Principios cardinales

The Basilica of Sacre-Coeur on Montmartre in Paris can be understood in this manner (figure 4.7). As David Harvey's (1979: 363-4)15 brilliant reconstruction of the historical moment in which the Basilica was built shows, the form, style, and placement of Sacre-Coeur was far from accidental. "Few would argue that the Basilica of Sacre-Coeur is beautiful or elegant," Harvey writes. "But most would concede that it is striking and distinctive, that its direct Byzantine style achieves a kind of haughty grandeur which demands respect from the city at its feet. On sunny days it glistens from afar and even on the gloomiest of days its domes seem to capture the smallest particles of light and radiate them outwards in a white marble glow." Hence, Harvey asserts, the Basilica stands as a symbol of "perpetual remembrance." The question, as with Johnstown and its closed steel mills, is what is to be remem- bered? What meanings does this monument project, and how does it project them? 14 Monk is referring explicitly to the ways in which gender is powerfully coded in the landscape. We will return to the examination of gender in chapter 5.

15 Page numbers in the text refer to the Annals version of the article (1979). The essay has been reprinted in Harvey (1989b).

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Figure 4.7 The Basilica of Sacre-Coeur. David Harvey's analysis of this monument in the landscape asks whose history - whose memory - is interred at this site. A reconstruction of the history of the Basilica and the political-geographic context with- in which it was conceived and built shows that that is not at all an easy question. Mary Evans Picture Library.

At one level, the history is plainly there for all to see. A prominent inscription at the Basilica proclaims:

The year of our Lord 1875, the 16th June, in the reign of His Holiness Pope Pius IX in accomplishment of a vow formulated during the war of 1870-1871 by Alexander Legentil and Hubert Rohault de Fleury ratified by His Grace Mgr. Guibert Archbishop of Paris; in execution of the vote of the National Assembly of the 23rd July 1873 according to the design of the architect Abadie; the first stone of this Basilica erected to the Sacred Heart of Jesus was solemnly put in place by His Eminence Cardinal Guibert

(quoted pp. 365-6) But Harvey is convinced - and he is right - that this inscription, and indeed the Basilica itself, hides more history than it reveals. The landscape is a deceptive representation. And conversely, the Basilica represents, plainly in its stones and mortar, a clear intervention in the political and economic history of Paris and France. The landscape couldn't be a clearer representation.

But again, representation of what? For Harvey, the answer lies in the tumultuous class politics of Paris during the nineteenth century. The story, however, begins in the late seventeenth century when Marguerite-Marie Alacoque (later sainted), haunted

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by visions of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, developed a cult within the Catholic church dedicated to its worship. As the cult spread slowly through France in the following century it found adherents from the monarchy, culminating in the private vows taken by Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette. As Harvey (pp. 364-5) remarks, such royal adherents are important because they indicate a lasting "association... between the cult of the Sacred Heart and the reactionary monarchism of the Ancien Regime. This put adherents of the cult in firm opposition to the principles of the French revolu- tion." When the monarchy was restored, the fortunes of the cult advanced, particu- larly among conservative Catholics.

When Paris was under siege in the last months of the Franco-Prussian war, and with the urban unrest growing during the fall of 1870, Catholic Parisian Alexander Legentil fled the city. From his refuge in the countryside, he vowed in December that "if God saved Paris and France and delivered the sovereign pontiff, he would contribute according to his means to the construction in Paris of a sanctuary dedi- cated to the Sacred Heart" (quoted p. 366). Attracting other adherents to his cause, Legentil built considerable strength behind the movement to build the sanctuary. But his vision did not go unopposed. As Harvey explains, tensions between the city and the countryside nearly scuttled the proposal as many of the most faithful adherents (and donors) opposed the further centralization of power - symbolic or otherwise - in Paris. Despite this, the backers of the Basilica reaffirmed their deter- mination to build in Paris: "were Paris reduced to cinders," they proclaimed on March 19, 1871, "we would still want to avow our national faults and proclaim the justice of God on its ruins" (quoted p. 367). Only one day earlier, Harvey (p. 367) notes, "Parisians had taken their first irrevocable steps towards establishing self- government under the Commune. The real or imagined sins of the communards were subsequently to shock and outrage bourgeois opinion. And as much of Paris was indeed reduced to cinders in the course of a civil war of incredible ferocity, the notion of a basilica of expiation upon these ashes became more and more appealing."

The history and politics of the Commune are complex and fascinating, but the important issue here is that "rightly or wrongly, the bourgeoisie [of Paris] was greatly alarmed during the 1860s by the emergence of working class organizations and political clubs, by the activities of the Paris branch of the International Working Men's association, by the effervescence of thought within the working class and the spread of anarchist and socialist philosophies" (p. 368). During the siege of Paris, the working classes were essential ingredients in the rather weak attempts by the Govern- ment of National Defense to repel the Prussians and break the siege. This alliance seemed to catch the bourgeoisie in a trap between the Prussians and the "red" leadership of the workers. But so too did the workers find their desire for municipal democracy and self-determination betrayed by the national government. Such intri- gue led, at the end of October, 1870, to the first insurrectionary movements of what would soon become a civil war. And all this during the continuing Prussian siege of the city: starvation among the mass of the population was rampant, with working- class Parisians reduced to bargaining for rat meat and eating bread adulterated with bone meal - bones exhumed from the catacombs that housed their ancestors. Yet even so, the bourgeoisie found it possible to continue to consume conspicuously (if rather expensively).

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The national government finally capitulated to Prussia in January, 1871, and provisions were made to disband the French Army. The Paris National Guard, however, remained armed. In the elections that followed, Paris voted radical and republican, but found the countryside strongly in support of the monarchists and a full capitulation to Prussia. Part of the agreement with Prussia provided that French reparations would be financed by French, not German, financiers, who promptly informed newly elected President Adolphe Thiers that financing could only be achieved if he first eradicated the unrest in Paris. Thiers's plan was to send "the remnants of the French A r m y . . . to Paris to relieve that city of its cannons in what was obviously a first step toward the disarmament of a population which had, since September 4th, joined the National Guard in massive numbers" (p. 370). In response, the people of Paris sought to maintain their control over their armaments, pouring into the streets and onto fortifications to contest the actions of the army.

It is here that Montmartre - a symbolic center of the city - re-enters the picture. "On the hill on Montmartre," Harvey (p. 370) reports,

weary French soldiers stood guard over the powerful battery of cannons assembled there, facing the increasingly restive and angry crowd. General Lacomte ordered his troops to fire. He ordered once, twice, thrice. The soldiers had not the heart to do it, raised their rifle butts in the air, and fraternized joyfully with the crowd. An infuriated mob took General Lacomte prisoner. They stumbled across General Thomas, remembered and hated for his role in the savage killings [of insurrectionary workers] in the June days of 1848. The two generals were taken to the garden of No. 6 rue des Rosiers and, amid considerable confusion and angry argument, put up against a wall and shot.

The hilltop at Montmartre had once again become a place of martyrdom - a point which was not lost on those who sought to build the Basilica. When the first stones of the church were laid, the connection was made explicit: "it is here where Sacre-Coeur will be raised up that the Commune began," one of the chief proponents of the Basilica proclaimed, "here where the generals Clement Thomas and Lacomte were assassinated." The Basilica would avenge those murders, and turn Montmartre once again into a holy site, and a site that would forever bury the "demons" of the commune (quoted p. 370).

If that was the function (or at least one of the functions) of the Basilica, the burying of the commune in less symbolic, more bloody means was left to fighting in the streets. President Thiers arranged a second siege of Paris in April, 1871, and rein- forced it with "one of the most vicious bloodlettings in an often bloody French history." Included in this bloodletting was the massacre of communard leaders, such as Eugene Varlin, where else but on the hillside of Montmartre. "The left can have its martyrs too," Harvey intones (p. 371). "And it is on that spot that Sacre- Coeur is built." Both for atonement and to erase the history of the wildly anti-clerical communards, the movement to build Sacre-Coeur gained momentum in the year after the commune's defeat, with Pope Pius IX giving his endorsement in July, 1872. By October, the Archbishop of Paris had selected Montmartre as the site for the Basilica because "it was only from there that the symbolic domination of Paris could be assured" (p. 376). As he struggled to the top of the hill, the Archbishop proclaimed,

"It is here, it is here where the martyrs are, it is here that the Sacred Heart must reign so that all can beckon to it" (quoted p. 364).

Much debate ensued as to the devotion of public property to such a cause, as to the role that Catholic workers were to play in raising funds, and as to the symbols with which the Basilica was to be adorned. Even so, the church was finally completed in 1912, and set to be consecrated in October, 1914, when another war with Germany yet again interrupted plans. It was not finally consecrated until after World War I had ended.

Sacre-Coeur remains a powerfully symbolic site today, both to pilgrims and tour- ists perhaps unaware of its bloody history, and to radical protesters who know precisely what the basilica stands for. But Sacre-Coeur's representations are not always crystal clear. As Harvey (p. 381) concludes,

[T]he visitor who looks at the mausoleum-like structure that is Sacre-Coeur might well wonder what it is that is interred there. The spirit of 1789? The sins of France? The alliance between intransigent Catholicism and reactionary monarchism? The blood of martyrs like Lacomte and Clement Thomas? Or that of Eugene Varlin and the twenty thousand or so communards mercilessly slaughtered along with him? The building hides its secrets in sepulchral silence.

So how then should we understand the production of landscapes? And how should we understand both their desire to represent and their desire to hide? My own sense is that it is vital to begin with an exploration, as Harvey did with Sacre-Coeur, of the relations that go into a landscape's making. No matter how mystified a landscape may be, no matter how abstracted from the forms of place landscape representations may become (as we will see below), it is nonetheless the case that there are a set of delineable social relations - as in Johnstown, Vancouver, and Paris - that explain both how landscapes are made and how and why landscape representations circulate as they do.

An understanding of landscape production should probably therefore begin with Sharon Zukin's (1991: 16, 19) definition of landscape as a "contentious, compro- mised, product of society" formed through "power, coercion and collective resist- ance." But the important point is precisely that "landscape" fully mystifies that contentiousness, creating instead a smooth surface, a mute representation, a clear view that is little clouded by considerations of inequality, power, coercion, or resist- ance - at least until the moment when those struggles over power become overt. As Vancouver's Chinatown and Paris's Sacre-Coeur, and perhaps especially Johnstown show so well, landscape is a kind of lived, produced, and represented space. What is interesting is the relationship between the lives (and deaths), the productions and the representations, that make a landscape. As W.J.T. Mitchell (1994: 1-2) has put it. landscape:

is an instrument of cultural power, perhaps even an agent of power that is (or frequently represents itself as) independent of human intentions. Landscape thus has a double role with respect to something like ideology It naturalizes a cultural and social construc- tion representing an artificial world as if it were simply given and inevitable, and it also makes that representation operational by interpellating its beholder in some more or less determinate relation to its givenness as sight and site.

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For geographers, this has meant searching below the surface of material landscapes like city blocks or national parks, "ethnic" neighborhoods and monumental build- ings, as well as of paintings, photographs, gardens, and other more representational landscapes, to uncover the conditions under which a landscape is made. Geographers have done this by exploring class and gender relations, the role of race and nationality in landscape production (as with Chinatown), or by engaging in fine-grained analyses of particular events that are determinate in making a landscape (as with Sacre- Coeur). These are all types of culture wars through which landscapes are made. But it has also meant paying close attention to other kinds of battles that reveal another crucial side of landscape: landscape as representation. For representation can have a circulation - an economy - quite different (though not disconnected) from the material form landscapes take on the ground.

Representations: Or the Work of Landscape as "Scene"

A few years ago, the Smithsonian National Museum of Art in Washington, DC, opened an exhibit that sought to reconsider the nature of the images that defined the American West. Part of the goal was to show how images of heroism and conquest were propped up by (and served to mask) syct^rw nf ^plp'tati****- and even genocide in the West (figure 4.8). The exhibit sought to show that the Western myth was just tfet7a~myth. As Stephen Daniels (1993: 1) describes the exhibit, "Some images are

Figure 4.8 Tompkins H. Matson, The Last of the Race (1847). Native Americans were often depicted as remnants of a past landscape, justifying American manifest destiny through their passing. Prints of The Last of the Indians were popular in the Eastern United States. Reproduced by permission of the New York Historical Society.

described [by text accompanying them] to be less ahoiit the West than a projection of social tgnsions, around imrpigratinn and labour unrest, in the eastern cities where many of the art-works were produced and consumed." The reaction to this exhibition was immediate and strong. Politicians in both parties condemned the Smithsonian and threatened to cut off its funding. Museums in other cities (including St. Louis and Denver, two key locations for Western development) canceled their plans to host the show. And, in the press and on television, on the floor of Congress and in classrooms, a wild debate developed on the proper representation of history and.g&ography - a debate that has reverberated in a series of increasingly strident battles in the culture wars around everything from the teaching of Westeftrhistory, to the role of museums in promoting national culture (see chapter 1; see also Limerick 1991).16

What's going on? Why such a furor over the way the West was painted? How is it possible that a more truthful depiction of the West can be pilloried as an affront to the sensibilities of the nation? To answer these questions we need to move beyond the realm of landscape production and focus more clearly on the role of landscape representation in defining society, in promoting ideologies of naturalism in the manner indicated above by W.J.T. Mitchell. As Harvey's explication of the building of Sacre-Coeur makes so clear, the facts of landscape production can never be divorced from the mode and purpose of landscape representation.'7 The "iconogra- phy of landscape," to borrow a phrase from Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels (1988), two pioneers in the geographical study of landscape representation, needs to be unpacked, not least to show the way that landscape itself is part and parcel of (indeed a key ingredient in) the sort of culture-as-ideology described in chapter 3.