France and the Cult of the Sacred Heart

the long version

"Raymond Jonas tells the story of the Sacre-Coeur, or Sacred Heart. The highest point in Paris and a celebrated tourist destination, the white-domed basilica of Sacre-Coeur on Montmartre is a key monument both to French Catholicism and to French national identity. Jonas constructs the history of the devotion responsible for the basilica, beginning with the reputed apparition of the Sacred Heart to Marguerite-Marie Alacoque in the seventeenth century, through the French Revolution and its aftermath, to the construction of the monumental church that has loomed over Paris since the end of the nineteenth century."--BOOK JACKET.