Did French officials state that "a religious attack" caused the spire of France's nearly thousand-year-old Rouen cathedral to catch fire on July 11, 2024? No, that's not true: As of July 12, 2024, the cause of the fire was still under investigation, according to the mayor of Rouen and a city portal. No credible media organizations have reported otherwise.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) on X, formerly known as Twitter, on July 11, 2024. Atop of a video of the cathedral, the caption said:
🚨 BREAKING:
The 1000-year-old Notre-Dame cathedral in Rouen is on fire. Authorities say it could be a religious attack.
This is what the post looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Fri Jul 12 13:16:16 2024 UTC)
Contrary to the claim, the French authorities made plain on the day of the post's publication that they had not yet determined the cause of the blaze.
On July 11, 2024, after the start of the spire fire, Rouen Mayor Nicolas Mayer-Rossignol (archived here) posted an image of the blaze and wrote on X (archived here):
Origine inconnue à ce stade.
Translated from French by Lead Stories staff:
Unknown cause at this stage.
As his profile on X showed (archived here), the mayor, as of July 12, 2024, had not posted anything that could have been interpreted as a suggestion that the fire "could be a religious attack."
A notification (archived here) on Rouen's municipal website on the day of the fire said the same, as translated by Lead Stories staff:
The cause of the fire is as yet unknown.
The statement pointed out that the relatively small blaze occurred in an area that was hard for members of the general public to access:
The flames only affected the metal structure of the spire and the protective tarpaulin that surrounds the worksite.
The spire has been under restoration since 2016.
France's Minister of Culture Rachida Dati, who visited the site of the fire, said nothing on July 11, 2024, on her X account (archived here) about its cause.
France's Le Monde (archived here) cited Rouen prosecutor Frédéric Teillet (archived here), whose statements did not contain what the viral post claimed, either. As translated by Google Translate, the article reported:
The Rouen prosecutor said an investigation was 'underway to determine the causes of the fire,' which 'are most likely accidental.'
Reuters (archived here), which talked to Archbishop of Rouen Dominique Lebrun (archived here), reported:
He added he thought a spark from a weld could have fallen onto a plastic cabin interior at the work site.
As of July 12, 2024, France's state news agency Agence France-Presse (archived here) had posted no stories about French officials saying that a "religious attack" could have caused the fire.
The Associated Press (archived here), the BBC (archived here) The New York Times (archived here), The Guardian (archived here) and TIME (archived here) also said nothing that supported the claim on X.
France 24 (archived here), France's government-funded international TV network, referred to viral posts about the purported "religious attack" on the Rouen cathedral as misinformation. The outlet wrote in English on July 11, 2024:
Rouen's authorities never said this
A search for keywords, seen here (archived here), across websites indexed by Google News also produced nothing that would corroborate the claim.
Other Lead Stories fact checks concerning international topics can be found here. Stories about Europe are here.
