In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

The Catholic Historical Review 88.1 (2002) 132-133



[Access article in PDF]

Book Review

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


France and the Cult of the Sacred Heart: An Epic Tale for Modern Times. By Raymond Jonas. [Studies on the History of Science and Culture, 39.] (Berkeley: University of California Press. 2000. Pp. xv, 308. $40.00.)

The striking Church of the Sacred Heart (Sacré-Cœur) that dominates the northern Paris skyline is the product of visions received by Marguerite-Marie Alacoque of the Visitationist order in the 1680's. Receiving numerous apparitions of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, Marie-Marguerite maintained that should France put itself under the sign of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, earthly triumph would enhance the kingdom and its prosperity. The connection between religion and politics was hardly novel in the absolutist state, but as that state succumbed to secularism and democratization the connection became more fraught. During the French Revolution the Sacred Heart became a talisman, worn to restore the Catholic monarchy, while in the nineteenth century devotion to the Sacred Heart came to equate with a steadfast anti-republicanism.

A succession of revolutions in the nineteenth century helped increase the fervor with which French Catholics devoted themselves to the Sacred Heart. They saw themselves performing an act of atonement for their country's deviation from legitimacy and religious commitment. And they wanted the country as a whole to make an official pledge to the Sacred Heart. During the Second Empire and its defeat at the hands of Prussia, Marie-Marguerite's and subsequent calls for national consecration became more pertinent than ever. Pushed by devoted clergy and lay people, the construction of the Sacred Heart Church from the 1870's on aroused the potent mix of religion and nationalism, stimulating pilgrimages to the site and massive contributions to the cost from all classes of society.

The resulting church of the Sacred Heart was fraught with complexity, however, for to critics the Byzantine design resembled nothing other than the domes and minarets of Constantinople fused into a single inappropriate building. Its ethos became less spiritual than didactic, for a visit to the church elicited lessons on the evils of secularism and the republic. Simultaneously, every gimmick known to a burgeoning, secular commercialism was tried: even the holes [End Page 132] that allowed the stones to be hoisted to great heights were sold as repositories for the prayers of the faithful. With state appropriation of French churches in the aftermath of the Dreyfus Affair, the Church of the Sacred Heart became, in fact, the property of the hated republic, while the building itself was not consecrated until 1919 after a devastating if technically victorious war.

Author Raymond Jonas excels in pointing these ironies out in a gentle and respectful manner, while his important and engaging study is particularly expert in portraying the elite politics that ultimately tended the cult of the Sacred Heart. The leading prelates of Paris knew that they had let down their mission to the working classes, and thus the Monmartre site, for all its difficulties, indicated movement into areas newly filled by those that Parisian gentrification had so violently dispossessed in the Second Empire and thereafter. There are brief glimpses throughout of practices associated with the Sacred Heart, especially by peasants in the French Revolution. Other major grassroots devotions, such as those spreading from the religious orders among students and alumnae of the many Sacred Heart schools, are less explored. Even without this, however, the portrait of institutionalized devotion to the Sacred Heart as increasingly a "counter-culture" amongst the French is clear and deeply interesting.

 



Bonnie G. Smith
Rutgers University

...

pdf

Share