Montmartre


Montmartre is a large hill in Paris' northern 18th arrondissement. It is high and gives its name to the surrounding district, part of the Right Bank. Montmartre is primarily known for its artistic history, for the white-domed Basilica of the Sacré-Cœur on its summit, and as a nightclub district.
The other church on the hill, Saint Pierre de Montmartre, built in 1147, was the church of the prestigious Montmartre Abbey. On 15 August 1534, Saint Ignatius of Loyola, Saint Francis Xavier and five other companions bound themselves by vows in the Martyrium of Saint Denis, 11 Rue Yvonne Le Tac, the first step in the creation of the Jesuits.
Near the end of the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th, during the Belle Époque, many artists lived, worked, or had studios in or around Montmartre, including Amedeo Modigliani, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Suzanne Valadon, Maurice Utrillo, Piet Mondrian, Pablo Picasso, Camille Pissarro and Vincent van Gogh. Montmartre is also the setting for several hit films.

Location and access

The Montmartre Funicular provides access to Sacré-Cœur from the place Saint-Pierre, allowing people to avoid climbing the stairs on Rue Foyatier, which runs alongside it and has a total of 222 stairs.
Four Paris metro lines serve the neighborhood:
The RATP bus lines 30, 31, 54, 67, 74, 80, 85 and 95 also cross the neighborhood, as does line 40, the only one to run on the Montmartre hilltop.
Finally, the Montmartre tram also offers a guided tour of the area in 14 stages.
The historic district established by the City of Paris in 1995 contains and is bordered by Rue Caulaincourt and Rue Custine on the north, by Rue de Clignancourt on the east, and by the Boulevard de Clichy and Boulevard de Rochechouart to the south.

Toponymy

A proposed etymology suggests that the toponym Montmartre originates from Mons Martis, Latin for "Mount of Mars". This name would have been given to the place due to the fact that there were temples in honor of the gods Mars and Mercury on top of its hill. This would explain the fact that Fredegar called the area "Mons-Mercurii" in the 8th century and, although Hilduin of Saint-Denis used the same name in the 9th century, his contemporary, the monk Abbo Cernuus, called it "Mons-Martis". Although he failed to present evidence for this and directly contradicted several historical accounts, Jean Lebeuf denied the fact that these temples ever existed.
Another etymology proposes that the name comes from "mons Martyrum", meaning "Mount of the Martyrs". This would have been a reinterpretation of "Mount of Mars" as "Mount of Martyrs". This transformation would have been documented by Hilduin, who stated that the hill started to be called "Mons Martyrum", "martyrum" referring to "the place of torture or burial of martyrs". After this, it would have transformed into "mont de "martre" " through morphological derivation, "martre" meaning "martyr" in Old French.
Since consensus on the etymology of this toponym is yet to be reached, both etymologies presented here are considered valid.

History

Antiquity to 18th century

Archaeological excavations show that the heights of Montmartre were occupied from at least Gallo-Roman times. Texts from the 8th century cite the name of mons Mercori ; a 9th-century text speaks of Mount Mars. Excavations in 1975 north of the Church of Saint-Pierre found coins from the 3rd century and the remains of a major wall. Earlier excavations in the 17th century at the Fontaine-du-But found vestiges of Roman baths from the 2nd century.
The butte owes its particular religious importance to the text entitled Miracles of Saint-Denis, written before 885 by Hilduin, abbot of the monastery of Saint-Denis, which recounted how Saint Denis, a Christian bishop, was decapitated on the hilltop in 250 AD on orders of the Roman prefect Fescennius Sisinius for preaching the Christian faith to the Gallo-Roman inhabitants of Lutetia. According to Hilduin, Denis collected his head and carried it as far as the fontaine Saint-Denis, then descended the north slope of the hill, where he died. Hilduin wrote that a church had been built "in the place formerly called Mont de Mars, and then, by a happy change, 'Mont des Martyrs'."
In 1134, King Louis VI purchased the Merovingian chapel and built on the site the church of Saint-Pierre de Montmartre, still standing. He also founded the Royal Abbey of Montmartre, a monastery of the Benedictine order, whose buildings, gardens and fields occupied most of Montmartre. He also built a small chapel, called the Martyrium, at the site where it was believed that Saint Denis had been decapitated. It became a popular pilgrimage site. In the 17th century, a priory called abbaye d'en bas was built at that site, and in 1686 it was occupied by a community of nuns.
By the 15th century, the north and northeast slopes of the hill were the site of a village surrounded by vineyards, gardens and orchards of peach and cherry trees. The first mills were built on the western slope in 1529, grinding wheat, barley and rye. There were thirteen mills at one time, though by the late nineteenth century only two remained.
During the 1590 Siege of Paris, in the last decade of the French Wars of Religion, Henry IV placed his artillery on top of the butte of Montmartre to fire down into the city. The siege eventually failed when a large relief force approached and forced Henry to withdraw.
The abbey was destroyed in 1790 during the French Revolution, and the convent demolished to make place for gypsum mines. The last abbess, Marie-Louise de Laval-Montmorency, was guillotined in 1794. The church of Saint-Pierre was saved. At the place where the chapel of the Martyrs was located, an oratory was built in 1855. It was renovated in 1994.
In 1790, Montmartre was located just outside the limits of Paris. That year, under the revolutionary government of the National Constituent Assembly, it became the commune of Montmartre, with its town hall located on place du Tertre, site of the former abbey. The main businesses of the commune were wine making, stone quarries and gypsum mines.

Mining and archaeology

The mining of gypsum had begun in the Gallo-Roman period, first in open air mines and then underground, and continued until 1860. The gypsum was cut into blocks, baked, then ground and put into sacks. Sold as montmartarite, it was used for plaster, because of its resistance to fire and water. Between the 7th and 9th centuries, most of the sarcophagi found in ancient sites were made of molded gypsum. In modern times, the mining was done with explosives, which riddled the ground under the butte with tunnels, making the ground very unstable and difficult to build upon. The construction of the Basilica of Sacré-Cœur required making a special foundation that descended under the ground to hold the structure in place. A fossil tooth found in one of these mines was identified by Georges Cuvier as an extinct equine, which he dubbed Palaeotherium, the "ancient animal". His sketch of the entire animal in 1825 was matched by a skeleton discovered later.

19th century

Russian soldiers occupied Montmartre during the Battle of Paris in 1814. They used the altitude of the hill for artillery bombardment of the city.
Montmartre remained outside of the city limits of Paris until January 1, 1860, when it was annexed to the city along with other communities surrounding Paris, and became part of the 18th arrondissement of Paris.
In 1871, Montmartre was the site of the beginning of the revolutionary uprising of the Paris Commune. During the Franco-Prussian War, the French army had stored a large number of cannon in a park at the top of the hill, near where the basilica is today. On 18 March 1871, the soldiers from the French Army tried to remove the cannon from the hilltop. They were blocked by members of the politically radicalised Paris National Guard, who captured and then killed two French army generals, and installed a revolutionary government that lasted two months. The heights of Montmartre were retaken by the French Army with heavy fighting at the end of May 1871, during what became known as the Semaine Sanglante, or "Bloody Week".
In 1870, the future French prime minister during World War I, Georges Clemenceau, was appointed mayor of the 18th arrondissement, including Montmartre, by the new government of the Third Republic, and was also elected to the National Assembly. A member of the radical republican party, Clemenceau tried unsuccessfully to find a peaceful compromise between the even more radical Paris Commune and the more conservative French government. The Commune refused to recognize him as mayor, and seized the town hall. He ran for a seat in the council of the Paris Commune, but received less than eight hundred votes. He did not participate in the Commune, and was out of the city when the Commune was suppressed by the French army. In 1876, he again was elected as deputy for Montmartre and the 18th arrondissement.
The Basilica of the Sacré-Cœur was built on Montmartre from 1876 to 1919, financed by public subscription as a gesture of expiation for the suffering of France during the Franco-Prussian War. Its white dome is a highly visible landmark in the city, and near it artists set up their easels each day amidst the tables and colourful umbrellas of the place du Tertre.
By the 19th century, the butte was famous for its cafés, guinguettes with public dancing, and cabarets. Le Chat Noir at 84 boulevard de Rochechouart was founded in 1881 by Rodolphe Salis, and became a popular haunt for writers and poets. The composer Eric Satie earned money by playing the piano there. The Moulin Rouge at 94 boulevard de Clichy was founded in 1889 by Joseph Oller and Charles Zidler; it became the birthplace of the French cancan. Artists who performed in the cabarets of Montmartre included Yvette Guilbert, Marcelle Lender, Aristide Bruant, La Goulue, Georges Guibourg, Mistinguett, Fréhel, Jane Avril, and Damia.