Panthéon

The Panthéon was commissioned by Louis XV in 1755 as a church dedicated to Sainte-Geneviève, Paris's patron saint, in fulfilment of a vow made during a serious illness, and was designed by architect Jacques-Germain Soufflot in a neoclassical style modeled on Roman and Greek temples, with a dome influenced by St Paul's Cathedral in London and Rome's Pantheon. Construction, delayed by structural difficulties with the piers supporting the dome, finished only in 1790, by which time the Revolution had begun; the National Assembly secularized the building in 1791 and rededicated it as a mausoleum for great Frenchmen, inscribing over the entrance 'Aux grands hommes, la patrie reconnaissante' (To great men, a grateful homeland). Its status shifted repeatedly over the following century, reverting to a church under the Restoration and Second Empire and back to a secular mausoleum under the Third Republic in 1885, coinciding with the state funeral of Victor Hugo. The crypt now holds the remains of more than 80 figures, including Voltaire, Rousseau, Victor Hugo, Émile Zola, Marie Curie (the first woman interred on her own merits, in 1995), and Resistance figures such as Jean Moulin and Joséphine Baker, inducted in 2021. The nave houses a working reproduction of Léon Foucault's 1851 pendulum, which first demonstrated the Earth's rotation from beneath the original dome. The building's dome, visible across the Left Bank skyline, underwent a major restoration completed in stages through the 2010s to address stone erosion and structural cracks identified as early as Soufflot's lifetime.