Paris in 2011: Sacre Coeur Cathedral

PV 3. Sacre Coeur Cathedral

Historical note: The 2011 "Occupy" movement in the US, starting with Wall Street, is protesting that 99% of the people own less, combined, than 1% of the very richest Americans! It may be a slight exaggeration, but it is a protest against being used.

The Paris "Commune" that occupied Paris was motivated by people who had been marginalized and mistreated by the aristocracy and the well-off. During a recent war, they were eating rats and worse, and now with peace, prosperity was again being pursued by the same people that were prosperous before and still, and who had just let them suffer horribly during this last war.

Having zero prospect for ever improving their lives, the people took over Paris. Gross violence ended this occupation. Let's hope it doesn't come to that in the US! Time and time again in history (as Hussey's book points out), when large masses of people are excluded from a decent life by forces seemingly unfairly stacked against them, and seemingly purposely designed to benefit only a small minority, revolution is often the outcome.

I knew that the Sacre Coeur cathedral was built to give thanks to the end of a very bloody time in Paris history. I just did not know, until Hussey told me on his pages 282-292, that this bloody time was not the result of an external foe’s attack on Paris, it was instead the attack on Paris by the government, attempting to take it back from the Parisians who were holding it as part of the revolution called the Commune.

The Commune was anti-government and anti-Church, and both for very good reasons. Government and Church were doing nothing to help the suffering of the lower classes of people. Quite the opposite. The Commune of 1871 was spurred on by true believers in anarchy, it was a war against the ruling classes of all sorts, secular or religious. Many of the anarchist leaders resided in, or at least did their conspiring in, the Montmartre district.

The Commune ended with a very bloody and destructive retaking of the city, with 40,000 arrested afterward, and 20,000 of the arrested summarily accused, tried, and shot. A full-blown (un)civil war.

To build a cathedral here on the Montmartre was to essentially place a very large symbol of the oppressor onto the central part of the territory of those who sought to throw off oppression. Of course to throw off that oppression, counter- oppression was employed, such as the imprisoning of many who were not in favor of the Commune’s ideals and the execution of some prisoners who were personally displeasing to the new 'prefect of police,' including an archbishop.

The Commune’s last stand was in the Pere Lachaise cemetery, which I had already added to my list of places to revisit, but not because of this mention in Hussey’s book. There the ragtag remnants were shot in flight, or if they surrendered they were lined up against a certain wall and executed as soon as they could be lined up properly. The executions by firing squads were so demanding on the soldiers' trigger fingers that a new invention was brought in, the machine gun, which made killing a lot of 100 persons at a time much more humane for the executing soldiers.

So, now how did this set of revolutionary revelations affect my experience of the Sacre Coeur cathedral? It did not affect it. Not really.

By the time of my visit I had reconciled myself to the fact that the Paris I experience today is the Paris that 'is what it is' today, not the Paris that was.

I came to this state of mind from not joining Hussey in his laments over the limited and regimented vision of the city architect, Haussmann, whom we have to either blame, or thank, or simply acknowledge as the creator of the unique way the city appears today, with buildings of rather uniform height solidly lining all major roads.

I am sorry, but to me this is now one of Paris’ charms, even if to attain this vision both the past, and the poor, were ruthlessly dealt with to make room for this ‘new’ Paris.

Only Washington, DC, looks much like Paris, in this sense, and I very much like the look of both cities.

Going back to the Sacre Coeur, Hussey describes the attacks local workers made on the outside workers constructing the edifice, and attacks on the edifice itself. It took a long time to construct, and was not dedicated until 1919, until the First World War was over, and the year before Joan of Arc was declared a Saint.

On page 331 Hussey says that the poor and neglected of Paris saw both the consecration of the cathedral and the venerating of the peasant girl Joan as insults to them, who were living short lives and dying just as unknown and unlamented and unsaved as they always had been, despite government and church lip-service.

No doubt this is a valid criticism, but I purposely walked up to the Sacre Coeur from the district to the northeast that Hussey says is still the most neglected and the poorest, and saw evidence of poverty, sure, but not any heart-rending suffering.

Things have gotten better in today’s Paris. 90 years is a long time, and as much as we lament modern trends and occurrences, we do take better care of our underprivileged than we used to in many countries. We are still a long, long way from what might be ideal, sure. But there has been definite progress.

So, inside the Sacre Coeur I again looked and smiled at the sainted Joan of Arc in the high ceiling, kneeling at Christ’s feet and physically the closest person to him. This church was dedicated a year before she was Sainted. Cool.

I agree with Mark Twain, no matter what you think of religion or of monarchies, and both left a lot to be desired, what Joan did is a bona-fide miracle, attested to by the records kept by both her supporters and her enemies, who in the end had their way with her, burned her alive, in the name of the same God whose name was invoked in her beatification! Go figure.

Northern approach to Sacre Coeur:

Front of Sacre Coeur with last rays of sun:

Ceiling in the Chapel of the Virgin (sorry about the overexposure in the center):

Ceiling in main chapel, with Joan of Arc at Jesus' feet (photo obtained from Wikimedia and modified)

One of the best things about being on a hill is the ability to look down, at Paris in this instance, at sunset: The church of Saint Eustache is the one almost touching the tree on the right, and the Notre Dame is the one to its left with the two towers.