Sacré-Cœur

On 4 September 1870 Felix Fournier, Bishop of Nantes, wrote that the defeat at Sedan and the capture of Napoleon III were divine punishment for a century of moral decline since 1789, and called for a Paris church dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. In January 1871 the philanthropist Alexandre Legentil set down a vow - "We recognize that we were guilty and justly punished" - promising to contribute to a sanctuary in Paris that might also free the Pope, then held captive in Italy.

The ground belonged partly to the city and partly to private owners, so the promoters went to the National Assembly: the law declaring the church of public utility passed on 24 July 1873 by 382 votes to 138, with 160 abstentions. It let the Archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Guibert, buy or expropriate the Montmartre land, required that the church be paid for entirely by subscription, and assigned it in perpetuity to public Catholic worship.

Montmartre was chosen for its Christian past - tradition holds that Saint Denis, patron saint of Paris, was beheaded on the hill - and for a height and visibility that made the church the highest and most visible building in the capital.

The same hill was where the Commune began on 18 March 1871 and where its suppression ended in bloodshed that May, and the idea that the basilica expiates it grew only gradually. No inscription inside links the building to the Commune, though many explain its origins. The Catholic priest Jacques Benoist held that the founders were reacting first to the liberalism of the Second Empire and to the seizure of the Papal States, that the Commune rising was a further motive, and that Belleville was seriously considered because Commune hostages were shot there. Rohault de Fleury, at the laying of the first stone in 1875, declared that it was where the Commune had begun, and where the generals Clement-Thomas and Lecomte had been killed, that the church of the Sacred Heart was rising.

Paul Abadie won a competition of seventy-seven proposals with a Romano-Byzantine design, and Cardinal Guibert laid the cornerstone on 16 June 1875, the work being entrusted to the Oblates of Mary Immaculate. Subsidence and underground galleries forced the sinking of eighty-three wells filled with rock and concrete to reach solid ground. A provisional chapel was consecrated on 3 March 1876, and pilgrims' money followed, much of it through a subscription that carved donors' names on the stone or column they had paid for.

Abadie died in 1884 and five architects followed him. In 1882, with the walls barely above the foundations, Georges Clemenceau's left-wing coalition won the elections and parliament blocked further funding, but liabilities of twelve million francs from cancellation obliged the government to let the work continue. The Blessed Sacrament has been displayed above the high altar without interruption since 1885. The interior opened for worship in 1891, and a second Clemenceau motion in 1897 was heavily defeated, since abandonment would have meant repaying thirty million francs to eight million subscribers. The dome was finished in 1899, the bell tower in 1912 and the building in 1914; the basilica was consecrated on 16 October 1919, though official completion is dated to 1923.

The bourdon called the Savoyarde was cast on 13 May 1891 by the Paccard foundry at Annecy-le-Vieux and given by the four dioceses of Savoy. At 18,835 kg it is the largest bell in France, and twenty-eight horses hauled it up to the basilica on 16 October 1895. It rings for the major feasts, and rang on the night of 24 August 1944, when La Nueve reached the Hotel de Ville as the first French troops back in Paris since 1940 and Pierre Schaeffer, broadcasting the news, asked any priest listening to ring his church's bells.

A bomb was exploded inside the church in 1976, and in 2004 the socialist mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoe, named the square below it after the Communarde Louise Michel. In 2021 left-wing deputies blocked a measure to list the church so that it would not be honoured in the 150th anniversary year of the Commune; the National Commission of Patrimony and Architecture then voted unanimously on 8 December 2022 to classify it as a monument historique, which Jean-Luc Melenchon condemned as "a glorification of the assassination of 32,000 Paris Communards shot in just 8 days". The basilica belongs to the city of Paris, draws some eleven million pilgrims and visitors a year, and its dome is open to visitors.