The story of this place
On 18 March 1871 the seizure of cannons stationed on the Butte Montmartre by government troops sparked the Paris Commune, a radical workers' uprising that ruled the city for seventy-two days before being crushed in the 'Bloody Week', when thousands of Communards were shot. The Basilica of Sacré-Cœur, begun in 1875, was built partly in atonement for that bloodshed. In the following decades the cheap-rent bohemian quarter drew Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, Renoir and, at the ramshackle Bateau-Lavoir studios, Picasso, who painted Les Demoiselles d'Avignon here in 1907—the birth of Cubism.