Paris Pantheon: the great and the forgotten under the same roof

Stop for a second before going in. Look at the facade. Those Corinthian columns. That triangular pediment. That dome dominating the Latin Quarter. All of this started with a sick king. In 1744, Louis XV fell gravely ill during a military campaign. Doctors gave him only hours to live. The king panicked. He promised God that if he survived, he would build a new church in honor of Saint Genevieve, the patron saint of Paris, on the hill where you now stand. Louis XV survived. And years later, when the ailments of old age reminded him of his promise, he summoned his favorite architect. Ja…

Jacques-Germain Soufflot was a man obsessed with the impossible. He wanted an enormous dome. Lighter than London's. More elegant than Rome's. The problem: heavy domes need thick walls. And Soufflot wanted thin walls. With enormous windows. With light inside. His colleagues told him it was madness. That the walls would not hold. That the building would collapse. Soufflot ignored them. He invented a system of crossed internal arches within the pillars. A structure that distributed weight in a way nobody had used before at that scale. It worked. But the price was high. In 1780, wit…

This building was a church for exactly one year. From 1790 to 1791. One year. Then the Revolution arrived. And the National Assembly decided that Paris needed a place to bury its great men. Not in churches. Not controlled by the Church. A secular place. Republican. For the heroes of the nation. They took this newly completed church. They transformed it. They closed the windows with masonry so light could not enter. They erased the religious inscriptions. They carved on the pediment the words you can still read: Aux grands hommes la patrie reconnaissante. The grateful homeland to i…

Go down to the crypt. And when you reach the end of the main corridor, stop. On your left: Voltaire. On your right: Rousseau. Face to face. Forever. There is something cruel about that. Voltaire and Rousseau hated each other. Not with polite indifference. With active contempt. Voltaire said Rousseau's ideas were dangerous sentimentalism that would lead to barbarism. Rousseau said Voltaire was an aristocrat playing at being a rebel from his Swiss castle. They insulted each other in letters. In books. In pamphlets. Their respective followers threw stones at each other in the streets…

The pediment inscription says: to its great men. Men. For more than a century, the Pantheon was literally only for men. Until Marie Curie arrived. In 1995, one hundred and three years after her first Nobel Prize, Marie Curie became the first woman to enter the Pantheon on her own merits. Underline that: on her own merits. Marie Sklodowska was born in Warsaw in 1867. Polish. An immigrant. A woman. Three characteristics that in 19th century Paris were a triple obstacle. The Sorbonne did not accept women. She got in anyway. She was the first woman to graduate in physics in the entire h…

Victor Hugo died on May 22nd 1885. He was eighty-three years old. He was the most famous man in France. Perhaps the most famous in Europe. He left precise instructions in his will: I want a pauper's coffin. I want no religious ceremonies. I want no state pomp. A simple procession. What happened was the exact opposite. The government declared nine days of national mourning. The body was laid out beneath the Arc de Triomphe for an entire night. Watched over by honor guards. Lit by torches. The entire city came to see him. The following day, the funeral procession moved down the Cha…

Emile Zola is here. In the Pantheon. But the story of how he got here has a piece most people do not know. In 1906, Zola's tomb was desecrated. Someone entered at night and fired shots at the sarcophagus. The police never found the person responsible. Nobody was prosecuted. The attack was a direct consequence of the Dreyfus Affair. In 1894, Alfred Dreyfus, a French army officer of Jewish origin, was convicted of treason. He had supposedly passed military secrets to Germany. The evidence was fabricated. The French army knew it. But Dreyfus was Jewish. And there were sectors of the F…

Jean Moulin entered the Pantheon in 1964. He was the first of the Resistance heroes to be pantheonized. And the ceremony was one of the most moving moments in recent French history. The minister of culture Andre Malraux gave the speech. He said something nobody had said before with such clarity: Here is a martyr who did not speak. Jean Moulin was a prefect, a civil servant, when the Germans took France. He was not a soldier. Not a cinema hero. He was a middle-aged man with a bureaucratic job. When the occupation came, he could have stayed silent. He could have administered under the …

Alexandre Dumas entered the Pantheon in 2002. One hundred and thirty-two years after his death. And they brought him in with an escort of musketeers dressed in period costume. As he would have wanted. The author of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo was the most-read writer in France in the 19th century. Probably the most read in Europe. But official France of his time never fully embraced him. Why? His paternal grandfather was Thomas-Alexandre Dumas. A general in Napoleon's army. One of the most brilliant generals of the French Republic. And of African origin. His …

Go back to the main nave. Look up. From the dome hangs a metal wire. At the end of the wire is a bronze sphere weighing twenty-eight kilos. It swings slowly from one side to the other. That is the Foucault Pendulum. And in 1851 it demonstrated something nobody in Paris had seen with their own eyes. That the Earth rotates. This was not a new idea. Galileo had said it in 1632. But seeing it was another thing. Leon Foucault hung a sixty-seven meter pendulum from the Pantheon's dome. He placed sand on the floor below. The pendulum, as it swings, traces a line in the sand. But because …

The Pantheon has ninety-six tombs. Ninety-six people France considered great enough. But there is a longer unofficial list. Those who should be here and were never allowed in. The first is the most obvious: Napoleon Bonaparte. The man who dominated Europe for twenty years. The one who created the Civil Code that still governs in France. The one who transformed the country's educational, judicial and administrative system. He is buried at Les Invalides, not here. Why? Because the political debate over whether Napoleon was hero or tyrant was never resolved. And the Pantheon only accep…

Before leaving, look at the entire space one last time. A building that started as a frightened king's promise. That was a church for one year. That was a pantheon. And a church again. And a pantheon again. That holds the philosopher whose coffin may be empty. The scientist who died from what she discovered. The writer who asked for simplicity and received two million people. The spy who did not speak. The novelist who was insulted for his blood. The lawyer who published a letter that split France in two. All together under the same dome that their architect would not live to finish.…