La Butte de Montmartre avec Basilique du Sacré Cœur en construction, François M. Borrel
Musée Carnavalet, Wikimedia
Le Sacré Cœur vu depuis le Square Louise Michel
Basilica of the Sacred Heart
The Basilica of the Sacré Coeur now dominates the Butte Montmartre.
On1 March 1871, it was here that the cannons paid for by Parisians were moved from the west of Paris and stored, lest they be confiscated by the Germans as they marched down the Champs Elysées from1 to 3 March.
After the French defeat in 1870, the loss of Alsace and Moselle and the ensuing Paris Commune, Catholic businessman Alexandre Legentil and his brother-in-law Baron Hubert Rohault de Fleury launched the "Vœu national", a Catholic patriotic brotherhood with the aim of building a Basilica of the Sacred Heart [of Jesus] to restore Catholic principles to French society and bring about a new "moral order". Its construction, financed by a national subscription, began in 1875 on the very site where the Commune began on 18 March 1871 and was explicitly announced as a "monument of expiation for the crimes of the Commune".
At the laying of the foundation stone for the basilica, Hubert Rohault de Fleury said: " It is where the Commune began, where Generals Clément-Thomas and Lecomte were assassinated, that the Church of the Sacred Heart is being built! We remember this hillock lined with cannons, criss-crossed by drunken hooligans, inhabited by a population that seemed hostile to all religious ideas and that seemed especially animated by hatred of the Church ".
Its construction , made difficult by the cavities dug in the subsoil, requiring the construction of numerous masonry shafts some forty metres deep, was not completed until 1923. The cavities in question were also used to bury the many corpses of Communards killed in the fighting during Bloody Week. It could therefore be said that the Sacré Cœur was symbolically and physically built on the corpses of the Commune.
It should also be noted that this basilica is oriented North-South and not East-West, as is the rule for Christian churches. This further accentuates the political, rather than religious, nature of the monument.
Émile Zola wrote in " Paris", whose main character dreams of blowing up the building: "I know of no more imbecilic nonsense, Paris crowned, dominated by this idolatrous temple, built to glorify the absurd. Such impudence, such a blow to reason, after so much work, so many centuries of science and struggle!
