Situated in the centre of the
Quartier Latin, high on the Montagne St-Genèvieve hill, the 19th-century Panthéon was originally built as a church between 1764 and 1790, but it was converted into a civil temple. Its appearance is prominent among other monuments, with its Greek-cross shape and massive Corinthian columns, modeled after the 2nd-century
Pantheon in
Rome, which surround the 110-metre long, 84-metre wide and 83-metre high structure. Its dome displays three superimposed shells, similar to the
St Paul's Cathedral in
London.
It is said that Louis XV vowed in 1744 that if he recovered from illness, he would rebuild the remains of the church of the Abbey of St-Genèvieve - the patron saint of Paris. The Panthéon’s foundation was laid in 1758 and completed in 1789. However, because of the
French Revolution, the building was converted from a church into a mausoleum for the remains of famous Frenchmen, called a
Temple of Fame. The temple was converted again into a church, where also
Victor Hugo was burried. Now the inscription of the front of the Panthéon reads
Aux grands hommes la patrie reconnaissante (‘For great men the grateful homeland’).
Among those buried in the Panthéon’s crypt, which covers the whole surface of the building, are Voltaire (whose body was exhumed and placed here), Mirabeau (the first to be buried there) and Marat (the bodies of Mirabeau and Marat were later removed), Emile Zola and Victor Hugo, as well as the temple’s architect Soufflot and he remains of the hero of the French Resistance from the times of World War II, Jean Moulin. The only woman buried in the mausoleum is Marie Curie, with her husband Pierre. More recently, André Malraux,
Charles de Gaulle's culture minister, was relocated here because President Jacques Chirac said that he “lived [his] dreams and made them live in us”.
The Panthéon was also the place where, in 1852, the physicist Jean Bernard Léon Foucault staged an exhibition, swinging his 60-metre long pendulum. His experiment proved that the world spins around its axis. Copernicus, 300 years before Foucault’s Pendulum, was the first to suggest that the Earth rotates around its axis, but Foucault provided the visual evidence.
The site of the Panthéon, on top of the St-Geneviève hill, not far from the Sorbonne University and the
Jardin du Luxembourg, was also the location of a basilica built in AD 507 by King Clovis, the first Frankish Merovingian King. This basilica was built as a tomb for the king and his wife, Clothilde. In AD 512 Saint Geneviève, the patroness of Paris was also buried there.