Sacré-Cœur: The White Basilica on the Hill of the Commune

Why is it significant?

Stand on the terrace in front of the basilica and, for a moment, turn your back on it. The whole of Paris lies at your feet, grey roofs and chimney pots rolling away to the horizon, the Eiffel Tower poking up in the distance. Now turn around... and face the whitest building in the city.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Stand on the terrace in front of the basilica and, for a moment, turn your back on it. The whole of Paris lies at your feet, grey roofs and chimney pots rolling away to the horizon, the Eiffel Tower poking up in the distance. Now turn around... and face the whitest building in the city.

It stays that white for a reason. The stone is a travertine from Château-Landon, southeast of Paris, which releases calcite when it rains. Every shower washes it, and soot and pollution never quite manage to stick. The architect, Paul Abadie, won the competition with this Romano-Byzantine design of domes, and plenty of Parisians mocked it. Writers compared it to a wedding cake, and worse.

To understand why it was built, go back to 1871. France had just been crushed by Prussia, and on the morning of 18 March troops were sent up this very hill to take away cannons that Parisians had paid for themselves. The crowd stopped them, two generals were shot in a garden a few streets away, and the uprising of the Paris Commune began. For devout Catholics, defeat and revolt were a punishment for the nation's sins. A national vow was made to build a church to the Sacred Heart, and in 1873 the National Assembly declared it a work of public utility... on the hill of the revolt.

The foundation stone was laid in 1875, but Montmartre is riddled with old gypsum quarries, so the builders had to sink deep shafts of masonry, tens of metres down, to carry the weight. The basilica was finished in 1914, and the war delayed its consecration until 1919. In the bell tower hangs La Savoyarde, a bell of about nineteen tonnes cast in Annecy in 1891, one of the heaviest in France. Inside, prayer before the altar has continued day and night, without interruption, since 1885.

Behind the basilica runs a street with a pointed name: rue du Chevalier-de-la-Barre, after a young man executed in 1766 for failing to show respect to a religious procession. The anticlerical city council chose it as a deliberate reply to the church. Montmartre never stops arguing with itself. Follow that street west, cross rue du Mont-Cenis and carry straight on into rue Cortot, to the oldest house on the hill.