There are, sometimes, beautiful coincidences willed by Providence. On December 8th, 2022, on the solemnity of the Immaculate Conception, the Basilica of the Sacré Cœur of Montmartre was finally classified as a historical monument. A little over 150 years after its construction, the honour arrives better late than never.
For the millions of tourists who visit this place—so emblematic of Paris—every year, the status of ‘historical monument’ for the Sacré Coeur was obvious. Many people must have thought that the building had already been listed.
The classification comes after years of furious controversy. The process started in the autumn of 2020 on the initiative of the regional directorate of cultural affairs and the Île-de-France region in partnership with the City of Paris—which for the occasion had chosen, curiously, to put aside its visceral and militant anti-Catholicism.
Some sinister characters took it upon themselves to make known their vigorous opposition to the classification. Communist elected officials, Freemason dignitaries, secularist associations—all the representatives of the leagues of republican virtue—took offence at a reward deemed undue for the Parisian basilica.
The reason given is almost as old as the basilica itself. Left-wing memory tinkerers hate the Sacré Coeur. They believe it was built over the corpses of the Commune revolutionaries who set Paris ablaze after the Frano-Prussian war in 1871 in a frantic attempt to resurrect the great hours of the Terror of 1793; they believe that the leaders of France at the time built the church as a sign of atonement for the crimes perpetrated by the revolutionaries of the Commune, whose worthy heirs they claim to be today. It is insufferable to them that the poor basilica had been built during a period known as the Moral Order (l’Ordre moral), i.e., the years of uncertainty from 1871 to 1879, when the fate of France hung in the balance between a Republic and a monarchy, as it awaited the return of the king after the fall of the Second Empire. As a result, the Sacré Cœur became for them the symbol of oppression.
A quick dive into history will put things in order. The project to erect a basilica on the Mount of Martyrs was born at the end of 1870, before the outbreak of the Commune, in a difficult international context marked by the French defeat by Prussia. The location was highly symbolic since the French word Montmartre—Mont des Martyrs—refers to the hill where historically Saint Denis, the first bishop of Paris, was beheaded by the Romans. One of the dramatic consequences of the collapse of Napoleon III in the face of Bismarck was the sudden withdrawal of the French troops engaged alongside the pope in Rome. Oddly enough, the pontiff, thus abandoned, found himself delivered—without any possible resistance—to the Italian unitarians who thereafter made Rome the capital of their new unified kingdom.
Following this double capitulation, statesmen of the time—steeped in Catholicism and national pride—thought it their duty to implore forgiveness and mercy for France by means of supplication to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The Commune broke out a few months later, in March 1871, delaying the project. The Parisian hill then became the scene of bloody confrontations. The Communards, feverishly anti-clerical, ferociously executed priests and nuns—before being subjected to bloody repression by those who came from Versailles to restore order in the capital. With the return of calm, a ‘memorial competition’ was established on the spot. The Holy Montmartre, the Mount of Martyrs, was opposed by the Communard Montmartre, the bastion of an outrageously anti-religious revolt.
The first stone of the building was not laid until 1875. When the time came to decorate the walls of the basilica with magnificent mosaics, one of them mentioned the crimes of the Commune, which were to be atoned for. But this was not the first and main reason for the construction of the Sacré Cœur. That only came second.
Yet, today leftist ideologues remain convinced of the contrary and consider the church a living insult to the glorious Commune. Therefore, their most ardent wish is to have it destroyed.
A few years ago, on the occasion of a ‘participatory budget,’ Ian Brossat, a communist elected official of the capital, proposed the outright destruction of the Sacré Coeur, even suggesting “the total demolition” of what he called the “wart,” on the occasion of a “great popular festival.”
It would be useful to remind these chagrined minds that today, the Sacré-Coeur is the most visited monument in Paris. It is immortalised in tourists’ photos from all over the world, and the hill of Montmartre represents in many hearts the best of the Parisian art de vivre. In concrete terms, this also means that every year, the holy basilica brings in a certain number of hard-earned euros through tourism and the business it generates: euros, which the same leftists are quite happy to find in the coffers of the Paris City Hall to finance cultural projects that are earmarked to serve, among other things, ugliness or LGBT communitarianism. These 21st-century revolutionaries are too obtuse to understand that Paris needs the Sacré Coeur, even if only to serve their vile interests.
Today, safeguarding our heritage is paramount to the defence of our identity, a delightful one, living through the beauty handed down through the centuries. Fortunately, it ensures a future for this glorious church, for which we may dare revive the hymn once popular in the 1870s and still relevant today: “God of mercy, O victorious God, save Rome and France, in the name of the Sacred Heart.”
