Clermont-Ferrand Cathedral (1248-1902): the black cathedral the Goncourt brothers called “the coalmen’s”

History

Bishop Hugues de La Tour’s 1248 decision to begin an ambitious new Gothic cathedral for Clermont reflected the broader wave of major cathedral-building that swept France during the 13th century. But master builder Jean Deschamps’s choice to source the building’s stone from the volcanic flows at Volvic, rather than the arkose sandstone more typically used for Gothic construction elsewhere in France, was a genuinely distinctive regional adaptation. It made practical sense given Clermont-Ferrand’s location within the volcanic Auvergne region, where lava stone was locally abundant. The stone’s properties permitted the unusually slender Gothic pillars visible throughout the building. And, whether intentionally or not, it gave the cathedral an unmistakable visual identity, setting it apart from virtually every other major French Gothic cathedral built in lighter-coloured stone.

The building’s more-than-six-and-a-half-century construction span, from 1248 through to 1902, meant the project outlasted the medieval period entirely, eventually incorporating substantial 19th-century intervention under Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, the era’s most influential and controversial French Gothic Revival architect, whose completion of the west facade brought his characteristic scholarly-but-interpretive approach to Gothic restoration to a building whose core medieval fabric long predated his involvement. The Goncourt brothers’ “Cathédrale des charbonniers” nickname, while originally likely intended at least partly as a wry or even mildly disparaging comment on the building’s unusual dark colouring relative to the pale stone of most famous French cathedrals, has since become an affectionately used popular epithet reflecting the cathedral’s genuinely singular visual character within French ecclesiastical architecture.