Tradition holds that Clovis, the Frankish king who united much of what is now France under his rule, was baptized into Catholic Christianity around 496 CE by Bishop Remigius at Reims, abandoning the Arian Christianity or paganism of his predecessors for the orthodox Catholic faith of the Gallo-Roman population he ruled. Later French monarchy treated it as the founding religious moment of a specifically Catholic French kingship, and that memory is what eventually made Reims the customary site for crowning French kings.
That coronation tradition developed gradually rather than beginning with Clovis himself, becoming firmly established by the eleventh century. The most celebrated of these ceremonies took place in 1429, when Charles VII was crowned at Reims with Joan of Arc present, having led the campaign that broke through English and Burgundian held territory to reach the city. Her insistence on Reims reflected the symbolic weight the site had accumulated.
The cathedral standing today is substantially a thirteenth century Gothic rebuilding of an earlier church on the same site, renowned for its sculptural program, including the celebrated smiling angel among its west facade figures, and for stained glass renewed across the centuries, including modern additions by Marc Chagall.
The First World War brought the cathedral close to total loss. German artillery shelled Reims repeatedly beginning in September 1914, and a resulting fire destroyed much of the roof, leaving the building an internationally publicized symbol of wartime cultural destruction. Restoration, substantially funded by John D. Rockefeller Jr. among others, took over two decades, and the cathedral reopened in 1938, a year before a second war would again put French monuments at risk.