Notre Dame was a reelection of the religious fervor and religious history of the nation. Many events occurred in the streets around the cathedral, including a good deal of political violence, from the Burgundian slaughter in 1572 to the popular uprisings between 1830 and 1848. The Communards in 1871 tried to burn down the cathedral but were thwarted by a bucket brigade from a nearby hospital. The Germans did manage to drop a bomb through its roof during World War I. In 1944, Allied troops rushed up the tower stairs to ring the bell and proclaim victory (Jacobs 97).
The cathedral was in a new style that would come to be known as gothic. The gothic is found not in the architectural elements themselves, including the cross-ribbed vault, the pointed arch, or the flying buttress, but rather in two characteristics unique to Gothic architecture--the use of light and the relationship between structure and appearance. In referring to the use of light, the observer means the relation of light to the material substance of the walls. In the Romanesque church, light is distinct from and contrasts with the heavy, somber, tactile substance of the walls. On the other hand, the Gothic wall gives the appearance of being porous so that light filters through it, permeates it, and transfigures it. Gothic interiors are not really that bright, and usually the stained-glass windows were such inadequate sources of light that a subsequent age replaced them with grisaille or white windows. However, the stained-glass windows of the Gothic replace the brightly colored walls of the Romanesque. There is also an anomaly in that light seems to be part of the inner landscape in spite of the problems, making Gothic architecture what some describe as "diaphanous architecture" (Von Simson 4).
The second feature of Gothic architecture is the new relationship it shows between function and form, structure and appearance. In earlier architecture, structure ...