1870. The Second French Empire under Napoleon III (alias Charles Louis Napoléon Bonaparte, son of the original Napoleon's younger brother Louis I of Holland) was still rolling on. Then, for reasons that probably seemed like a good idea at the time but were really, really awful in any other context, France decided to flex its military muscles in the direction of Prussia while Otto von Bismarck was building a confederation that we would later know as Germany.

Bad idea. Bad, bad idea.

In the resulting Franco-Prussian war of 1870, France had its collective backside handed to it. Napoleon III and the Second Empire fell, the Third Republic rose, and on the day that it did Bishop Félix Fournier (1803-1877) gave a speech opining that the defeat France was a divine punishment following "a century of moral decline" since the French Revolution. Then the Paris Commune of 1870-1871 occurred where an attempt was made to create a communist "country" within Paris. That ended the way such things usually do, with a few thousand people dead.

The solution to moral decline? A big church. Big, big, biiiiiiig church. Make it 83 metres (272 feet) tall. Build it out of the whitest of white Travertine limestone so that it positively glows. Stick it on top of a hill (the butte Montmartre, the highest in Paris) so that it can be seen from all of Paris. And there you have... Sacré-Cœur Basilica, alias Basilique du Sacré-Cœur, alias the Basilica of the Sacred Heart of Paris. Construction began in 1875, though it was not completed until 1914 by which time France had other things on its mind, so the consecration did not occur until 1919.

It's just under 4 klicks away from here, but I was using a standard lens (I don't recall whether I had the 40-150 with me at the time) so it seems a little further here. Depending on how much I've cropped the image that you're viewing, the Avenue Hoche will be visible on the left.