The restored bells of Notre-Dame de Paris have a good many unusual and interesting details attached to them

The restored bells of Notre-Dame de Paris have a good many unusual and interesting details attached to them. The great bell Emmanuel, for instance, is a witness to history: cast in 1681, it is the only one of the large bells to have survived the French Revolution. Napoleon heard it at his coronation in 1804.

The other bells were melted down for cannon, but were eventually revived. The new bells cast in the nineteenth century proved not good enough in quality, and their sound was judged discordant. In 2013, for the cathedral's 850th anniversary, they were replaced by a set of nine new bells cast in Normandy with the aim of recreating the sound of the cathedral before the Revolution.

Each bell has a name and godparents: some of the bells of 2013 bear the names Gabriel, Anne-Geneviève, Denis, Marcel, Étienne and Maurice, in honour of saints and figures important to Paris and the Church. Gabriel bears the words: “My voice is the voice of the angels”, which fits quite well the image of the archangel as messenger.

The restoration aimed not only at historical authenticity. Experts in acoustics and musicology saw to it that the simultaneous sounding of all ten bells produces a deep resonance, as though the sound had been created to “touch” you.