Monument of Reaction by Peter Brooks

Mac-Mahon decreed the restoration of the Vendome Column, begun in 1873 and finished in 1875. But well before Mac-Mahon’s presidency, the most reactionary elements in France undertook the incarnation of its anti-Communard (and anti-republican) sentiments in the stone of the Basilique du Sacre-Coeur, of Basilica of the Sacred Heart. It would rise on the height of Montmartre, just about where the National Guard cannons had stood, those cannons whose attempted capture had ignited the Commune insurgency. The basilica dominates the Paris skyline still today; it’s the sight that generally meets your eyes first in arriving of last when leaving the city. It’s a building hard to place architecturally or historically. Tourists flock to it as one of the wonders of the world on a par with the cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris, possibly without much attention to its place in French history and the political message it conveys. Frommer’s travel guide to Paris offer this capsule version: “After France’s 1870 defeat by the Prussians, the basilica was planned as a votive offering to cure France’s misfortunes.” That’s a considerable bowdlerization. The builders of Sacre-Coeur saw it as expiation for the sins of republican France, most egregiously represented in the Commune.

The story of the basilica may evoke incredulity, so improbable and even perverse as it may seem. The idea for the church originated in 1870 with two laymen, Alexandre Legentil and Hubert Rohault de Fleury, who attributed France’s defeat by Prussia to French decadence and secularism, its falling away from the way of Christ. They called for a “national vow” to rededicate France to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. This was the extreme version of a popular story that wanted to see 1870-1871 as divine chastisement. We encountered a left, secular version in Zola’s vision of Paris burning in expiation of the luxury and corruption of the Second Empire, in The Debacle. Such a thorough catastrophe had to be justified as the wages of sin. France’s moral failure was evidenced not only in defeat by Prussia, but also its inability to rescue Pope Pius IX from Italian insurgents who were intent on stripping the Vatican of its temporal power. Napoleon III’s Italian and papal politics amounted to A doomed balancing act: he was attempting at once to promote Italian unity and to protect the pope’s rule over Rome – which the insurgents insisted must be the capital of Italy.

Part of the complex story in which the emperor managed to make enemies on both sides was the formation of the Papal Zouaves, an international volunteer corps in defense of the pope that recruited from France many unredeemed reactionaries, especially from the Vendee region, in Brittany, that had long resisted republican rule during the Revolution. These Zouaves, commanded by Athanase de Charette, great- nephew of a famous Vendee general, joined the French Army of the Loire in which Flaubert, like many of his contemporaries, placed their last hope for reversing the fortune of war and breaking the Prussian siege of Paris. Charette, though, insisted that his Zouaves retain a separate identity within the army officially dedicated to republicanism. Along with Louis-Gaston de Sonis, a famously pious Catholic general, he led a heroic, though vain – and somewhat absurd- charge at the Battle of Loigny, in the Loire Valley, on December 2, 1870.

Toward evening, as light was fading on that cold and bloody engagement of what remained of the French Army, de Sonis ordered a charge on the Prussian positions. His troops hesitated, and he turned to Charrette and his Zouaves tyo lead the charge. The standard-bearer of the Zouaves unfurled their white royalist banner with its emblem of the bleeding heart and the words, “Sacre Coeur de Jesus, Suavez la France,” reflecting the belief that only the Sacred Heart of Jesus could work the miracle of French salvation. The charge resounded not only with the cry “Vive la France!” but also with “Vive Pie IX!” More than half the legion fell dead. Both Charette and de Sonis were wounded; de Sons had to have a leg amputated the next day. Neither ever reconciled to the republic. The cult of the Sacred Heart in which they had enlisted brought together the irreconcilables of modern France.

For Legentil, Rohault de Fluery, and others who joined in the national vow, 1870 was not only a failure but also a sin that needed expiation, which could best be symbolized in a new religious edifice that made evident a rededication of the French nation to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. “This temple,” declared Monsignor Joseph- Hippolyte  Guibert, archbishop of Paris, “will stand among us as a protest against other monuments and works of art erected for the glorification of vice and impiety.” There were early proposals that the basilica be constructed on the foundation of the Opera, designed by Charles Garnier under Napoleon III but not yet finished, which was considered by many to be the very incarnation of Second Empire excess and decadence. What would be more appropriate than a severe church in its placed? But nothing could equal the allure of Montmartre, especially its height: the foundations of the church would stand higher than the top of the Pantheon, home of such impious ancestors of the republic as Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

The Butte Montmartre was highly symbolic, and not only because of its elevation above Paris. Its name originally meant “mountain of martyrs” from the travails of early Christians. St. Denis, bishop of the city, is supposed to have been seized, tortured, and decapitated by the heathen Gauls there in 327. A chapel to his memory was destroyed in the French Revolution. Archbishop Guibert was persuaded in 1972 that Montmartre was the place for the expiatory church. His predecessor, Monsignor Darboy, had resisted the idea as unnecessarily confrontational; but the relatively liberal Darboy had been shot as a hostage by the Commune, and had been replaced by the hard-liner Guibert. Climbing the Butte in October, Guibert exclaimed: “It is here, it is here where the martyrs are, it is here that the Sacred Heart must reign so that it can beckon all to it!” So in 1873 the National Assembly, dominated by non- Parisians – les ruraux – who were largely conservatives, monarchists and Catholics, voted, 382 to 138, to declare the site on Montmartre “of public utility,” which in France means you can then take the land by the equivalent of our eminent domain, and raise funds for the project.

There followed, inevitably, a story of intense conflict. Here were the most reactionary elements of France intent in creating a monument that would over- top the Pantheon, symbol of the secular greatness (the Eiffel Tower was still in the future), The cult of the Sacred Heart of Jesus had an interesting and, from a secular point of view, sinister history. It dated to a relatively recent candidate for sainthood, Marguerite-Marie Alacoque, who in the seventeenth century had visions of the wounds of Christ – of what he was made to suffer by humanity – which, with the support of the Jesuits, was proclaimed a symbol of divine love for humanity. She was beatified by Pope Pius IX in 1864 (and canonized by Benedict XV in 1920). Wearing the image of the bleeding Sacred Heart of Jesus was thought to ward off danger. During the resistance to the Jacobin republic in the Vendee, peasant soldiers stitched the emblem to their jackets to protect against  republican bullets. It became a symbol of allegiance to the monarchy and the Church and rejection of the republic- a conflict that would play itself out all through the nineteenth century in France. There arose a legend that Louis XVI, imprisoned by the Jacobins, vowed to dedicate France to the cult of the Sacred Heart were he to be delivered from captivity. When instead he died on the guillotine, the cult only grew stronger, uniting those intent on counter-revolution. (When Stendhal, for instance, wants a symbol of Restoration reaction, he has his women characters educated in the convents of the Sacred Heart.) So by the time of the Terrible Year, the proposition to crown impious and insurrectional Paris with  church dedicated to the Sacred Heart was an audacious gesture of anti-republicanism and clerical potency.  But by  1873, the legislature had few members willing to oppose the clergy. In a phrase that seemed to sum up the thinking of the right-wing majority, the bishop of Perpignan declared that the church high on Montmartre would be a lightening rod “to protect us against the lightning bolts of divine anger.”

So work began.. in 1876 a provisional chapel was completed, and became  important as a place  of pilgrimage for the faithful from all over France, and hence for the collection of donations for the construction of the permanent church, itself conceived from the start as a pilgrim’s goal. In addition to the contribution of large donors, there provisions for modest ones. You could over time full up as card ruled off in squares, the “carte du Sacre-Coeur,” for ten centimes a square, and when you had filled in all the squares, you had purchased a stone for the church. You could then write out a vow on parchment that would be sealed in a glass tube and placed within a hollow that was cut into the stone (in order to secure  the tongs that lifted it into place). Your vow, sealed in glass, would be cemented into place before the next row of stones was laid. The basilica is literally filled with such texts, as if in representation of its self-conscious creation as itself a message to the people of France.  Pilgrimage  to the site became an important rite for provincial French who held fast to the beliefs that so many Parisians had abandoned. This divide between leftist, non-believing Parisians and devout denizens of rural and small-town France as also part of the story: Paris needed to be chastised and brought to heel.

After the fledgling republic survived the restoration crisis, thanks to the intransigence of Comte de Chambord- who insisted that the crown be represented in Bourbon colors, and President Mac-Mahon’s failed attempt to override the Assembly in 1877, it began to secularize and to emerge from the rigors of “Moral Order.” Successive governments tried to kill the basilica project, but without success. The Radicals led by Georges Clemenceau in fact by 1882 won a vote, 261 to 199, to stop the building, but their action never took effect, largely because the government feared the loss of jobs for the workers on the project. It moved forward despite the fact that the Montmartre site proved to be a difficult and expensive one on which to build. It turned out there were gypsum mines, for material used in making plaster of Paris, honeycombing the hill. Before the real building could begin, it would be necessary to sink masonry pillars deep into the hill as supporters for the edifice. Eighty-three pillars were driven into the Butte. This was costly and time-consuming. Still the project continued. Between 1876 and 1910, 76 billion francs was spent on it. Meanwhile, in 1889, Zola’s novel Paris dramatized a (failed) anarchist plot to blow up the Sacre- Coeur. The basilica was finished by 1914, but its consecration was delayed by another war with Germany – the Great War – until 1919. France had by then officially voted for the separation of church and state (in 1905), but that perhaps made the emblem dominating the secular city all the more powerful.

The strange architecture of the Sacre- Coeur has significance as well. A competition for the design of the church attracted seventy-eight entries, which were put on public display at the Palais de L’Industrie in February 1874. There was a curious deficit of design in the indigenous tradition of Ile-de-France., the Gothic cathedral, probably because the small, squarish plot on Montmartre didn’t lend itself to a long Gothic nave. The Romanesque style, newly popular, predominated. Many entries proposed domes. The winner – on the judgment of a panel that consisted half of architects and half of clergy, with Archbishop Guibert reserving the final decision to himself- had many domes. It was the work of a relatively obscure but well-connected architect from the southwest of France, Paul Abadie, considered to be a disciple of Viollet-le-Duc, the great restorer, many would say simultaneously the destroyer, of Gothic monuments through-out France. Abadie was a diocesan architect, and hence held the advantage of enjoying long-standing relations with a number of bishops. His model for the Sacre-Coeur was apparently the cathedral of Saint- Front in Perigueux, which he had restored starting in 1852 or, more accurately, reconstructed.

Saint-Front dates mainly from the twelfth century, though with earlier foundations and many later restorations, including Abadie own, which was a complete make-over that regularized the cathedral. It was had always been something of a stylistic mystery, since it resembles so little the indigenous French tradition (but that was true of a number of other churches in the southwest as well). Its dome was thought to derive from St. Mark’s in Venice, and there is a generally  “eastern” feel to the structure – more Byzantine than French. Some have cited Hagia Sophia in Istanbul as is source. So while the Basilique du Sacre-Coeur is often referred to as ‘eclectic” in style (the campanile, for instance, is clearly of Italian inspiration), it strikes the viewer, still today, as a radical and unwelcome break in the stylistic traditions of the Ile-de-France. Perhaps, it has been suggested, it is supposed to represent a self-conscious hearkening back to an earlier moment in Christiam inspiration, a renewal of the tradition of proselytism that was part of the Catholic revival of the post-Commune years. St. Front, the first bishop of Perigueux – appointed by St. Peter himself, in some versions of the legend- is held to have converted much of Perigord in the fourth or fifth century. The conversion of unbelieving French was on the minds of the basilica’s sponsors.

How strange, when one thinks about it, that glorious Paris should be crowned with this image of repentance and expiation. Although the national vows was formulated following defeat by the Prussians in December 1870 and January 1871, the crimes of the Commune would soon take the dominant place in the complex of sins to be expiated. After the laying of the cornerstone, Rohault de Fleury, who had joined with Legentil in devising the original vow, declared: “Yes, it is here where the Commune began, here where Generals Clement Thomas and Lecomte were assassinated, that the church of the Sacred Heart will rise! Despite ourselves, this thought would not leave us during the ceremony you have just read an account of. We remembered this hill furnished with cannons, overrun by inebriated fanatics, inhabited by a population hostile to any religious idea and seemingly animated most of all by a hatred of the Church.” Republican France, though now holding  political power, would have to see rise before all eyes a symbolic refusal of all that the republic stood for. The basilica was from the start “at war with the spirit of modern times,” as a dissenting deputy put it: an appeal to those who rejected modern French history, and perhaps modernity itself.

Inside, the church is richly decorated with mosaics, some of them quite extraordinary in subject matter to anyone who bothers to look closely. High above the alter, the mosaics of the cupola, executed by Luc Olivier Merson, representing the national vow, with the presentation of a replica of the basilica by four successive archbishops of Paris, along with its lay sponsors:  Alexandre Legentil, Hubert Rohault de Fluery, and Emile Keller, the Legitimist deputy  who floor-managed the legislation enabling the project, Generals de Sonis and Charette, the family of Louis XVI, with the king kneeling in a posture of devotion, dedicating France to the cult of the Sacred Heart. There is also in the background a proletarian sans-culotte from the time of the great Revolution, leaning with indifference against a pillar. The mosaics offer a celebration of the most radially reactionary figures of modern French  history; they also constitute an illustration of a claim to the continuity of Catholic France, interrupted by revolution, contested by a radicalized proletariat, but nonetheless the interpretation of French history . If you descend  to the crypt of the basilica, you will find an urn holding the heart of Legentil, the first to propose the vow.

The basilica participates fully in that crucial battle of emblems that followed the Terrible year. The Comte de Chambord on his deathbed asked that the bannerof the Saxred Heart that had been unfurled by Charette during the unavailing charge at the battle of Loigny – the one we see in the mosaics- be placed over his body. It was a sacred relic. The church in Loigny-la-Bataille holds a stain-glass window where St Henri is represented in the likeness of Chambord, the King Henry V who never was. As Rene Remond writes in Sites of Memory, still today the Sacre-Coeur is “the symbol and the rallying sign of all those who refuse the Revolution.” A site of memory, indeed: a place of pilgrimage explicitly designed to call to mind the long tradition of Church opposition to irreligious France and its attempts to upset the reigning political order. France in this view is an apostate nation that must be brought back into the fold. The victory of the ultraconservative, Catholic, monarchic France is perpetuated in the white stone of the basilica. One can by this point say it is only a symbolic victory, sine France followed the course of republican perdition ever more resolutely into the future.

Yet symbolic victories are not without importance, especially in France . . .

Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris; The story of a Friendship, A Novel, And A Terrible Year by Peter Brooks; Basic Books. N.Y., 2017. pages 124-132