Montmartre

The hill that would become Montmartre was called Mons Mercurii by the Romans, after a temple to Mercury that stood at its summit during the first and second centuries AD. Roman Lutetia, the settlement that preceded Paris, used its heights for worship as Roman cities often did with elevated ground. When Christianity arrived in Gaul, the temple gave way to a church, and the hill acquired new meaning. Denis, sent from Rome as a missionary bishop around 250 AD, was arrested there during the Decian persecution and executed by decapitation at the summit.

The story Denis carries into legend is the cephalophory: he reportedly picked up his severed head and walked north for several miles to the place where he wished to be buried, which became the Basilica of Saint-Denis. Whether literal miracle or later legend, the image fixed itself in French Christian memory. By the ninth century, the hill appeared in Latin documents as Mons Martyrum, the Mount of Martyrs. French contracted this to Monmartre and then to the modern spelling.

A Benedictine abbey, founded in 1133 by King Louis VI and his wife Adelaide of Maurienne, occupied the summit for six centuries. The nuns held the hill through every upheaval of medieval and early modern France. The Revolution suppressed the abbey in 1794 and sent its last abbess, Marie-Louise de Montmorency-Laval, to the guillotine. The hill passed from sacred ground to public property in a matter of months.

By the 1880s, cheap rents and clear views drew artists up the slopes: Toulouse-Lautrec sketched the cabarets below, van Gogh worked from a studio on the Rue Lepic, and Picasso lived at the Bateau-Lavoir from 1904. The Sacré-Coeur Basilica, begun in 1875 as a national vow after France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, rose through the same years. A hill that had held a Roman temple, a medieval abbey, and the mass graves of 1871 was crowned with a new monument. The martyrdom became backdrop.