France and the Cult of the Sacred Heart: An Epic Tale for Modern Times (review)

France and the Cult of the Sacred Heart: An Epic Tale for Modern Times. By Raymond Jonas. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. 308 pp. $40.00.

The Book of the Heart. By Eric Jager. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000. 270 pp. $32.00 (cloth), $15.00 (paper).

The heart, so ubiquitous a symbol in the Christian spiritual tradition, is at the center of two fine books recently published by university presses. Raymond Jonas, a historian at the University of Washington, in a study that is part of UC's Studies on the History of Society and Culture, offers a detailed account of the devotional cult of the Sacred Heart and its early modern intertwining with French politics. Beginning with the late seventeenth-century visions of Visitandine Margaret Mary Alacoque, the "Apostle of the Sacred Heart," he charts the changing ways in which the image became the standard flown over various French causes for two hundred years, culminating in the construction of the basilica of Sacré Coeur on Montmartre as the "Church of the National Vow." In doing this, Jonas creates what he calls "the secret history" of a monument that is one of the five top tourist destinations in Paris.

Jonas tells his story well. With the careful attention to detail and primary source material that is the craft of the historian, he recounts a riveting tale. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century visionaries (of which Margaret Mary is the most well-known) reported that Jesus had appeared to them and displayed his wounded heart as a source of grace and love as well as the object of neglect and rejection by humankind. Encoded in these visions was also the claim that France was elect among nations and the French a chosen people. Indeed, although he never complied or never received the request, Louis XIV was to seal this alliance by consecrating the nation to the Sacred Heart. This prophetic theme continued to circulate around subsequent reigns.

It is well known that the Sacred Heart and its devotional cult shaped on the Visitandine model gradually became widespread throughout Catholic Christendom. Jonas tells the very French and very political part of the story that is less well known. Promoted by the Jesuit order, the Sacred Heart became worn as a talisman against danger, illness, and evil. The symbol also addressed anxieties about apostasy, error, and schism. This sense of protection by the Sacred Heart became communal with the episcopal consecration of the city of Marseilles, which ritual act was believed to halt the devastating plague of 1720. With the Revolution in 1789, Catholic anxiety extended to the new republican threat to Catholic belief and the Catholic vocation of France. Peasants in the Vendée stitched the Sacré-Coeur to their clothing when they took up arms against the revolutionaries. Gradually all over France, Catholic loyalists adopted the symbol as a bitter condemnation of the secular republican ideal and as a promise of national redemption through the re-Christianization of public life, especially through a national consecration. The nineteenth-century church waged what Jonas terms "a campaign of cultural politics of breathtaking skill and sophistication (5)." Clergy and laity alike joined the campaign. Diocesan consecrations, municipal consecrations (in strongly Catholic rural areas), and family consecrations were widespread. Large-scale pilgrimages to a linked network of sacred sites provided ritualized occasions on which the moral and political regeneration of France through the Sacred Heart, including the restoration of a Christian monarchy, was reaffirmed. Through art and ritual gesture these pilgrimage sites generated a counter-cultural discourse that challenged the republican hegemony. Techniques of mass marketing (e.g., newsletters, "shareholder certification," souvenir sales, fund-raising pitches) were used to promote the construction of the queen of these pilgrimage sites on Montmartre. Jonas's study is splendid and rewards...