Sacred Mysteries and Holy Memories: Counter-Revolutionary France and the Sacré-Coeur

Abstract

There are moments in the life of a nation where the hand of God is clearly visible -- or so it seems. The years 1870 and 1871 provided many such moments, notably when France went to war against Germany and suffered defeat, invasion, and occupation on a scale surpassed only in 1940. The Catholic episcopate interpreted these cataclysmic events in terms at once political and providential, terms drawn ultimately from Catholic discourse on 1789. Defeat was a sign of divine judgement, the condemnation of a nation fallen from grace. France was invited to imagine a different past, a different history, a different national story, one that would have led to, and might still lead to, a different outcome for France. This story would provide a prescriptive guide for national reconstruction after 1870. I propose to examine certain artifacts of the crisis of 1870, artifacts that define the emblems, vocabulary, and script for Catholic nationalism through the Great War and beyond. And since we are here to honour James Leith and recognize his influence on the study of political culture, I propose to emphasize the spatial, built, and iconographical features of my topic. My aim is to show how a specifically Catholic political culture was sustained and propagated in the nineteenth century, how this culture was embodied in certain votive churches dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and finally how this culture reinforced prevailing discourses on counter-revolution in the Vend6e and the moral status of the Revolution. James Leith showed us Temples of Reason, I'm inviting you to visit Temples of Memory.(2) I The most famous of votive churches of 1870-71 would be the Sacre-Coeur de Montmartre, but that project was derivative of several provincial projects which antedated it.(3) In fact, the vow to build the Sacre-Coeur de Paris was made in Poitiers, not Paris, by Alexandre Legentil, a devout Parisian bourgeois who had fled the capital before the advancing Prussian troops. His piety and his perception of French decadence inspired his project for Montmartre, but so did events all around him. Throughout the west of France, the classic response to the crisis of 1870 was a vow to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the construction of a church, a votive church. embodying and fulfilling the vow. Among the first dioceses to do so was Angers, led by its bishop.(4) Anger's church differed in significant ways from the Sacre-Coeur de Montmartre, notably in that it was to serve not only as a votive church, monumental in intent, but also to fulfill a pastoral need in a city whose population had outgrown its parish churches. The Angers church was begun sooner than the Paris project (no question of an architectural concours here) carried out on a far less grand scale and, remarkably, completed on schedule.(5) It was consecrated by Monseigneur Freppel, bishop of Angers, on 30 June 1878.(6) Making sense of sacred art and architecture can be tricky, especially when one wants to make assertions about sponsors's intentions. No such problem exists for the Angers church, however, given that the plan for the sacred art in the church was laid out in a memo drafted by the pastor of the parish and a copy of this lengthy memo can be found in the diocesan archives.(7) Why was such a plan made? Such programmes promote coherence in the sacred art for a church and they also minimize the influence of wealthy patrons, whose offers of money might come with strings attached, notably with respect to the style and content of sacred art. The problem was not a new one. Clergy in thirteenth-century Chartres faced similar challenges.(8) The Angers document is a precious one because it shows how the art in the church is organized around the devotion to the Sacre-Coeur but also because it reveals clerical eagerness to lay out a programme to which patrons would have to submit. Iconography was to be under clerical control. What, then, are the features of this artistic programme? …