Introduction

In 1873, the French National Assembly voted to build a church on Montmartre hill, looking over Paris, as a better way of dealing with social unrest than the alternative proposal of an army barracks. This Church of the Sacred Heart (Sacré-Coeur) is now a national symbol and tourist attraction. But it was originally designed as a gesture of national contrition, seeking divine forgiveness for a military defeat, in the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71), and for a Socialist revolution, in the Paris Commune (1871), the short-lived people's government which refused to surrender and tried to introduce a new social order in the besieged city. In many ways, this moment sets the scene for the complex and passionate relationship between religion and politics in twentieth-century France, and for the deep and long-running conflicts they have embodied. It also provides a benchmark against which to measure the changes that have taken place over the past century or more.

This episode raises three enduring issues, which continue to preoccupy French society today. The first is the relationship between religion and the State. The builders of the Sacre-Coeur were staunch advocates of an inseparable link between the Catholic Church and the French State, but that link was decisively broken thirty years later. In the ensuing century since then, France has groped towards new ways of addressing the place of religious beliefs in the life of the nation, and managing the surges of passion that the question arouses. The second issue is the relationship between religion and politics.