media reported security forces had tried to use tear gas to restore calm after the chaos that followed a disputed penalty.
“This (the disputed penalty) angered supporters who threw stones. This is how the security services used tear gas,” Media Guinea, a local news website, reported. It said several of those killed were children while some of the injured being treated at a regional hospital were in critical condition.
Videos that appeared to be from the scene showed fans in a section of the stadium shouting and protesting the refereeing before clashes broke out as people poured onto the field. People ran to try to escape from the stadium, many of them jumping a high fence.
Other Videos showed many people lying on the floor in what looked like a hospital, as a crowd gathered nearby, some assisting the wounded.
An opposition political coalition known as the National Alliance for Alternation and Democracy called for an investigation. It said the tournament had been organized to drum up support for the “illegal and inappropriate” political ambitions of the country’s military leader.
Guinea has been led by the military since soldiers ousted President Alpha Conde in 2021. It is one of a growing number of West African countries, including Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso, where the military has taken power and delayed a return to civilian rule across a region that’s become known as Africa’s Coup Belt.
Doumbouya, who ousted the president three years ago, said he was preventing the country from slipping into chaos and chastized the previous government for broken promises. He has, however, been criticized for not meeting the expectations he raised.
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Syria’s civil war reignites in dramatic fashion as Russia joins airstrikes on rebels who seized Aleppo
The Syrian military and its ally Russia conducted deadly joint air raids Monday on areas that Islamist-led rebels seized control of over the weekend. The strikes were a response to a lightning offensive by the rebels that saw them wrest control of swathes of northwest Syria from government forces.
The conflict that started more than a decade ago took a significant turn several days ago, catching many — including, it seems, Syrian dictator Bashar Assad and his Russian backers — by surprise. On Saturday, rebels, including many with the U.S.-designated Islamic terrorist group Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS), took control of the major city of Aleppo in northern Syria.
The rebels seized Aleppo’s airport and started pushing into towns and villages in the countryside around the city on Sunday after leaving piles of dead government soldiers in the streets. Observers said the rebel forces were often met with little to no resistance by regime forces, but by Monday the pace of the surprise offensive appeared to have slowed, with Assad and his Russian backers ramping-up their response.
Syrian rebels’ surprise offensive
Syria’s civil war began in 2011 after civilians led pro-democracy protests against Assad, and his government responded by opening fire on its own people. The ensuing war is thought to have killed around 500,000 people but, for the last several years, it had simmered as a stalemate. Government forces have controlled the west and south of the country, American-backed rebels have dominated the northeast, and Islamist rebel factions — including the ones now in control of Aleppo — have held most of the northwest.
“We are coming Damascus,” the rebels chanted Sunday, threatening to push on next toward Syria’s national capital and the Assad government’s stronghold.
Ghaith Alsayed/AP
The balance in the stalemate started changing last week, when the Islamist-led rebel alliance in the northwest launched its offensive. Over the weekend, HTS and allied factions took control of Aleppo city for the first time since the civil war started more than a decade ago, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitoring group’s director Rami Abdel Rahman.
Aleppo, an ancient city dominated by its landmark citadel, is home to two million people. It was the scene of fierce battles earlier in the conflict but, until Sunday, the rebels had never managed to totally seize it. Video showed rebels in military fatigues patrolling the streets of Aleppo, with some setting fire to a Syrian flag and others holding up the green, red, black and white flag of the revolution.
While the streets appeared mostly empty, some residents came out to cheer the advancing rebel fighters. HTS is an alliance led by al Qaeda’s former Syria branch. It’s fighting alongside allied factions, with units taking orders from a joint command.
Aron Lund of the Century International think tank said: “Aleppo seems to be lost for the regime.”
He added: “And a government without Aleppo is not really a functional government of Syria.”
The United States and its allies France, Germany and Britain called Sunday for “de-escalation” in Syria, and for the protection of civilians and infrastructure. The U.S. maintains hundreds of troops in northeast Syria as part of an anti-jihadist coalition, and it has also continued carrying out strikes against Islamist groups in the country.
Russia and Iran vow to help Syria’s Assad
Assad’s reaction to the surprise offensive was still building on Monday with the joint airstrikes carried out by his air force and his Russian allies, and expanded ground operations aimed at retaking towns and villages north of Aleppo said to be underway.
ABDULAZIZ KETAZ/AFP/Getty
Syrian-Russian air raids hammered several areas of both Aleppo and the neighboring Idlib provinces, killing at least 49 people, including 17 civilians, according to the Observatory.
“The strikes targeted… displaced families living on the edge of a displacement camp,” said Hussein Ahmed Khudur, a 45-year-old teacher who sought refuge at a camp in Idlib after fleeing fighting in Aleppo province. He said one of the five people killed in one strike was a student of his, and the other four were his four sisters.
Russia, which first intervened directly in the Syrian war in 2015, said Monday that it continued to support Assad.
MIKHAIL KLIMENTYEV/SPUTNIK/AFP/Getty
“We of course continue to support Bashar al-Assad and we continue contacts at the appropriate levels, we are analyzing the situation,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told journalists.
Iran’s top diplomat Abbas Araghchi, was in Syria on Sunday to deliver a message of support, state media said.
On Monday, Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Esmail Baqaei said the Islamic republic had entered Syria at the official invitation of Assad’s government.
“Our military advisers were present in Syria, and they are still present. The presence of advisers from the Islamic Republic of Iran in Syria is not a new thing,” he said.
Same Syrian civil war, but very different times
While the fighting is rooted in a war that began more than a decade ago, much has changed since then. Millions of Syrians have become displaced, with around 5.5 million living in neighboring countries.
Most of those involved in the initial anti-Assad protests are either dead, living in exile or in jail.
Russia, meanwhile, is nearing the third year of its incredibly costly full-scale war on Ukraine, and Iran’s militant allies Hezbollah and Hamas have been massively weakened by more than a year of conflict with Israel.
On Monday, Iran’s foreign ministry said it would maintain its military support for the Syrian government.
But the role of Lebanon’s Hezbollah, which played a key role in backing the government particularly around Aleppo, remains in question particularly after it withdrew from several of its positions to focus on fighting Israel.
HTS and its allies began their offensive Wednesday, just as a ceasefire took effect in Lebanon after more than a year of war between Hezbollah and Israel.
The recent violence in Syria has killed some 244 rebels and 141 Syrian regime and allied fighters, along with at least 24 civilians, according to the Observatory, which has a network of sources inside Syria. The Observatory said rebel advances met little resistance.
Aaron Stein, president of the U.S.-based Foreign Policy Research Institute, said “Russia’s presence has thinned out considerably and quick reaction airstrikes have limited utility.”
He called the rebel advance “a reminder of how weak the [Assad] regime is.”
The airstrikes on Sunday on parts of Aleppo were the first since 2016.
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contributed to this report.
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Police seize record 2.3 tons of cocaine from fishing boat that broke down off coast of Australia
Australian police seized a record 2.3 tons of cocaine and arrested 13 people in raids after the suspects’ boat broke down off the coast of Queensland, authorities said Monday.
The drugs had a sale value of 760 million Australian dollars ($494 million) and equaled as many as 11.7 million street deals if they had reached the country of 28 million people, federal police said in a statement.
Investigators told reporters in Brisbane that the drugs were transported from an unidentified South American country.
The arrests on Saturday and Sunday followed a monthlong investigation after a tipoff that the Comancheros motorcycle gang was planning a multi-ton smuggling operation, Australian Federal Police Commander Stephen Jay said. Police released photos and video of the operation, showing the cabin of the fishing boat loaded with huge packages of the alleged drugs.
Jono Searle / AP
The smugglers made two attempts to transport the drugs to Australia by sea from a mothership floating hundreds of miles offshore, Jay said. Their first boat broke down, and the second vessel foundered on Saturday, leaving the suspects stranded at sea for several hours until police raided the fishing boat and seized the drugs, he said.
The mothership was in international waters and was not apprehended, Jay said.
Authorities have seized more than one ton of cocaine before, Jay said, but the weekend’s haul was the biggest ever recorded in Australia.
Those charged are accused of conspiring to import the drug into Australia by sea and were due to appear in various courts on Monday. The maximum penalty under the charge is life in prison.
Some were arrested on the boat while others were waiting on shore to collect the cocaine, police said. Two were under age 18 and all were Australian citizens, they said.
“Australia is a very attractive market for organized criminal groups to send drugs such as cocaine,” Jay said.
The seizure marks the latest in a string of massive drug busts around the globe in recent days. On Wednesday, the Colombian navy announced that a authorities from dozens of countries seized over 225 metric tons of cocaine in a six-week mega-operation where they unearthed a new Pacific trafficking route from South America to Australia. Officials said they had also seized “increasingly sophisticated” drug-laden semisubmersibles — better known as “narco subs” — that can travel 10,000 miles without refueling.
Last week, Belgian authorities said they had seized almost five tons of cocaine stashed in shipping containers at Antwerp port, as part of a cross-border investigation into a drug-trafficking ring.
Just days before that, Spanish police said that they had seized 13 tons of cocaine — the country’s largest-ever haul of the drug — and made one arrest.
