Architecture, Memory and Power in Fin-de-Siècle Europe:
A comparative study of La Basilique du Sacré-Cœur de Montmartre and Храм Спаса-на-Крови (Church of the Saviour on the Blood)
建筑，记忆和权力在十九世纪末的欧洲：
一个巴黎圣心教堂与圣彼得堡滴血救世主教堂的比较研究
作简
者介
孙鉴远，UCL和LSE历史学毕业。曾在法国德国短期学习过。主修19世纪欧洲史，殖民史。现在在申请博士，方向为中亚研究。精通英、法、德、意、汉五种语言，能够阅读荷兰语、西班牙语，在学习俄语、阿拉伯语、叙利亚语。曾去过中东欧洲40多个国家。梦想是成为像Livingston那样的探险家 (alas unlikely in a postcolonial modern age!)
“[...] в стиле времен Московских царей XVII века. Выдающимися образцами этой эпохи являются церковь Василия Блаженного в Москве, целая группа храмов в Ярославле, в Ростове и др.”
--- Alfred Parland, the architect of the Church of the Saviour on the Blood [1][2]
“[...] elle [la Basilique du Sacré-Cœur] est laide et les circonstances de sa construction symbolisent l’écrasement de la gauche.”
--- Lionel Jospin, French ex-Prime Minister, Socialist [3][4]
It was my first visit to St. Petersburg. A friend of mine graciously took me on a tour around the historical centre. The Church of the Saviour on the Blood was a must-see attraction and we, as almost all tourists, reached it by leaving the Metro at Nevsky Prospect, waking along one of the many canals in this city famed for its harmonious baroque and neoclassical landscape. As we walked towards the end of the canal, the form of a Muscovite style church with its onion domes gradually appeared, breaking the straight vista shaped by the uniform neoclassical buildings standing on the banks of the Catherine Canal. Unused to see an old-Russian style building in the centre of the city famed for its European outlook, I turned to my friend: “Как будто бы мы были в Москве!” (As if we were in Moscow!). Yet my friend replied, calmly, “actually it was the Tsar himself who ordered the Church to be built ‘во вкусе русского церковного зодчества’ (in the style of Russian church architecture).”
I was certainly not alone in treating this fin-de-siècle edifice as an aesthetic mistake. This church would certainly be more suitable for Moscow, rather than for a city of Peter’s creation.[5] Yet it was exactly the intention of its builders and patrons to add this archaic architectural feature to Petersburg’s neoclassical cityscape. In choosing this traditional Russian style for a church dedicated to his rather un-Slavophile predecessor, Tsar Alexander III made it clear that he wished to renounce the Western (i.e. liberal) style of government as initiated by his predecessor’s Great Reform, and to return to a more autocratic Muscovite style of rulership as characterised by Ivan the Terrible.[6]
The force of politics in building was certainly not a Russian innovation. All countries in Fin-de-Siècle Europe recognised it. From the Altare della Patria in Rome to the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche in Berlin, from Sacré-Cœur de Montmartre to the State Historical Museum of Moscow, the difference between these buildings that the ruling élite in their respective countries chose to build is a powerful revelation of the variation of their aspirations, be it political or aesthetic. Architecture, as the most visible and the most perpetual form of material culture, is accordingly worth of our attention because it reveals better than anything else the intentions of its patron.[7] What political message does the patron intend to express in his (or rarely her) choice of architectural style? What political image does he wish to convey by sponsoring the construction of certain buildings? These are the questions this essay is going to answer. I shall look in turn at two religious buildings built, coincidentally or not, at roughly speaking the same period (fin-de-siècle) with similar political messages: la Basilique du Sacré-Cœur de Montmartre and Храм Спаса-на-Крови (Church of the Saviour on the Blood). The essay is intended to be comparative. The purpose of the essay is to examine the relationship between politics and architecture in Fin-de-Siècle Europe by decoding the hidden messages the patrons wished to express in their choice of architecture.
As its name indicates, the Church of the Saviour on the Blood was built on the spot where Tsar Alexander II was assassinated by a bomb thrown by a member of the anarchist group Narodnaya Volya (“People’s Will”).[8] His successor, Alexander III was determined to build a church in order to memorialise his father’s martyrdom at the hands of the revolutionaries. His conscious choice of the style - Muscovite Russian style, nostalgic yet inappropriate for a memorial dedicated to the perhaps most un-Slavophile of Tsars, was more an illumination of his own vision of rulership than that of his martyred father’s. St. Petersburg, the metropolis of Peter’s creation, was viewed by the Slavophile Alexander III as too Westernising to be the capital of the Orthodox Russia. For him, as for many Slavophile nationalists of the age, Petersburg was an alien city artificially imposed by Peter I onto the ancient land of Medieval Rus’.[9] Alexander III certainly preferred Moscow, the old capital of Muscovite Rus’, untouched by Western civilisation, where he could reassert his personal rule in the style of Ivan the Terrible.[10] On his ascension to throne, he even contemplated the idea of moving the capital from European Petersburg back to Moscow.[11] Unable to realise such a radical move, the new Tsar could at least take a symbolic stand by displaying his vision of autocracy in stone. No other building of the period better illustrated the close link between architecture, Orthodoxy, and political power: by modelling on the design of the Byzantine-style St. Basil’s Cathedral on the Red Square, the Tsar wished to propagate the ruling ideology of “Moscow as the Third Rome”; while by displaying the coat of arms of every town and district of the Russian Empire, the Tsar made it clear that he possessed both temporal and spiritual authority “над всей России” (“over all Russia”).[12] If the Tsar could not move the capital back to Moscow, he could at least Muscovitise Petersburg to make it more Russian.
If the Church of the Saviour on the Blood was built to expiate the crime of regicide, the Sacré-Cœur de Montmartre was to expiate the sin of a nation.[13] Yet if the crime of regicide is clear to define i.e. the assassination of Alexander II, the sin of a nation seems to be a rather ambiguous crime. Hence the controversies surrounding the construction of Sacré-Cœur. The origin of this project could be traced back to a moralising speech lamenting the military defeat of France during the Franco-Prussian War given by the Archbishop Fournier on the 4th September 1870, the same date when the new Republic was proclaimed at Hôtel de Ville. According to Fournier, the defeat of France was a divine punishment to the French people for their more than one century’s moral decadence that began with the Revolution of 1789.[14]
The outbreak of la Commune amplified this sentiment that France was on the verge of catastrophe and only a divine intervention could save the nation. Even though the Commune was never publicly mentioned in the inscription commemorating the dedication of the church, it was widely believed that the Sacré-Cœur was constructed for expiating the crime of the Communards.[15] The site chosen for the construction of the church - Montmartre - was the place “where the Commune broke out, where generals Clément Thomas and Lecomte were assassinated.”[16] Montmartre, due to its low rents that had attracted a dense congregation of working class population, was renowned for its irreligious bohemian ethos.[17] Therefore, the choice of Montmartre had a symbolic importance for the conservatives who viewed the basilica as “a permanent protestation against the impious doctrines and the barbarous acts of la Commune de Paris.”[18]
If the Church of the Saviour on the Blood enjoyed the unremitting sponsorship of the Tsar throughout the course of its construction, the Sacré-Cœur was not such fortunate. The law concerning the construction of the Sacré-Cœur was voted on the 23rd July 1873, when the National Assembly was still dominated by Monarchists. The President Mac-Mahon and his Prime Minster de Broglie, both monarchists by conviction, viewed the Republic as a makeshift and wished to restore the Monarchy once opportunity came. The project of the Sacré-Cœur was part of the conservative programme aiming at reestablishing “l’ordre moral”.[19] Yet with the electoral triumph of the Republicans in the mid-1870s and the gradual shift of political gravity towards the left during course of the Third Republic, the raison d’être of the Basilica seemed to be under question.[20] The triumph of Republicanism and its ruling ideology of “la laïcité” stood exactly the opposite to what the Sacré-Cœur stood for. After several unsuccessful attempts by the Chamber of Deputies to stop the construction, finally on 1905, the same year when the Law of separation of the Church and the State was promulgated, a statue of La Barre, a young man tortured and decapitated in 1766 by the Church for refusing to remove his hat on a religious procession, was erected on the parvis of the Basilica, in front of the entrance to the church, in order to remind the pilgrims of the excesses of the Catholic Church.[21]
To conclude, despite the different circumstances under which they were constructed, both the Church on the Blood and the Sacré-Cœur represented the effort their respective patrons devoted on utilising public space for legitimising their rulership by controlling the meaning prescribed to certain historical events. Sociologist Durkheim emphasised the integrative and unifying role of the commemorative monument and rituals: the public recognition of an individual (the assassinated Tsar) or a group of people (the communards) constituted a collective tribute to certain deeds that were publicly recognised, a tribute around which individual citizens could reaffirm their common link with other people in the society and create a collective memory thereof.[22] Yet the meaning these two churches conveyed were not neutral. They both represented the wish of the established order in their respective countries, for the simple reason that only the established ruling class had the material and political means to fulfil the construction of something as costly as churches. To use a Marxist terminology, the architecture, as part of the superstructure, is only a reflexion of the power struggle, the outcome of which is determined by the material conditions each class find itself in.[23]
Yet, as the analysis of both churches has shown, the commemoration of the past did not always imply a consensual collective memory but sometimes revealed the division of public opinions in the society. The Church of the Saviour on the Blood was deeply resented by the revolutionaries, who, after having come to power in 1917, closed down the church and converted it into a public museum.[24] The Sacré-Cœur was equally controversial as it was viewed by the left as an overt justification of the violence committed by the government after the fall of the Commune. The very fact that both governments spent lavishly on architecture was an indication of instability rather than stability of their respective regimes. Had they felt confident in their power in controlling public opinions, they would not have needed to display it in such an ostentatious way for legitimisation. It was therefore no coincidence that both churches were built at the beginning of their respective regimes, at a time when the regime was most vulnerable: the Sacré-Cœur shortly after the establishment of the Republic, while the Church of the Saviour on the Blood immediately after Alexander III’s ascension to throne.
The meanings these buildings conveyed did not remain unchanged. Despite the controversies generated by their construction, their original meanings have been neutralised in the course of history. Both churches have become, with good reasons, popular tourist attractions in their respective cities. After the fall of the USSR, the Church of the Saviour on the Blood was reopened as a working church, yet the Tsar and the Empire to which the Church was dedicated were gone forever.[25] As for the Sacré-Cœur, originally an anathema to the Communards, found itself gradually inundated with memorials commemorating various irreligious acts of anti-clerical heroes: from the already mentioned statue La Barre, to the plaque of Jean Baptiste Clément, the author of the popular working class song “le temps de cerises”, or more recently the renaming of the square Willette (on the foot of the Sacré-Cœur) to Louise Michel, in memory of this militant Communard who during the Commune attempted to assassinate Thiers.[26] All these indicate that the churches have been “demythified” - to use Roland Barthes’ terminology - the process of which requires a thorough examination that is beyond the scope of this essay.
Fig.1 La Basilique du Sacré-Cœur de Montmartre [Photograph: J. Sun, 2014]
Fig.2 Храм Спаса-на-Крови (Church of the Saviour on the Blood)
[Photograph: J. Sun 2015]
Notes
[1] “[...] in the style of the time of 17th century Russian Tsars. Outstanding examples of this era are the Church of St. Basil's Cathedral in Moscow, the whole group of churches in Yaroslavl, Rostov, etc.”
[2] “Khram Voskreseniia Khristova”, Zodchii, (1907) No. 35, p. 375
[3] “[...] it [the Basilica of the Sacré-Cœur] is ugly and the circumstances of its construction symbolize the crushing of the left.”
[4] “Entretiens de Lionel Jospin”, L’Express, (11 oct. 1985)
[5] M. S. Flier, “The Church of the Saviour on the Blood: Projection, Rejection, Resurrection”, in R. Huges and I. Paperno (eds.) Christianity and the Eastern Slavs, ii. (California Slavic Studies, 17; Stanford, 1994), p. 25
[6] M. Steinberg, Petersburg Fin-de-Siècle (Yale, 2011) p. 10-17
[7] G. Prakash (ed.), The Spaces of the Modern City: Imaginaries, Politics and Everyday Life (Princeton, 2008) p.101
[8] C. Kelly & D. Shepherd, (eds.) Constructing Russian Culture in the Age of Revolution: 1881-1940 (Oxford, 1998) p. 169
[9] O. Figes, Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia (London, 2003) p. 150-171
[10] O. Figes, A People’s Tragedy: A History of the Russian Revolution (London, 1996) p. 9
[11] Cf. Moskovskie Vedomosti, (6 Mar. 1881), reported in Russkii Vestnik, no. 152 xxiv-xxv; “Moskva ili Peterburg?” Novoe Vremia, (10 Mar. 1881)
[12] W. C. Brumfield, A History of Russian Architecture (Cambridge, 1993) p. 419-420
[13] J. Benoist, Le Sacré-Cœur de Montmartre: de 1870 à nos jours (Paris, 1992) p. 134-138
[14] J. Best, Les monuments de Paris sous la Troisième République: contestation et commémoration du passé (Paris, 2010) p. 113
[15] J. Benoist, p. 22
[16] Rohault de Fleury, Historique de la basilique du Sacré-Cœur. Pièces et documents réunis pas H. Rohault de Fleury. (Paris, 1903-1907) p. 264
[17] R. S. Ionas, “Sacred Tourism and Secular Pilgrimage: Montmartre and the Basilica of Sacré-Cœur”, in G. P. Weisberg (ed.) Montmartre and the Making of Mass Culture (London, 2001) p. 101
[18] Bulletin de l’Œuvre du Vœu national au Sacré Cœur (Paris, 1875) p. 398
[19] J.-M. Mayeur, La vie politique sous la Troisième République (Paris, 1984) p. 23
[20] F. Démier, La France du XIXe siècle: 1814-1914 (Paris, 2014) p. 300-324
[21] J. Best, p. 153-159
[22] É, Durkheim, Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse (Paris, 1912) p. 503-550
[23] K. Marx, Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (Berlin, 1859) p. 14
[24] A. Kryukov, Khramy Sankt-Peterburga: Khudozhestvenno-istoricheskiy ocherk (St. Petersburg, 1998) p. 204
[25] V. Antonov & A. Kobak, Svyatyni Sankt-Peterburga: Istoriko-tserkovnaya entsiklopediya v trokh tomakh (St. Petersburg, 1994) p. 189
[26] J. Best, p. 122
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