Six contemporary windows designed by the French artist Claire Tabouret are scheduled to be unveiled in Notre-Dame de Paris in December 2026. As of 9 November 2026, installation was planned for the period from mid-October to late November, and no report confirming that it has begun or finished had been found.
What is being installed
The new glass is intended for six chapels on the south side of the cathedral. Each window takes Pentecost, the descent of the Holy Spirit, as its theme. The six windows being removed are non-figurative grisaille windows dating from the 1860s, installed during Eugène Viollet-le-Duc’s nineteenth-century restoration of the building.
The State is paying for the project, which the Ministry of Culture began in April 2024. Its origin was a request from the Archbishop of Paris, Laurent Ulrich, to which the President of the Republic agreed in December 2023. On 18 December 2024 Tabouret and the Simon-Marq workshop in Reims, founded in 1640, were chosen to carry out the work. Full-size models followed in the first half of 2025, and manufacture of the glass started that autumn. The panels are being assembled with traditional lead came and fitted into the existing ironwork.
The legal challenge
The heritage association Sites & Monuments, together with a private donor, asked the Paris administrative court to annul the public contract. On 27 November 2025 the court dismissed the case. It found that the 2019 law on the restoration, and its decree, give no definition of conservation or restoration, and that the Venice Charter, an international text on monument conservation, cannot be relied on directly. The donor’s claim was also ruled inadmissible. The association said it would appeal.
A second action followed after the regional prefect authorised removal of the old windows in April 2026. In May 2026 a judge hearing urgent applications declined to suspend that authorisation, on the ground that the works were not irreversible and there was no urgency. The wider case on the merits and the appeal against the first judgment were both still pending in the latest reports found.
Fate of the earlier windows
Once restored, four of the removed windows are to be shown at the Château de Pierrefonds, and the other two at the Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine in Paris.
Responsibility for the fire
The restoration follows the fire of April 2019. In June 2019 the Paris prosecutor stated that there were no indications of a criminal origin, and an electrical fault or a discarded cigarette were considered the likeliest causes. A judicial investigation into possible negligence was opened. The exact cause has not been officially established, and as of the latest report found, in November 2024, nobody had been charged. The disagreement over the windows is a question of heritage policy, and no person or organisation has been held responsible for it.
Related reading: how to read a church window and ecclesiastical stained glass.
Published 9 November 2026