Basilique du Sacré-Cœur de Montmartre

 An Excerpt from the Chapter:
Potions, Puccini and Pandemics
Milan and Paris 1889 - 1890

I saw a Paris with Endie that would have been invisible to me at my age. We explored the Left Bank, along the Rue Bonaparte she showed me the École des Beaux-Arts where Miss Annie’s new husband and Willis’s friend Bernard Maybeck had studied. Another day exploring the right bank we entered the Passage des Panoramas, the oldest of the covered passages of Paris. Here was the Académie Julian’s headquarters where we met a number of artists painting and sculpting. Then we climbed the steep slope to Montmartre, hill of the martyr Saint Denis, the first bishop of Paris where the Basilica Sacré Coeur was being erected, but was far from complete in 1890.
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    I have always found the Basilica fascinating as much for the building difficulties as the reason for the build. One only has to do some simple research to learn the history of the Paris Commune and the misfortunes of France in 1870 to understand the ongoing confusion. Emperor Louis-Napoleon, Napoleon’s none-to-bright nephew, provoked a war with Bismarck’s powerful Prussia. Why? For the usual reasons that demagogic governments provoke wars: distracting a weary population with fear, and a common enemy. In this case, Prussia was the evil next-door. Louis-Napoleon and his generals were sure of a win. The Prussians were delighted. Bismarck needed German unification, and his generals were correctly reassuring. The outcome, like Waterloo before, was catastrophic for the French, capturing the Emperor himself and Paris beseiged. The French government accepted “humiliating” terms of surrender; but of course what terms of surrender aren’t humiliating? The Prussians finally retreated, having reclaimed the northern regions of Alsace and Lorraine as German territory. 
     The resulting widespread famine in Paris led to a total collapse of two successive governments. Some Parisians formed their own marxist government lasting two months. The communards’ stated purpose still seems prophetic in its moral stance, but the mob’s disorganized acts of looting and reprisals, was soon quelled. In 1871, Bloody Week “semaine sanglante”, the national army took the city with overwhelming force at great human and property cost. I wasn’t there, but the word massacre is still used here in Paris with estimates of twenty-thousand people killed in Paris during this time.
   Here’s the wrinkle, the French Parliament made the land available for the construction of a church on the Montmartre site before the Paris Commune. The French defeat was conflated with the “moral decline” of France and church leaders sought a church dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus “to obtain infinite mercy and pardon to reverse the misfortune of France.” The church also wanted their Pope released by the Italians, but that’s another story. The hill of the martyr was chosen because Saint Denis was beheaded there by the Romans. Still, at the highest point of the city, overlooking the site of the Commune, many see it as a symbol of the repression of the martyred Communards. Again, if a Parisian told you the story, it would be different from a Frenchman in the countryside as to which martyrs are being honored.
     The Montmartre hill site also posed some problems for the builders. The remarks -There is more of Montmartre in Paris, than Paris in Montmartre - is literally true. Because that hill, that keeps sliding downwards to this day, and has been mined for almost two thousand years. The two hills on the right bank, Montmartre and Menilmontant (Belleville), were quarries for gypsum - plaster of paris - used in almost every building in Paris. From Roman times adobe deposits were also found used both as mortar and terracotta flooring tiles we still see commonly in France, called “carreaux” and the red roofing tiles called “tuiles”. The Tuileries gardens actually derived their name from a tile-making factory built there in 1372 and torn down in 1564 when Catherine de Medici replaced it with her Tuileries Palace - burned by the Communards of 1870.
     Besides fouling up the city’s water, gypsum’s “permeability” and mining caused another problem. The inside of the hill was riddled with hundreds of tunnels. The hill was not stable enough to support large structures above. Indeed, the piers holding up Sacre Coeur needed to be poured cement dug as deep as the church is high. Other buildings in the area are constantly having foundations reinforced because they are “sitting” atop Swiss cheese.
     The hill, giving no indication to the problems below ground, was a picturesque spot then. Several of its many windmills still survived, wine was still made from a vineyard on its slopes, and its maquis, a large patch of open ground that was dotted with small cottages and gardens, gave it an undeniably rural sensibility. Artists in search of peace, cheap rents and good air had begun to migrate to the hill and it was a flourishing colony and a popular rendezvous for writers, journalists and “Bohemians”.