Almost everything people love about Montmartre is usually explained by atmosphere. It is better explained by geology and tax. The hill is gypsum — the raw material of plaster of Paris — and it was mined from Roman times until 1860, which left it hollow, unbuildable and therefore cheap. And until 1860 it sat outside the city's customs wall, so the wine was untaxed. Hollow ground and cheap wine built the rest.
The hill is the Paris in plaster of Paris
Montmartre rises 130 metres above the north of the city, and it is made of unusually thick, pure beds of gypsum. Burn gypsum, grind it, add water, and it sets hard. That is plaster, and this hill and its neighbours are where Europe got it.
Quarrying began in the Gallo-Roman period and continued until 1860, by open working and by gallery. Eighteen centuries of extraction left the butte honeycombed underneath.
That has one consequence every visitor can see and nobody is told: when the Sacré-Cœur was built on the summit, it could not simply be founded on the hill. Its foundations had to be driven some forty metres down to reach ground that would carry it. The basilica is not built on Montmartre. It is pinned through it.
Why it is called the mount of martyrs, and why that is an argument
There were Roman temples on this summit, and the hill's older name descends from them — Mons Mercurii, the mount of Mercury, or Mons Martis, of Mars. The Christian reading, Mons Martyrum, displaced it. The ninth-century abbot Hilduin records that change.
The martyr is Saint Denis, first bishop of Paris, executed on the hill around 250 AD. The legend — and it is legend, written down six centuries after the event — holds that he then picked up his own head and carried it north down the far slope. He is the original head-carrying saint.
Both etymologies are usually presented as fact and neither should be. The Christian form is documented from Hilduin; the pagan original is a scholarly reconstruction. The martyrdom tradition is old; the walk is hagiography.
An abbey, and the second-oldest church in Paris
In 1133 Louis VI bought the hill and, with his queen Adelaide of Savoy, founded a royal Benedictine abbey whose buildings covered most of the summit for the next six and a half centuries. The abbey was destroyed after 1790 and its last abbess guillotined in 1794.
One building survives: Saint-Pierre de Montmartre, beside the place du Tertre, usually described as the second-oldest surviving church in Paris after Saint-Germain-des-Prés. It was reconsecrated in 1147 by Pope Eugenius III, with Bernard of Clairvaux assisting.
Inside, the double arch between choir and apse rests on two ancient columns of the 2nd or 3rd century, carrying carved marble capitals of Merovingian date. Roman stone, Merovingian carving, Romanesque building, in one arch. Almost nobody goes in.
Thirteen windmills, and the one you are photographing is the wrong one
The first mills appear on the slopes in 1529, grinding wheat, barley and rye. At the peak there were thirteen. Two survive: the Blute-fin of 1622 — from bluter, to sift flour — and the Radet of 1717. Both are listed monuments.
The Radet is the picturesque one on the street corner, and it was moved there. The mill Renoir painted in 1876, and Van Gogh in 1886, is the Blute-fin, further up behind the rue Lepic.
The dance hall came out of a disaster. The Debray family bought both mills in 1809; during the 1814 assault on Paris three Debray men died defending the mill. In 1830 the survivors started selling wine, and in 1833 they laid a dance floor. The brown bread galette they sold gave the place its name.
Tax, not romance, made it bohemian
Until 1 January 1860 Montmartre was not part of Paris. It was a village, and from 1790 an independent commune with its own mayor and a town hall on the place du Tertre. The city's customs wall ran below the hill, so wine sold up here never paid the entry duty.
Cheap wine produced drinking gardens, which became cabarets — Le Chat Noir in 1881, where Erik Satie played — and then the music halls, including the Moulin Rouge in 1889.
Annexation ended the tax advantage and quarrying stopped the same year. The hill stayed cheap anyway, because the ground was full of holes. Cheap rent is why Renoir, Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, Utrillo, Valadon, Modigliani and Picasso all worked here — and why Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in 1907 in a wooden tenement called the Bateau-Lavoir. Most of them left for Montparnasse after 1918.
The morning the Paris Commune began
Before dawn on 18 March 1871, the army came up the butte to remove the National Guard's cannon, parked on the heights after the siege. They arrived without enough horses to move them, and while they waited the neighbourhood woke up. A crowd came out and stood between the soldiers and the guns, and the soldiers would not fire.
Two generals, Lecomte and Clément-Thomas, were taken and shot that day. By evening the government had fled to Versailles and the Paris Commune had begun. It ended ten weeks later against a wall in Père Lachaise.
The mayor of Montmartre that morning was a young doctor named Georges Clemenceau, who tried to prevent the killings and failed.
Popular accounts credit the crowd, and specifically the women, with shooting the two generals. Modern scholarship points instead to mutinous soldiers and National Guards. What is not in doubt is that the crowd stopped the operation.
Six things almost everyone believes that aren't true
| Claim | Verdict | What is actually the case |
|---|---|---|
| Saint Denis carried his head down the hill | Legend | Written down by Hilduin before 885, six centuries after the event. The martyrdom tradition is old; the walk is hagiography |
| The windmill on the corner is the Moulin de la Galette of the paintings | False | That is the Radet, and it was moved. Renoir and Van Gogh painted the Blute-fin, up behind the rue Lepic |
| Montmartre has always been part of Paris | False | It was an independent commune from 1790 and was annexed on 1 January 1860, becoming part of the 18th arrondissement |
| The artists came for the light and the romance | Mostly false | They came for the rent, which stayed low because the quarried ground could not carry heavy building |
| Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d'Avignon at the Moulin Rouge | False | He painted it at the Bateau-Lavoir, a wooden tenement, in 1907 |
| Montmartre is a UNESCO World Heritage Site | False | It is not inscribed. It is protected as a French historic district of 60 hectares, with listed monuments inside it |
What to do with an hour
Leave the place du Tertre. Fifty metres in any direction the crowd simply stops, and the village underneath — lanes, stairs, walled gardens, washing lines — is still there. Go into Saint-Pierre and look at the arch. Walk to the Clos Montmartre on the rue Saint-Vincent, a working vineyard planted in 1933 that makes about 500 litres a year and is harvested every October. Then take the rue Lepic and find the mill nobody photographs.
Hear this one standing in front of it
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Written from Wanderlight's research dossier for Montmartre — the same one the narration is written from. Where the evidence is thin, this page says so rather than rounding the uncertainty up.