By funicular to a surprise on top of Montmartre
In the great heat of Paris on Wednesday, greater even than the heat in London, it was a treat to take the slightly ridiculous funicular up the hill to the summit of Montmartre, kindly paid for by an old friend who lives nearby. It saves climbing the 222 steps of the rue Foyatier.
At the top was what I had come to see: on one side the wide view over Paris, pale in the sun, on the other the ancient church of St Pierre. It is next to the incredible hulk of the basilica of Sacré Coeur, which, whether you like its architecture or not, does attract attention.
St Pierre deserves a look, for it has had more lives than the defunct cabaret nearby, the Chat Noir. On stepping through the door, it’s plain that St Pierre is much restored, but it’s amazing it is there at all.
It was thanks to the nuns who built it for their abbey that vines were planted on Montmartre’s lumpy hill. A couple (of vines, not nuns) survived into the 20th century, when the present vineyard (a little twee) was laid out. But the nuns’ 12th-century church was not the first. A predecessor, dedicated to the thirdcentury bishop St Denis, marked the place of his martyrdom.
In the legend of St Denis, patron of France, he ignores his decapitation on the summit of Montmartre and carries his head, preaching all the way, for five miles to the place of his burial, now called Saint-denis. That became an abbey of royal burials, as at Westminster, but the Revolution shamefully despoiled it.
The biographer of St Denis, Hilduin the abbot of Saint-denis in the years after the reign of Charlemagne, made a false identification of the French saint with Dionysius the Areopagite, mentioned in the Bible as being converted by St Paul’s preaching in Athens. This wild misidentification did matter because the biblical Dionysius had already been misidentified as the author of influential 6th-century books on Christian Neoplatonist theology.
But Hilduin wasn’t utterly lacking in judgment, for he acknowledged that the name Montmartre, which might seem to be Martyrs’ Mount, probably took its name from the Mount of Mars. Oddly enough, St Paul was preaching on the Hill of Mars in Athens, named after the Olympian god of war Ares, where the Areopagus or city council met.
Anyway, the old church on Montmartre was sacked in the siege of Paris – not the one in 1870, but one laid by Norsemen in 885. The new abbey church was consecrated in 1147 by the Pope himself, with St Bernard present. Two decades later, St Thomas Becket visited and in 1429 St Joan of Arc during another siege.
Here too, St Ignatius and five companions came in 1534, to bind themselves to the foundation of the Jesuits. (This could not have been in the crypt in the rue Yvonne le Tac now dedicated to St Denis, as that space was not unearthed till well after the death of Ignatius.)
In 1794, the last abbess was guillotined at the age of 71 and the abbey fell into ruin. From 1794, a tower served as a mechanical telegraph post. Russian troops used the church as a store in 1814.
Attempts at restoration began in 1838, but the bell tower was demolished in 1864. The Commune of 1871 stored munitions in the church. As late as 1896, St Pierre was closed for fear of collapse, and demolition was mooted. Only in 1900 did a thorough restoration begin.
Today it is impossible to ignore the bold stained glass by Max Ingrand from the mid 1950s. But here and there inside there are capitals from the Merovingian church of St Denis, and some black marble columns that were old even then– spolia from the Roman temple that once stood on this hilltop.