The Panthéon

The place, briefly

The Panthéon exists because a king got ill. In 1744, campaigning at Metz during the War of the Austrian Succession, Louis XV fell seriously sick and prayed to Saint Geneviève, the patron saint of Paris. He recovered, and promised the monks of her abbey that he would rebuild their crumbling church.

It took twenty years to start. The king laid the first stone himself on 6 September 1764, to a design by Jacques-Germain Soufflot, who had been given the commission in 1755. Soufflot wanted to combine three things that had never been combined: the structural daring and lightness of Gothic, the discipline of French classicism, and the grandeur of the Greek temples he had studied in Italy. The result is a Greek-cross plan under a dome, fronted by a portico modelled on the Pantheon of Agrippa in Rome — which is where the building's eventual name comes from.

Soufflot died in 1780 without seeing it finished, and without any idea of what it was about to become. Maximilien Brébion and Jean-Baptiste Rondelet carried the work on and completed it in 1790.

One year later the Revolution took it. When the orator Mirabeau died in 1791, the new republic needed somewhere to bury its heroes, and the brand-new church at the top of the hill was the obvious candidate. Antoine Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy was given the job on 3 July 1791 of stripping the Christian building down into a secular one — blocking most of the windows, which is why the interior is far darker and more solemn than Soufflot's design intended.

Voltaire was moved in that same year, 1791, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau in 1794 — the two writers whose arguments had done most to make the Revolution thinkable, installed as its founding saints. Then the building changed hands repeatedly as France changed regime, going back to being a church and back to being a mausoleum more than once across the nineteenth century.

What settled it was a funeral. When Victor Hugo died in 1885, the crowds that followed him through Paris were so vast, and the national feeling so unambiguous, that the building's identity was fixed by the event: from Hugo onward the Panthéon was the Panthéon.

The people admitted since read as an argument about what France wants to say about itself. Émile Zola's ashes came in 1908, six years after his death, in the long aftermath of the Dreyfus affair. André Malraux arrived in 1996 and Alexandre Dumas in 2002, on the bicentenary of his birth. Josephine Baker was honoured in 2021, the first Black woman to be, and the Armenian-French Resistance fighter Missak Manouchian in February 2024.

One distinction is worth knowing before you go down to the crypt, because it surprises people: not everyone honoured here is buried here. A pantheonisation can be marked by a cenotaph — an empty tomb — or by an inscription alone. Josephine Baker is the monument's own example. Her tomb in the crypt is a cenotaph; her body remains in Monaco, where her family wished it to stay.