How the hill got this way

The History of Montmartre Paris

An abbey, a quarry, thirty windmills, a revolution, a basilica built as an act of atonement, and forty years of painters.

Mons Martis or Mons Martyrum — where the name comes from

Two etymologies compete and both are old. One reads the hill as the mount of Mars, from a Roman temple said to have stood on it. The other reads it as the mount of the martyrs, after Saint Denis. Neither can be proved from the ground, and the name settled long before anybody thought to record which was meant.

Saint Denis and the abbey on the hill

The story that made the hill sacred has Denis, the first bishop of Paris, beheaded on its slopes in the third century and walking north carrying his own head. A royal abbey was founded here in 1133 and held the hill for six and a half centuries. It farmed the slope, pressed its grapes and rented out its windmills, until the Revolution dissolved it.

The gypsum quarries that hollowed out the Butte

Under the village is a hill quarried for gypsum — plaster of Paris is named after it — on such a scale that the ground beneath parts of Montmartre is a honeycomb. Quarrying stopped in the nineteenth century because the hill was becoming unsafe. The basilica above it had to be founded on eighty-odd deep shafts, sunk through the worked ground to reach solid rock. The cellars that hold the Dalí collection are part of the same story.

Thirty windmills, and the two that are left

A hill that catches the wind and grows grain grows windmills. Some thirty stood here at the peak, grinding flour and pressing grapes for the abbey and then for the village. Two survive: the Blute-Fin and the Radet, together the Moulin de la Galette. It turned from milling to dancing in the nineteenth century, and gave Renoir the subject of the Bal du moulin de la Galette.

1871 — the cannons, and the start of the Commune

After the siege of Paris, the National Guard’s cannons were parked on the Butte, paid for by public subscription. On 18 March 1871 the government sent troops to take them back. The crowd on the hill stopped them, two generals were shot, and the Paris Commune began that morning. The hill has never quite lost the association, and the basilica that followed is inseparable from it.

The National Vow, 1870 to 1875

The idea of a church on the summit came out of the defeat of 1870. Alexandre Legentil and Hubert Rohaut de Fleury drafted the text of the National Vow in 1871, and the archbishop approved it in 1872. In 1873 the National Assembly voted the project public utility, which is what made the site available. Paul Abadie won the architectural competition in 1874 with a Romano-Byzantine design on a Greek-cross plan.

Building the basilica, 1875 to 1919

The first stone went down in 1875. Perpetual adoration began on 1 August 1885 and has not been interrupted since. The building was solemnly inaugurated on 5 June 1891, with the dome still unfinished. La Savoyarde — cast in 1891, and at 19 tonnes the largest bell in France — was installed on 20 November 1895. The campanile was completed and its cross raised on 6 April 1912. The First World War delayed the consecration until 16 October 1919, more than forty years after that first stone. The apse mosaic of Christ in Majesty, 480 square metres of it, followed in 1923.

The bohemian decades — Le Chat Noir to Le Bateau-Lavoir

While the basilica went up, the village below it filled with people who could not afford anywhere else. Renoir painted the dance garden. Toulouse-Lautrec drew the Moulin Rouge from the year it opened in 1889. Van Gogh lived with his brother Theo on rue Lepic, and his palette changed there. Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon at Le Bateau-Lavoir, with Modigliani and Juan Gris in the same building. By the 1920s the money and the artists had both moved to Montparnasse, which is roughly why the village still looks like a village.

1933 — a vineyard planted to stop the developers

A plot on the north slope was about to be built over when residents planted it with vines instead, with the support of the municipality. The Clos Montmartre took its first harvest in 1934, with Mistinguett and Fernandel presiding, and it has been harvested every October since. Its 2,000 vines are pressed and bottled at the town hall of the 18th, and the money goes to social work in the arrondissement.

Montmartre now — a pedestrian zone and a Tour de France finish

The hill is still a working neighbourhood rather than a museum. Fifteen of its upper streets are now a pedestrian zone where through traffic is banned and pedestrians have priority. And in July 2026, for the second year running, the Tour de France routed its final stage over the Butte, climbing rue Lepic three times before the finish on the Champs-Élysées — the loudest the village has been since the Commune.

Two places hold most of this story in one room. The Sacré-Cœur is the National Vow made in stone, and the Musée de Montmartre is the house the painters actually worked in.

Montmartre walking tours tell most of this on the ground, in two hours; the departures are listed on Montmartre Paris Tours.

Sources

• Basilique du Sacré-Cœur de Montmartre — hours, free entry, the dome, the construction timeline and La Savoyarde. Checked 2026-09-08.
• Ville de Paris and Mairie du 18e — the height of the Butte, the 222 steps, the funicular, the Clos Montmartre, the cemetery hours and the pedestrian zone. Checked 2026-09-08.
• Musée de Montmartre, Dalí Paris and Le Mur des Je t’aime — admissions, hours and the wall’s own figures. Checked 2026-09-08.

Hours and prices move; check anything time-critical before you travel.