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

The standard political history of modern France can be summarized as the steady triumph of the secular, democratic nation, culminating in the Third Republic (1870-1940). Yet, for Jonas, the Third Republic is the regime that erected the votive church at Montmartre—a fact that is baffling without reference to the heretofore "repressed," or "secret," history of the Cult of the Sacred Heart recounted in this book. Instead of the well-known tricolor flag, sansculotte, and the ideas of liberty and equality, Jonas presents the ever-proliferating emblem of the Sacred Heart, the devout peasant, and the counterrevolutionary defense of God and king. Writing "Whenever Marianne went into combat, she encountered the Sacré-Coeur" (3), Jonas shows us that perspective is everything. To his mind historians of the postrevolutionary period have been willfully blind to religion as an arena of modern politics. In the nineteenth century, a veritable national movement with a decidedly antirepublican, Catholic vision of France and its future was forged. Ignoring it leads to a distorted view of French history, which Jonas' beautifully written, carefully researched, and richly illustrated book is intended to correct.

The primary methodological contribution of Jonas' book concerns religion as politics—especially, modern mass politics. What began in the seventeenth century with the experiences of a little-known nun, propagated by a "grass-roots campaign to encourage private, domestic, and municipal acts of confidence in the Sacred Heart of Jesus" (30), became, by the nineteenth century, the inspiration for massive, nationally organized pilgrimages. These pilgrimages, Jonas insists, "not strikes or worker demonstrations, were the most important manifestation of collective will in late-nineteenth century France" (208). The events of 1789 transformed such religious practices as processions, pilgrimages, and clandestine services into political acts, and the Sacred Heart became the focus of Catholic resistance to the scourge of Revolution. Far from subsiding in the nineteenth century, this movement continued to grow, adapt, and flourish in the age of modern, mass politics, a point powerfully and fascinatingly argued in Jonas' chapters on the building of the votive church at Montmartre (financed by extraordinary mass-marketing schemes) and the pilgrimages that took place in the Basilica in the 1880s (orchestrated using all the tools of modern mass politics).

The mosaic of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart, described in detail on pages 226 to 229, recounts the saga of the Sacred Heart, and illustrates the perspective on France and its history that Jonas' book provides. The 375-square-meter mosaic presents the counterrevolutionary narrative of the nation that was developed and popularized through the rites and rituals of the Sacred Heart across three centuries. The top half features Jesus Christ and the heavenly saints of the Catholic Church; the bottom half depicts key episodes in the history of the Sacred Heart recounted in Jonas' book—the plague at Marseilles in the early eighteenth century, the consecration of France to the Sacred Heart by the royal family later in the Revolutionary period, and, finally, the national vow of the Third Republic, leading to the construction of the Basilica at Montmartre. Alongside this rendering of France's history and destiny, is a solitary sansculotte who "is, in effect, revolutionary France, taking his place outside of the assembled figures of Catholic France paying homage to theSacré-Coeur.... While revolutionary and republican France lookselsewhere, the Sacré-Coeur rivets the attention of Catholic France" (229).

By marginalizing the revolutionary legacy, and riveting attention on the Sacré-Coeur, Jonas creates a new perspective on French modern political history, and provides a way to assimilate and understand suchseemingly aberrant episodes as the counter-revolution in the Vendée, the Dreyfus Affair (not as a republican triumph, but from the other side), and most important, the Vichy regime. But this book also offers invaluable insights concerning popular and...