Psst. Montmarte was renamed Mont-Marat during the revolution...

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Huh. Thanks for the heads up!



The English Wikipedia page on Montmartre doesn’t mention this name-change, but the French one does. However, it doesn’t tell us why Montmartre was called Montmarat. For that, we ended up at the Danish Wikipedia page on Montmartre - I’ve no idea why that one is more detailed than the others, but there you go. As a name, Montmartre means ‘Mount of the Martyr’, after the martyr St Denis, who got decapitated up the top of the hill. When the Revolution set about de-Christianising everything, they renamed Montmartre to Montmarat, to celebrate the famed journalist and Montagnard politician Jean-Paul Marat. This guy lived from 1743 to 1793, when he was assassinated by Charlotte Corday, a Girondin supporter radicalised against the Montagnards. I’m not able to find anything on the exact date when this name-change took place, but all of the sources I have found describe the name change as happening in honour of the fallen Marat - which suggests sometime after July 1973. I’m also not finding any specific dates on the return to ‘Montmartre’, except that it was pretty quick. Best guess: end of the Revolution with the rise of Napoleon in 1799.

Check out more on the Girondins and the Montagnards here, or read our original post on Montmartre here.