The Dynamite Club: How a Bombing in Fin-de-Siècle Paris Ignited the Age of Modern Terror

by John M. Merriman

Montmartre was chosen as a site for “a temple on a sacred mountain towering above the profane,” a “point of intersection between heaven and earth.” However, to those who rejected the public role of the church in France, the glistening white marble of Sacré-Coeur represented — like Haussmann’s boulevards — the architecture of conquest, standing defiantly apart from its working-class environment: a strange “colossal monster.”

The latter, particularly after Louis XIV constructed his opulent royal palace and gardens at Versailles in the seventeenth century, had pulled privilege westward, leaving the artisans and ordinary workers to their own devices in the neighborhoods of central and eastern Paris.

“The straight line [of the boulevards] has killed off the picturesque and the unexpected.” Rue de Rivoli, “so long, wide, and cold, on which promenade prosperous people as cold as the street on which they walk,” formed an apt example.