Panthéon

The Panthéon began as a king's thank-offering and became a republic's hall of fame. Louis XV vowed during an illness in 1744 to rebuild the decrepit abbey church of Saint Genevieve, patron saint of Paris, on her hill in the Latin Quarter, and in 1755 the commission went to Jacques-Germain Soufflot, who had spent years studying ancient buildings in Rome. Work started in 1758 and dragged on so long that neither king nor architect lived to see it finished; Soufflot's pupil Jean-Baptiste Rondelet completed the church in 1790, just as the Revolution broke out.

The building is an early and very pure statement of Neoclassicism: a Greek-cross plan, a portico of Corinthian columns copied from a temple, and a stone dome meant to rival St Peter's in Rome and St Paul's in London. It is 110 metres long and 83 metres high, and the dome is really three shells fitted one inside another; through the opening in the lowest you see Antoine-Jean Gros's painted Apotheosis of Saint Genevieve on the second. Soufflot wanted Gothic lightness in classical dress, but when the Revolution turned the church into a mausoleum in 1791 most of the windows were bricked up for a more funereal gloom. Above the entrance, David d'Angers's pediment of 1837 carries the dedication "To great men, the grateful nation".

The building swung back and forth between church and secular temple through the 19th century before the Third Republic settled its purpose in 1881; Victor Hugo's funeral four years later opened the modern era of burials. Voltaire and Rousseau lie in the crypt, as do Émile Zola, Jean Jaurès, the Resistance leader Jean Moulin, Alexandre Dumas, and Marie Curie, who in 1995 became the first woman honoured here on her own merit. Simone Veil followed in 2018 and Josephine Baker was inducted in 2021. Walls of the nave carry 19th-century murals of the lives of Saint Genevieve and Saint Denis, with notable panels by Puvis de Chavannes.

Under the dome swings a copy of the pendulum with which Léon Foucault demonstrated the rotation of the Earth in 1851, hung then on a 67-metre wire. Watching its slow drift is still the quietest, and most persuasive, science lesson in Paris.

Getting there

The Panthéon stands on Place du Panthéon at the top of the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève in the 5th arrondissement, at the head of the rue Soufflot, which runs downhill for about 300 metres to the Jardin du Luxembourg. Paris-Orly Airport (ORY) is about 13 km away.