Individual Article:
Selections from the McCormick Library of Special Collections
The spring issue of Library Briefings spotlighted materials relating to late 19th-century Montmartre held in the Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections. Specifically, the issue showed publications generated from the Chat Noir cabaret, as examples of Montmartre's emergence as a “bohemian” community of artists, and, tangentially or coextensively, as a locus of anti-establishment feelings, be they republican, anarchist, or subversive without conscious political pedigree. This article looks at recent acquisitions relating to what is today a contradictory landmark of that neighborhood, the Basilica of Sacré-Coeur.
Montmartre, rather obviously, means “Mount of Martyrs.” The term originated with the legend of the martyrdom of St. Denys, the first bishop of Paris and subsequent patron saint of France. Denys was beheaded on Montmartre in the third century, but with the vim characteristic of the successful his headless torso retrieved the head and carried it away about two miles, handing it off to a woman named Catula, who, it is said, “was good,” and apparently unflappable.
Somewhat more concrete evidence exists relating to Montmartre as a site of martyrdom in the 19th century. As mentioned in our spring article, Montmartre was a bastion of the Communards during their brief reign of power during the Siege of Paris in the Franco-Prussian war. On May 18, 1871, the hill of Montmartre was the site of conflict between a crowd of working class Parisians who wanted to storm the cannons stationed there and a band of French soldiers who were ordered by their generals to fire upon the crowd, French killing French. When the troops refused to obey this command the two generals, Lecomte and Thomas, were captured by the crowd and executed. They were quickly elevated by reactionary forces to the status of martyrs, and their deaths and those of some clerics also executed during the siege were used as excuses for the brutality of the vengeance to come.
Sacré-Coeur is, of course, Sacred Heart, and one of the Library's recent acquisitions is a spectacularly fresh copy of R. P. Jonquet’s Montmartre Autrefois et Aujourd’hui [Paris, Dumoulin,1890], a book sympathetically tracing the cult of the Sacred Heart in France and the progress theretofore of the construction of the Basilica of Sacré-Coeur. In its frontispiece illustration we see an image of Marguerite-Marie , the late 17th-century nun whose vision of Christ with a flaming heart spawned the beginning of the French Sacred Heart movement. In the background, above the windmills that long served as Montmartre landmarks, is an image of Sacré-Coeur, allegorically enflamed. Among the adherents to this cult of the Sacred Heart were Louis XVI and his wife Marie Antoinette, and because of this the Sacred Heart became an emblem of counter-revolutionary royalists and clerics during the Revolution and in the politically tumultuous century that followed.
The disaster (for France) of the Franco-Prussian war led to the kind of “why us?” soul searching such despairs engender. The Second Empire of Napoleon III, which had brought France into that war, was cast as a decadent demon, whose irreligious worldliness had brought upon France the judgment of an angry God. One of the penitent moralizers in France was Alexander Legentil, who fled Paris prior to the arrival of the Prussian invaders and vowed that if God saved Paris and France and delivered the sovereign pontiff, he would contribute according to his means to the construction in Paris of a sanctuary dedicated to the Sacred Heart. Paris and France did survive, but at a terrible cost. Besides the destruction of buildings caused by the war and Communards, the re-taking of Paris by French government forces was a bloodbath, occasioning the deaths of approximately 20,000 to 30,000 Parisian citizens, a ratio of approximately a 1,000 to 1 of those “martyred” by the Communards. Many of the deaths occurred on the hill of Montmartre; the roads there ran red.
It was on top of this hill that parties of the Catholic Church, royalists, and others on the Right decided that the new ex-voto Basilica should be built. As the highest point of Paris, the new Basilica would be visible throughout the city as a triumphant emblem of what was termed “the Government of Moral Order,” a complicity of the State and the Roman Catholic Church. Funds to build Sacré-Coeur were solicited nationwide. In fact, it was the provinces much more than Paris that chiefly supported this act of expiation, and donations were solicited by clever marketing devices such as getting one's name inscribed on a brick of the new building for a certain monetary contribution.
The design of the new Basilica was decided by an architectural competition. The McCormick Library recently acquired a relic of that competition, the Souvenir du Concours de l’Église du Sacré-Coeur [Paris: J. Le Clere, 1874]. The book contains a text describing the competition and its contestants, as well as mounted albumen photographs of the designs of the finalists. The winner was the plan of Paul Abadie. As in any such competition, it is interesting to see the losing entries as well; in fact, in some ways the losers Davioud, Moyaux, Pascal, Raulin shown in this book are more interesting, if only because they exist in designs alone.
Construction of the Basilica stretched out over the decades, and the building was not formally dedicated until after World War I. During this time, the monument was under constant attack by republicans and others of the Left. In October of 1880, for example, the city council of Paris voted 61 to 3 to revoke the law of public utility which had been hurriedly passed in 1873 to seize land on top of Montmartre for the construction of the basilica. One representative vented the feelings of many Parisians, particularly the bohemians of Montmartre, when he described Sacré-Coeur as “an incessant provocation to civil war.”
Even as the structure was nearing completion, proposals were made to revamp its identity and import. One idea was to turn the uncompleted structure into a four-star hotel. Another idea is presented in a book that arrived here just weeks ago, Gustave Téry’s Les Cordicoles [Paris: Édouard Cornély, 1902]. Téry was an ardent Republican and his suggestion, complete with some fascinating little plans, was to convert the basilica into a community center, the Maison du Peuple. The nave would be converted to a theater, other rooms would become play rooms for children, baths, and exercise centers, and on top of it all, rather than a statue of Christ, would be a heroic statue of Marianne, the allegorical symbol of French liberty. This indeed might have been a plan more likeable to the immediate local populace, but it was not to be. Like a big white cork, the Basilica on top of Montmartre bottles up rather than celebrates the local wine.
Scott Krafft
Information here is for the most part derived from two sources:
Raymond A. Jonas. “Sacred Tourism and Secular Pilgrimage: Montmartre and the Basilica of Sacré-Coeur”. From: Montmartre and the Making of Mass Culture. Gabriel P. Weisberg, editor. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001.
David Harvey. Consciousness and the Urban Experience: Studies in the History and Theory of Capitalist Urbanization. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985.