40 Fun Facts About Sacré-Cœur

Opponents of Sacré-Cœur once proposed hiding the basilica behind a full-size copy of which famous sculpture?

The Statue of Liberty had just been shipped from France to America when critics suggested raising a twin in front of the church to block it from view. The plan was dropped as too costly.

Sacré-Cœur is built of Château-Landon stone, which reacts in what way whenever rain falls on it?

It whitens itself, because the stone gives off calcite on contact with rainwater. The travertine, quarried at Souppes-sur-Loing in Seine-et-Marne, is also extremely hard and fine-grained.

Which 2023 action film has its hero fight up Montmartre's long staircase to a sunrise duel at Sacré-Cœur?

John Wick: Chapter 4 has Keanu Reeves's hitman fight his way up the steps of the Rue Foyatier twice before a pistol duel in front of the basilica.

What has continued inside Sacré-Cœur day and night, without a single break, since the summer of 1885?

A relay of prayer has never stopped here: men, women and children take turns before the altar, hour after hour, through every night of the year.

What does Sacré-Cœur, the name of the white basilica crowning Montmartre, mean in English?

Sacred Heart is a Catholic devotion to the heart of Jesus, and Pope Pius IX had made it a feast of the Church in 1856, not long before the basilica was planned.

Which kind of railway, opened in 1900, lifts visitors up the hillside to Sacré-Cœur in about ninety seconds?

A funicular first ran here on water power: tanks under each cabin were filled at the top, so the heavier car sank and pulled the other one up. It went electric in 1935.

Bronze horseback statues of two French saints guard the porch of Sacré-Cœur: King Louis IX and which warrior?

Joan of Arc was meant to appear as a peasant girl fighting sword in hand, but the monument committee made sculptor Hippolyte Lefèbvre show her in armour.

Which 2001 French film, set among the cafés of Montmartre, stages a key scene in the gardens below Sacré-Cœur?

Amélie follows a shy waitress, played by Audrey Tautou, who works at the Café des 2 Moulins, a real Montmartre café on the Rue Lepic.

How was the decades-long construction of Sacré-Cœur paid for, a point written into the 1873 law approving it?

Donations from the public covered the cost, and a 'subscription of stones' let families pay for a single block carved with their name, initials or coat of arms.

Sacré-Cœur began as a vow of national penance made after France's crushing defeat in which war?

The Franco-Prussian War left part of France under German occupation, and the two laymen behind the vow blamed the disaster on spiritual causes rather than political ones.

The apse of Sacré-Cœur holds one of the world's largest examples of which art form, covering 475 square metres?

Mosaic covers the whole vault: the Christ in Glory, inaugurated in 1923, shows Christ in white with arms outstretched amid a crowd of saints, popes and worshippers.

Which archangel, honored as a protector of France, has his own Chapel of the Armies inside Sacré-Cœur?

Michael also stands beside Christ in the apse, and a 1903 statue by François Sicard shows him slaying a dragon on one of the basilica's pinnacles.

In which 2024 Olympic sport did competitors climb Montmartre, the hill crowned by Sacré-Cœur, three times?

Road cycling sent the Olympic peloton up the hill, and the route inspired the 2025 Tour de France to add Montmartre climbs to its final stage.

Which fairground ride is a fixture of the park that climbs the hillside directly below Sacré-Cœur?

A carousel stands at the foot of the park's great staircase: a two-storey merry-go-round built in the style of eighteenth-century Venice.

Which square a few streets from Sacré-Cœur fills each day with artists setting up their easels for tourists?

Place du Tertre was laid out in 1635 on land given up by the nuns of Montmartre's Benedictine abbey. Picasso and Modigliani later lived close by.

Tradition says which patron saint of Paris was beheaded on Montmartre, centuries before Sacré-Cœur rose there?

Denis, the first bishop of Paris, is said in legend to have picked up his severed head and walked on for miles, preaching a sermon as he went.

What is the name of the 19-ton bell of Sacré-Cœur, cast near Annecy in the Alps and the largest in France?

La Savoyarde was a gift from the four dioceses of Savoy. It rings only on major feast days, and its note was said to carry ten kilometres.

Which animals hauled the 19-ton great bell of Sacré-Cœur up to the basilica when it reached Paris in 1895?

Horses did the job: twenty-eight of them were harnessed to a single wagon, and the bell's arrival on the hill was the talk of Paris.

Centuries of mining for which mineral left Montmartre so hollow that Sacré-Cœur needed 83 deep concrete pillars?

Gypsum from Montmartre was heated to make plaster, which is how 'plaster of Paris' got its name. The old tunnels left the ground too unstable to build on without deep shafts.

Which restorer of Périgueux Cathedral won the contest to design Sacré-Cœur but died long before it was finished?

Paul Abadie died in 1884, soon after the foundations were finished, and his successors stretched the round domes he had planned into taller ovals.

Which 1871 uprising began beside the future site of Sacré-Cœur, in a clash over cannons parked on Montmartre?

The Paris Commune held the city for two months until the army crushed it in a 'Bloody Week' of street fighting, which is why the basilica has drawn political argument ever since.

Sacré-Cœur grew out of the national shock when which French ruler was captured at the Battle of Sedan?

Napoleon III was taken prisoner in early September 1870, and within days the Bishop of Nantes was calling the defeat a divine punishment for a century of moral decline.

The great bell of Sacré-Cœur, normally kept for major feasts, rang out on an August night in 1944 to hail what?

The liberation of Paris was hours away: as the first French troops reached the Hôtel de Ville, a radio announcer asked priests to ring their bells, and churches across the city answered.

What destroyed the original stained-glass windows of Sacré-Cœur, which had to be replaced with new ones in 1946?

Wartime bombing in April 1944 blew out windows that had taken from 1903 to 1920 to install, so the glass in the basilica is younger than the building around it.

Which Catholic order traces its birth to vows taken in 1534 on Montmartre, the future hill of Sacré-Cœur?

The Jesuits began with Ignatius of Loyola and six fellow students making their promises in a Montmartre crypt, and the basilica has a chapel dedicated to him.

Montmartre locals nicknamed Sacré-Cœur 'Notre-Dame de la Galette' after which kind of building near the site?

A windmill, the Moulin de la Galette, stood near the spot where the Archbishop of Paris laid a first stone of pink marble in June 1875.

A much smaller copy of Sacré-Cœur stands in the hills above the capital of which Caribbean island?

Martinique built its Sacré-Cœur de Balata in the 1920s above Fort-de-France, where many people had settled after Mount Pelée destroyed the town of Saint-Pierre in 1902.

The great organ of Sacré-Cœur, built by Aristide Cavaillé-Coll in 1898, was first made for what kind of building?

A private château in Biarritz was its first home: Baron Albert de l'Espée wanted the best organ available whatever the cost, and the basilica acquired it years later.

The main entrance of Sacré-Cœur breaks with church tradition by facing which direction, toward the centre of Paris?

South is where the city lies, and the narrow hilltop also left more room along a north–south line, so the builders broke with the usual east–west layout.

Which pope made a pilgrimage to Sacré-Cœur during his first official visit to France?

John Paul II came on 1 June 1980, and one of the chapels behind the high altar was later dedicated to him as a saint.

Which French politician, later nicknamed the Tiger, tried in parliament to halt the building of Sacré-Cœur?

Georges Clemenceau moved to stop the work in 1882 and again in 1897, but cancelling would have meant repaying millions of donors, so the building went on.

Paris's secular city council placed a statue before Sacré-Cœur honoring a young nobleman executed in 1766 for what?

Blasphemy cost the Chevalier de la Barre his life, and in 1907 the council renamed the street behind the church after him, so the basilica's own address bears his name.

The park below Sacré-Cœur was renamed in 2004 after which anarchist teacher who fought in the 1871 uprising?

Louise Michel led the Montmartre women's vigilance committee during the revolt. Until 2004 the park carried the name of the cartoonist Adolphe Willette.

Since a 1908 law settled a dispute between Church and state, who has been the legal owner of Sacré-Cœur?

The City of Paris owns it under the 1908 law, which also said the building could not be taken out of religious use without a new act of parliament.

The Latin dedication in the apse of Sacré-Cœur calls France penitent and devoted; which word was added after 1918?

Grateful, or 'grata', was added after the First World War. The consecration of the basilica, planned for October 1914, had itself been put off for five years by the fighting.

Unlike the long nave of a Gothic cathedral, Sacré-Cœur follows which floor plan with a great dome at its centre?

A Greek cross has four arms of equal length, which meet here under the great central dome ringed by four smaller cupolas.

Sacré-Cœur was designed in which style, unusual for Paris and partly a reaction against the ornate opera house?

Romano-Byzantine design drew on Hagia Sophia in Constantinople and Saint Mark's in Venice, giving Paris white domes where its medieval churches have spires.

The chapel of Saint John the Baptist at Sacré-Cœur was paid for by the Order of Malta and which country?

Canada helped fund the chapel of the Baptist, a fitting choice: he is the patron of French Canadians, and his feast day is a legal holiday in Quebec.

Which famous French novelist wrote sarcastically in 1898 that Sacré-Cœur made France do penance for the Revolution?

Émile Zola complained that the gigantic landmark, visible from every street, punished a century of free speech, science and reason. Artists such as Steinlen and Willette attacked it too.

The quarries behind the white stone of Sacré-Cœur also supplied which Paris monument begun in 1806?

The Arc de Triomphe drew on the same quarries at Château-Landon and Souppes-sur-Loing, which also provided stone for the footings of the Eiffel Tower.