We strode west, one afternoon, following the Grands Boulevards from the Place de la République. When we reached Barbès, the grubby working class district around the elevated train line, my friend veered sharp right. Shoulder to shoulder, we thundered up a narrow street which twisted its way to the top of La Butte Montmartre.
At every turn we could see the glistening white domes of the Sacré Coeur looming high above the shabby, shadowy streets. We climbed up long flights of stairs with curious double railings in the middle, we crossed lifeless, bedraggled squares – which were every shape but square - and passed overgrown gardens with rain-streaked marble statuary prodding out of the moss and the mould.
At last, on the steps of the great church, we looked out at the low, flattish horizon of Paris, with a jumble of tin-covered rooftops below. Just a few years before I had seen, in New York, a poetic film called Le Ballon Rouge, in which a schoolboy makes friends with a balloon he meets on a corner. I thought that Yves could once have been the nervous, hungry-looking little boy, running through the winding streets below, with his magical red balloon sailing among the chimney pots and gables.
Just as I, on the other side of the Channel, had once been a winsome English lad, with my flaxen cow’s lick and grey flannels. Now we were man-sized adventurers who would have climbed a hill three times as high as Montmartre, and without stopping to rest on the way, if we thought there was anything worth seeing at the top.
The climb in the cold had given us an appetite, so we bought hot buttery crèpes from a sidewalk stand and wolfed the soggy things down folded twice over into a triangle, holding them by the tip in their bit of wax paper. Once that was done, we lit up one another’s Gauloise, shielding the flame from the icy wind with our hands, like long-lost brothers whom the love of travel had finally brought together.
I learned that Montmartre was called “Mount of the Martyr” for France’s patron Saint Denis. As the early Christian Dionysius, he came from the Holy Land to convert the Gauls and was beheaded by the Romans atop the highest hill overlooking the city. Then, the legend said, he picked up his head and walked with it, under his arm, to the place north of the city now called Saint Denis.
In the mist to the south, across the Seine, we could make out the second highest peak of Paris, the Montagne Sainte Geneviève, surmounted by the silvery grey dome of the Pantheon. I asked Yves where the hill of Montparnasse was, but he told me that in spite of the “mount” in its name, that quarter of Paris didn’t have one.
However, my erudite guide ironically explained, in the 17th century there had been a grassy mound there, formed by the debris from a mine but long since flattened out by the boulevard. Of a summer eve, in those humanistic times, the students of the Latin Quarter would wander south to read their poems aloud on its bucolic summit. And since Mount Parnassus was the home of the Muses, they dubbed it Mont Parnasse.
Montmartre was still, in the 19th century, a country village on the outskirts of Paris, where the local men eked out a living in the gypsum mines on its slopes. When France was invaded in the Franco-Prussian War, in 1870, a battery of canons was placed on the hill to defend Paris against the Germans.
But when France surrendered, the people of Paris, desperate from the months of starvation and bombardment inflicted on them by the Germans, revolted against the new, conservative government and proclaimed a republic of their own, popularly called La Commune. In opposition to the ruling alliance of bourgeoisie and church, the communards called for a return to the radical, anti-clerical ideas of the 1789 Revolution. The order was given to crush them, and the government troops, gathered in Versailles, launched a massive attack.
They seized the hilltop of Montmartre, to prevent the communards who had their stronghold there from using the canons against them. Many of the overwhelmed rebels fled into the mines where they were mercilessly buried alive, while thousands of others were shot against the walls of the city’s cemeteries.
In their despair, the decommissioned soldiers and starving workers tore up the cobblestones of the streets to use as weapons, when there was no more ammunition, and many idealistic men and women fought behind the barricades to the end. But before they became the legend of a lost cause, the radicals were able to vent their fury by burning down several great buildings.
One was the Hôtel de Ville, the city hall, which was later rebuilt on a larger scale, and in a more ornate style. The other was the Tuileries palace, where Louix XVI was taken prisoner in the Revolution, and where, afterwards, France’s cataclysmic succession of self-appointed emperors and restored monarchs held court.
After the fire, its gutted walls were razed to the ground, leaving the Louvre courtyard wide open on the western side. Les Tuileries had become such a detested symbol of absolutist power that, it was convened, no despot would ever risk living there again.
The ruinous armistice with Germany forced the French to give up Alsace and Lorraine and pay huge damages to the Kaiser, adding to the general grief and self-recrimination. The country’s priests began gathering alms to build a great basilica on the hill, to atone for the sins which brought about France’s suffering and humiliation. Later, the new government took over the construction of the church, claiming that it would instill a renewed sense of national pride in the citizens.
But Frenchmen less pious and patriotic, like my friend Yves, sneered at these high-minded explanations. They claimed that the basilica was really built to celebrate the destruction of the dreaded commune, a reincarnation of the 1789 Revolution, which most French people of the day, especially the non-Parisian ones, saw as godless and immoral.
As well as the huge task of building the monument itself, massive foundations had first to be driven far down through the hilltop, which the plaster mining had turned into a fragile honeycomb. The consecration of this supremely political church did not take place until almost half a century later, a few years after Germany was in turn defeated in the First World War. Many believed that God had thanked the people for their sacrifice by punishing those who had humiliated them.
The French say la vengeance est un plat qui se mange froid, which roughly translates as “revenge is sweet but one has to wait a long time to taste it”. In the reigning spirit of patriotic defiance, equestrian statues of France’s two warrior saints, Joan of Arc and King Louis IX, were placed on either side of the entrance gate.
Yves, like many artists and writers, ridiculed the Sacré Coeur, accusing it of being a garish pastiche, comparing it to a heavily frosted wedding cake – une pièce montée. He said it was nothing but a vulgar copy of Byzantine monuments such as Saint Mark’s of Venice and Santa Sophia of Istanbul, catering to the “orientalist” fashion of the day, with its craze for exotica from the East.
I agreed with him, but since then I have seen the cluster of white domes emerge from the chimneys and gables too often with pleasure to despise the Sacré Coeur without feeling ungrateful. And when I step inside and look up through the shadows at the dome’s vast golden mosaic – the largest in the world, even if it is a pastiche – it is with the same awe which fills me when I sit in other great Parisian churches such as Saint Sulpice, Saint Gervais, Saint Germain des Près...
Also, it is untrue that it was copied from Saint Mark’s in Venice. Although the Sacré Coeur was designed in the Byzantine manner, it was directly modelled on an unusual 12th century domed church in southwestern France, the Cathedral of Saint Front.
The architect Abadie was a medieval revivalist like Viollet-le-Duc and worked with him on Notre Dame. He had just finished restoring this authentic French Byzantine church before winning the contract to design the new basilica. He was so enamoured of the church, hidden away in the town of Périgueux, that he set about creating an oversized, stylized replica of it in Paris.
So, when Yves took me to visit the “venerable” Sacré Coeur, at the end of 1960, it was in fact only half a century old. Of course, its relative youth would not have impressed us then, even if it had crossed our overwrought minds. Fifty years seems like a very long time, when you have barely lived twenty!
For example, the painter Utrillo, who made the Sacré Coeur famous in his street scenes of Montmartre, was born on the hill after construction began, but he was almost thirty when the scaffolding was finally removed. So when he depicted the bulbous domes looming above the quarter’s picturesque alleys, they must have seemed shockingly new.
Utrillo, Yves also failed to tell me, was not a foreigner as his name suggests, but a died-in-the-wool Frenchman. He was the fatherless son of a model who posed for, and slept with, some of the great painters of her time, Suzanne Valadon. Between amorous adventures, she tried to save the troubled little boy from the stigma of illegitimacy by persuading a Spanish friend, an art critic called Miguel Utrillo, to register him in his name. This somewhat alleviated young Maurice’s misery, even though, when he became famous, it had the contrary effect of obfuscating his Frenchness.
He saw many great buildings going up, in the effervescent new Paris which was created in the second half of the 19th century: the Eiffel Tower, Les Halles, the Opera House, the Grand Palais and the Petit Palais, the train stations, many of the city’s bridges and all the apartment houses which lined the new boulevards carved out by Haussmann. And the Sacré Coeur was one of these modern marvels, even if its style was not modern.
But what made Montmartre famous, as my French textbooks at Greengates School had already taught me, was the painters who worked there at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. As well as the native-born Utrillo, Renoir, Degas, Toulouse Lautrec, Van Gogh, Picasso, Braque and many other “modern” artists who rejected the academic style rented lofts on the hill, leaving many legends in their wake.
And when Yves led me through the labyrinth of alleyways to the picturesque village square, La Place du Tertre, I saw, incredulously, what these legends had wrought. Several hundred painters stood behind their easels producing copies of the works of the long-departed masters for American and German tourists who bought them as souvenirs.
The most copied master by far was Utrillo with his eminently copiable views of Montmartre, I observed with horror, as Yves, sneering sardonically, led me through that shameful marketplace. It was no less shameful, we agreed, than the Rue Saint Denis with its painted women on sale, and in a way it was even worse.
What, I could not help thinking, would idea-less Utrillo – who used postcards to do his highly sought-after canvases, once he got rich enough to move away - have been without Montmartre and the Sacré Coeur, and what would all these poor daubers freezing in the rain have been without Utrillo to copy for the tourists?
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