France and the Cult of the Sacred Heart: An Epic Tale for Modern Times, and: The Tragic Tale of Claire Ferchaud and the Great War (review)

All visitors to Paris are familiar with the basilica of the Sacred Heart that overlooks the city, and most make the pilgrimage up Montmartre hill to admire the views from its terrace. Some dutifully tour the church itself, but fewer understand the cult that inspired it or its place in French history. They would do well to read Raymond Jonas's engaging and well written book, France and the Cult of the Sacred Heart, which traces this important Catholic devotion that peaked in the nineteenth century and culminated in the building of Sacré-Cœur after the twin traumas of defeat in the Franco-Prussian war and the violence of the Paris Commune. What makes the book most interesting and original is not just the story of the devotion itself but its deft contextualization in the political and religious history of France over several centuries. Jonas succeeds in proving that the Sacred Heart cult was central to a popular Catholic revival that lasted at least until World War I. In this his work joins a growing body of historical literature that emphasizes the persistence of religious belief despite the secularizing pressures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Although the cult of the Sacred Heart is not limited to France, it was particularly intertwined with French history from the 1680s through the First World War. The devotion (which uses the symbol of Jesus's bleeding heart to emphasize both divine love and divine wounding by human indifference) was revived in the late seventeenth century when a Visitationist nun, Marguerite-Marie Alacoque, reported a series of visions in which Jesus commanded the worship of the Sacred Heart, and, most notably, promised France divine recognition if Louis XIV would consecrate the nation to the cult. Although the Sun King ignored the revelations of an obscure provincial nun, Alacoque's visions became widely known among the faithful, especially after the devotion was invoked during the 1720 outbreak of plague in Marseille – and the disease waned soon after.

It was the French Revolution, however, that gave the Sacred Heart its most powerful association by becoming the talisman of the counter-revolutionaries in the Vendée, where attacks on the power and independence of the Catholic church provoked a French civil war. Those fighting on behalf of the Old Regime took to wearing emblems with the Sacred Heart painted or sewn in the center, fabricated by the thousands by nuns whose very existence was threatened by the new religious order. The most ardent devotees of the cult believed that before his death Louis XVI had consecrated France to the Sacred Heart, and Jonas shows how, in the nineteenth century, the devotion became the symbol of Catholic conservatism, of those who sought a return to the pre-Revolutionary order and its close relationship between throne and altar.

That relationship was most threatened in the second half of the nineteenth century when the resurgence of secular and liberal politics in France (despite the clerically inclined Second Empire) and the attack on papal power in Italy culminated in the année terrible of 1871, with its twin disasters of foreign and civil war. To keep France safe, faithful Catholic Alexandre Legentil made a vow to build a church dedicated to the Sacred Heart if Paris was spared foreign occupation. Taken up by Paris's new bishop, whose predecessor had been martyred during the Commune, for the next four decades Catholics worked to make this promise a reality. In several fascinating chapters Jonas describes in detail the innovative methods of this campaign to design, fund, and build a modern church dedicated to the Sacred Heart (albeit one in a nostalgic Romano...