Agnès Poirier’s lively account of the majestic cathedral relates key episodes from its past and the night that fire almost destroyed it

Until late into the evening of 15 April last year, I stood with what felt like half of Paris in the Quai de Bourbon on the Ile St Louis, perhaps 150 metres from Notre Dame, and watched as one of the western world’s great architectural treasures burned. No further away but on the south bank of the Seine, along with hordes more onlookers, many in tears, some praying, stood Agnès Poirier, who can see the 850-year-old Gothic masterpiece from her apartment window.

Less than a year later, Poirier, whose racy read on artistic and intellectual Paris in the 1940s, Left Bank, won many plaudits, has produced a slim, vivid and engrossing history both of that night and of the edifice she calls “always far more than just a cathedral… The face of civilisation, and the soul of a nation”.

It is a big claim but the opening chapter repays the cover price: a breathless, exhaustively reported and utterly unputdownable account of the drama, from the first confusing alarm on the screen of an inexperienced security guard to the moment a shaken Emmanuel Macron stepped up to address the nation, five hours later.

In between, we hear from many of the men and women whose actions that night helped save Notre Dame and its priceless contents from absolute destruction, including the cathedral’s general manager, Laurent Prades, and Marie-Hélène Didier, the National Heritage curator in charge of France’s religious art.

Most were out of Paris. All scramble to the scene, by car, metro, even bike, but none more frantically than Prades, who knows the whereabouts not only of the cathedral’s 100-odd keys but also the codes to its treasury and, critically, to a bulletproof glass safe at the back of the apse that holds the Catholic world’s most precious relic, the crown of thorns.

At 7.57pm, the cathedral’s spire collapses, triggering a blast, Poirier relates, which blows open all its doors at once, each weighing several tonnes, and a howl from the watching crowds. Just after 8pm, the historians arrive, don helmets and plunge into the interior, braving a hail of burning embers and molten lead from the roof.

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The detail is rich: when it most matters, Prades’s memory fails him and he has to text a sacristan for the right code to the glass safe. But, along with countless other priceless artefacts and relics, the crown is saved and carried off in a van to nearby Paris city hall and safety.

Soon after 8pm, Jean-Claude Gallet, commander of the Paris fire brigade, faces a crucial decision: the north tower is on fire. If it collapses, so will the south tower. If both go, the facade and the entire cathedral will follow.

With the personal permission of President Macron, Gallet sends 50 crack firefighters racing up the precipitous spiral staircases into the towers, “to attack the fire close up, in hand-to-hand combat”. It is 11pm before Gallet can tell the president the tower is safe. Half an hour later, a sombre Macron addresses the French people from outside the cathedral:

“Notre Dame is the epicentre of our life, the kilometre zero of France; it is so many books, so many paintings, it is the cathedral of all the French people, even those who have never set foot in it. Her story is our story and she is burning.”

Most of the remainder of Poirier’s volume is the demonstration of that thesis: that the story of Notre Dame is the story of France. Eight mini-essays relate key episodes from the cathedral’s history, from the laying of its first stone in the 12th century to the bloody upheaval of the French Revolution and the coronation of Napoleon to the creation of Victor Hugo’s hunchback.

From the start, Poirier argues, this was no ordinary cathedral: “Although embracing the Gothic principles of light, space and clarity, Notre Dame rejected lavish munificence. Her serenity was almost austere; her radiance not in the opulence of sparkling gems but in the symphonic quality of her space.”

During the brief but bloody years that followed the revolution, Notre Dame lost both its bells, which became cannon, and the heads of the 28 kings of Judah that had adorned its facade, removed one after the other by a stone-cutter because they were thought to represent kings of France.

On 10 November 1793, the Catholic faith was abolished and banned throughout France and all the churches of Paris closed down bar one – Notre Dame - which was reconsecrated as the Temple of Reason. Napoleon made sure to get himself crowned there, satisfying both Catholic and revolutionary France, in December 1804.

Victor Hugo began his 1831 epic The Hunchback of Notre Dame partly to draw attention to Paris’s neglected, defaced and increasingly demolished Gothic architecture and its success is largely credited with helping initiate a vast mid-19th century renovation of the cathedral led by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, the subject of another chapter.

Millions for Notre Dame – but nothing for us, say gilets jaunes Read more

Poirier recounts this and the other defining moments in the building’s history, including General Charles de Gaulle’s eventful walk up the aisle on 26 August 1944, the liberation of Paris, with great verve, intriguing anecdote and unexpected detail.

She explores, too, the battle over the cathedral’s future, blessed with €500m from France’s richest families and donations from individuals around the world but cursed, in the era of gilets jaunes, by the question of why, when so much money can found for old stones, none can be found for France’s most disadvantaged.

The night of the fire is a journalistic tour de force; the rest a ripping historical yarn, elegant, witty and constantly informative. It’s a bit of a mismatch, but it works.

• Jon Henley is Europe correspondent for the Guardian

• Notre-Dame: The Soul of France by Agnès Poirier is published by Oneworld (£16.99). To buy a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £10