ABSTRACT
A historian of the First World War experiences a strange sense of familiarity reading the way in which Francois Hartog recently described the development, from the 1970s onwards, of a "new regime of historicity": that of "presentism". At first glance, the rites of consecration to the Sacred Heart of Jesus celebrated in Europe during the First World War and its immediate aftermath seem to be dominated by passatism; that is a regime of historicity dominated by the past. From an emic perspective, the war was a crucial turning point in the providential history of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Habsburg dynasty, or France, or the human race – a centuries-long history. From an etic perspective, the war has to be placed in the context of the Roman Catholic Church's reaction to the French Revolution and, in the shorter term, to the secularisation policies of the Third Republic, the Kingdom of Italy, and the German Empire.
