A Basilica Built as an Act of National Penance

The Basilica of the Sacred Heart at Montmartre that this entry's first article mentions was not built as an ordinary parish church but as a specific act of national penance, funded by public subscription following France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and 1871 and the violent suppression of the Paris Commune that followed, with its promoters explicitly framing the building as reparation for the moral and political failures French Catholics believed had brought national disaster, tying the devotion's own theme of reparation directly to a specific and traumatic national political crisis rather than only to private spiritual practice.

Construction stretched from 1875 into the early twentieth century, and the basilica's prominent hilltop site and continuous exposition of the consecrated host inside it have made it both a major site of ongoing Sacred Heart devotion and a recurring target of political controversy in France, where its origin as a monument tied to a specific conservative Catholic political reading of national defeat has made it, at various points since its construction, a contested symbol for secularist and left-wing critics who see the building's very existence as making a political claim about France's Catholic identity that the country's official secularism does not share.