"Rouen Cathedral"

The cathedral, built and rebuilt over a period of more than eight hundred years, has features from Early Gothic to late Flamboyant and Renaissance architecture. It also has a place in art history as the subject of a series of impressionist paintings by Claude Monet, and in architecture history as from 1876 to 1880, it was the tallest building in the world.

In the 1020s, the church was rebuilt in the Romanesque style. the church was consecreted in1063, in the presence of William, Duke of Normandy, soon to become William the Conqueror after his conquest of England in 1066.

In 1145 a project for a cathedral in the new Gothic style was launched.  In the 15th Century an archbishop incorporated  Gothic design new Renaissance features into the cathedral.  In 1796, in the course of the French Revolution, the new revolutionary government nationalised the cathedral and transformed it for a time into a Temple of Reason. Some of the furniture and sculpture was sold, and the chapel railings were melted down to make cannon

In 1822 lightning started a fire that destroyed the wood and lead Renaissance spire of the central tower. The architect Jean-Antoine Alavoine proposed to replace it with a new spire made of cast iron. The idea of an iron spire was highly controversial; the novelist Gustave Flaubert denounced it as "the dream of a metal-worker in a delirium." The new spire, 495 feet tall, was  completed in 1882. For a short time, from 1876 to 1880, the spire made Rouen Cathedral the world's tallest building, until the completion of Cologne Cathedral.