PANTHÉON

Description

Essentials about the Panthéon in brief

The Panthéon is France’s national hall of fame and is used as the burial place of famous French personalities. Philosophers Rousseau and Voltaire, physicists and Nobel laureates Marie and Pierre Curie, and writers Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo and Émile Zola, as well as philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, among others, have all found their final resting place here. The impressive building is located on the Hill of St. Genoveva, the patron saint of Paris, in the Latin Quarter student district.

The history and architecture of the Panthéon

Already in the 5th century there was a first church on this place. In the 12th century a convent was built on the site and the old church was replaced by a new collegiate church. At the end of the 18th century, King Louis XV commissioned a new church building in gratitude for the recovery after a serious illness. The architect appointed was Jacques-Germain Soufflot, who was largely unknown until then and who planned the construction of a huge church in the shape of a Greek cross. Soufflot wanted to revive ancient classicism with his church building and build a domed church with a Greco-Roman temple façade. The church was modeled on and named after the Pantheon in Rome, the only surviving domed building of antiquity. The construction of the church took 26 years from 1764 to 1790. Soufflot died during the construction work, so his students completed the church.

The interior of the Panthéon

In the interior, Soufflot drew inspiration from Gothic cathedrals, replacing the heavy supports of classical art with the elegance of slender columns and ribbed vaults. In addition, each of the four arms of the cross is surrounded by side aisles – as in Gothic cathedrals. Many details of the original concept were later altered by the revolutionaries, who, for example, had many of the side windows bricked up.

Shortly after its completion, the imposing domed building was profaned by the leaders of the French Revolution and declared a national hall of fame. From then on, important personalities of French history were to be immortalized here. This was to be done by means of monuments, but it was also planned to bury the mortal remains of important Frenchmen in honorary graves in the basement of the building. Under the entire floor of the former place of worship there is no crypt in the usual sense, but a huge system of corridors with numerous chapels, each of which pays tribute to specific historical figures, similar to the veneration of saints in Christian churches.

The Panthéon as a burial place

Since then, the list of people buried in the Panthéon has been a who’s who of French art and culture, science and politics. The first Frenchman whose body was solemnly interred was the revolutionary leader Mirabeau in 1791 (but his body was removed from the national shrine just two years later, when he again fell from grace). In 1791, the bones of the philosopher Voltaire were transferred to the Pantheón, where they still rest today. The physicist and Nobel Prize winner Marie Curie was the first woman to be buried in the Panthéon. Since then, this honor has been bestowed on only three other women, who rest among a host of men, including Louis Braille, the inventor of Braille, physicist and Nobel Prize winner Pierre Curie, writers Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo and Émile Zola, and philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

The reburial of a corpse or urn in the Panthéon is officially called “panthéonization” and represents a quasi “mystical elevation” of the deceased. Only in exceptional cases were the deceased buried in the Panthéon immediately after their death. This has happened only twice so far (to the writer Victor Hugo and the former French President Marie François Sadi Carnot). The vast majority of people buried in the Panthéon were moved there many years after their passing. Pantheonization remains an important process in French cultural policy to this day. Proposals for the inclusion of a person in the Panthéon are made by the National Assembly. The final decision, however, is made by the French president.

The Foucault Pendulum

Incidentally, in March 1851 the Panthéon was the scene of a world-famous experiment. The physicist Léon Foucault succeeded here in empirically proving the earth’s rotation with a 67-meter-long pendulum in front of an astonished public. At the end of the pendulum body, which weighed 28 kilograms, was a tip which, with each swing, painted a track in a bed of sand on the floor. The original of Foucault’s pendulum can still be admired in the hall of fame.