With the fall of the Paris Commune and the rise of the Third Republic, we return to three instances of shared space: the building of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart, the aborted suggestion to couple the Basilica and a Liberty statue, and the opposition of Marianne and the Virgin Mary in Third Republic town squares. It is my intention to evaluate whether the sources under review have adequately prepared us to understand why the issue of symbolism and shared space in the Third Republic was such a contentious issue.
The building of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart was motivated by the desire to expiate the sins of the secular Revolution and France as a whole. Raymond Jonas, David Harvey and Claude Langlois agree on this point. Jonas notes the proliferation of Sacred Heart dioceses during the “terrible year” the national vow of Fournier, Legentil and Rohault de Fleury, and the near unanimous consent of the National Assembly as evidence that the Basilica was a popular project. The perceived connection between the Commune and the secular French Revolution gave it added urgency. Reconciliation and reconstruction from the ravages of eighty years of revolutionary dialectic took center stage. Expiation was the evident intent, and the interior mosaic decoration of the Basilica would mirror this intent.
Why was Montmartre chosen as the site to host this monument? Jonas fails to appreciate the fullest implications the Montmartre site had upon the popular conscious. He stresses expiation, the martyrdom of Christians and conservatives, and the battle between revolution and counterrevolution as motivations for its construction. He ignores the attempt to manipulate the memory of those events through the spatial reorganization of the center of the Paris Commune, attributing its selection instead to historical, religious, and geographic factors. In the end, the site selection came down to these questions, determined through political debate and enacted in the name of public utility. It seemed more of a project of reconciliation and not expiation. In the mosaics, Jonas sees a Catholic compromise, rendering a penitent France as Mary Magdalene, who was a former femme de nuit, much like the conservative’s mocking depiction of Marianne.
The spatial reordering does not escape David Harvey and Claude Langlois. David Harvey makes a more direct link between the French Revolution, the Paris Commune, and the Montmartre site. Harvey recognizes not only the revolutionary and counterrevolutionary battles, but also the secular and religious battles and class conflict between the bourgeois and the workers. The new monument had to dominate the space of Paris and dominate the memory of everyone who would see it. The Montmartre site was, according to Harvey, selected as the site where the ashes of the destroyed Commune would best fertilize the expiatory monument. Some of the quotes he provides are compelling as well, showing that there was indeed a current that wanted expiation and thus eventual eradication of the revolutionary legacy. The Basilica of the Sacred Heart was no ordinary monument; it was a symbolic “fuck you” to the worst excesses of the revolutionary tradition.
Where Harvey and Jonas represent the extremities of the Monmartre debate, Claude Langlois strikes the middle ground. He agrees with Jonas that the politics leading up to the choosing of the Montmartre site did not demonstrate the desire to intrude upon the revolutionary space in an attempt at revenge, but there is a fundamental difference between the history of the monument and the memory of the monument. Memory is indifferent to official history, and it became commonplace to associate the Basilica with the defeat of the workers. Moreover, as one in a continuing give and take between secularism and clericalism it would lead Gambetta to designate clericalism as the enemy in 1877. The Basilica of the Sacred Heart represents a decisive turning point in the history of the French Revolution; from here on out, the most contentious battles would be fought between secular and clerical grassroots organizations, with the public school system occupying the most prominent role.
Langlois’ account seems most believable. Despite the intentions of the politicians and clerics who chose Montmartre as the site for the Basilica, the sharing of space between revolution and counterrevolution through forceful imposition could not be seen as anything else but an affront on the revolutionary tradition. It is tempting to regard the Basilica as having supplanted revolutionary space, but in reality, the Basilica still sits upon a hill of immense importance to the communards and amid a neighborhood that was still identified with the revolution, and one must conclude that space is still actively being shared. The complete and total occupation of space and symbol such as was attempted by counterrevolutionaries in Sheryl Kroen’s narrative was no longer possible; from the Third Republic onwards, revolution and counterrevolution would wage their battle through shared space.
The next instance of share space involves a gigantic Statue of Liberty. On August 3, 1880, the Paris city council proposed placing a statue directly in front of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart on public land. Why was this proposal never carried out? I would like to look at the problem through the prism of the works reviewed here. Recall that shared space between Marianne and other counterrevolutionary symbols has a longer history. She was often adorned with the fleur-de-lys, and in Mona Ozouf’s narrative she was even converted from former statues of the Virgin Mary. Thus, shared space is not a new phenomenon, so was it inconceivable that an imposing Marianne could share space with the Basilica?
Given that revolution and counterrevolution had to share space in the Third Republic, I believe the natures of the Sacred Heart and Marianne were too antithetical to share space. The Basilica worked not as a symbol for all Catholics in France, rather liberal Catholics were highly suspicious of the cult of the Sacred Heart for its perceived extremism. Marianne was not a symbol for everybody. She represented a long line of militant republicanism, and a gigantic statue in the middle of a contentious area in Paris in front of an equally contentious memorial whose construction had been approved six years earlier under an ultra-conservative republican regime would have only highlighted the tensions that simmered stronger than ever in French society. Thus, even shared space in a highly heterogeneous republic had its limits.
Finally we turn to shared space between Marianne and the Virgin Mary in town squares. They contested space with increasing frequency as the Third Republic progressed, especially in smaller town squares where Marianne would often stand directly in front of the Virgin. Why was this possible, and the Marianne/Sacred Heart shared space not possible? The answer lies in Ozouf’s and Agulhon’s narratives, which highlighted the visual and semantic similarities of the two images, as well as the longer history of the contentious relationship between the two. French citizens would have been familiar with these figures in opposition to one another, because the real dichotomy existed here. The ability to share space may have been an affront on the part of secular republicans versus clerical counterrevolutionaries, but the ability to share public space ironically led to the cementing of the conflict between the two. In light of this supposition, I believe Jonas’ statement pitting the Sacred Heart and Marianne against one another, despite its possibly metaphorical intentions, is misplaced.
Concluding Discussion
If nothing else, these works have shown conclusively the importance of symbolism not simply to the revolutionary dialectic, but to politics at large. The Sacred Heart and the Virgin Mary waged symbolic war against Marianne, each side trying to win the hearts and minds of French people. The dialectic between these forces is more complicated than the tension between revolution and counterrevolution. The battles between republicans and monarchists between legitimists and Orléanists, between secular and clerical partisans, and between the government and the church, as well as the conflicts among classes complicate the political situation. Can we then speak of a unitary counterrevolutionary dialectic?
There are more complexities than are mentioned here; nevertheless, dialectics between revolution and counterrevolution are indeed a useful category for analyzing nineteenth century France. The complexity of the issue is what makes Sheryl Kroen’s and Mona Ozouf’s works so much more compelling, because the fight between revolution and counterrevolution is to accept the multiple sources of discontent. Kroen shows unequivocally that there was a fundamental difference between royalist counterrevolution and Catholic missionary counterrevolution. She also gives agency to the political actors from below, who receive relatively little in Ozouf’s work, denying the unitary conception of revolutionary festivals as staged political events from above. Ozouf’s model is highly unitary and top down, which puts her at odds with Lynn Hunt who takes a much briefer, ground level perspective of the revolution in Politics, Culture and Class. Agulhon and Jonas rely far too heavily upon a unitary struggle between revolution and counterrevolution, remaining relatively aloof to the profound differences in the counterrevolutionary coalition.
Kroen is also, in her critique of Agulhon, a critique that could be projected to the other works as well. Although he pays tribute to the unitary struggle between revolution and counterrevolution and the symbolic systems they created, the struggle does not form a central component of his argument. Only in very rare cases does Agulhon directly juxtapose those symbols, mostly to show the visual and semantic similarities between Marianne and Mary. Jonas suggests that there was an opposition, but provides no evidence that they physically or symbolically confronted one another. Finally, Ozouf concerns herself with the different implications of space and time, but her analysis focuses more upon the transition from one system to another than the physical oppositions this engendered.
Finally, we must recognize that Jonas was correct in suggesting that the Sacred Heart did indeed go into battle with Marianne in a metaphorical sense, but this is insufficient. Symbols are by nature visible phenomena, a fact that of which Jonas is cognizant. To show the concrete effects that symbols had upon the collective consciousness and the collective memory of the French people, he must show conclusively that, as in the case of the revolutionary festivals, the restoration and the building Basilica of the Sacred Heart, these symbols were involved in a physical battle for space. This may seem a Structuralist or Habermasian argument to pursue, but Kroen, Ozouf, Agulhon, Harvey and Langlois all stress the centrality of spatial occupation in which symbols became effective in shaping collective memory and consciousness.
Robert Nelson is blogger-in-chief at History News, Notes and Arguments. Find us on Google+ or on Facebook.
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