On July 15, 2025, La Poste issued a stamp from the "Heritage and Tourism" series featuring the Notre-Dame de Sées Cathedral in the Orne department.
The two spires rising from the plain are those of a Gothic cathedral whose construction began shortly after King Philip Augustus' conquest of Normandy in 1204.
Between the nascent Orne River and the Écouves Forest, Notre-Dame de Sées has dominated the episcopal city and its eleven historic monuments for eight centuries. Despite a bold, soaring design and a particularly troubled history, it celebrated the 700th anniversary of its dedication in 2010. The southern bastion of the Duchy of Normandy, Sées Cathedral bears witness to the unstable borders and rivalries that nearly ruined it on several occasions, as did the four cathedrals and the Roman temple that preceded it. Its façade, renowned in the 15th century as one of the most beautiful in France, has lost all of its statuary. However, generations of architects and craftsmen have successfully consolidated the building without distorting its medieval spirit, present in both the sculptures and the stained-glass windows.
The monument has retained its canonical quarters, its architectural unity, its harmonious proportions, and its remarkable transept rose windows: one radiating in red tones to the south, the other with a hexagonal blue structure to the north. Its chevet is described by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc as a masterpiece of 13th-century French architecture for its lightness and its dialogue with light. Inside, one can discover the Cavaillé-Coll organ, inaugurated in 1883, the 14th-century marble statue of Notre-Dame de Sées, and one of Bernini's last works, the Salvator Mundi, from the mid-17th century. It is at the winter solstice that the sun's reflections through the stained-glass windows are at their most expressive, like an uninterrupted transmission of the message that the medieval master builders inscribed in the stone of this discreet cathedral.
