Panthéon

The hill where the Panthéon stands was the original burial place of Saint Genevieve, who had led the resistance to the Huns when they threatened Paris in 451. In 508 Clovis, King of the Franks, built a church there, and was buried in it in 511, his wife in 545. Rededicated to Genevieve, it became the centre of the Abbey of Saint Genevieve, where the saint's relics were kept and carried in procession when danger threatened the city.

Louis XV fell gravely ill at Metz in August 1744 and vowed that, if he recovered, he would replace the abbey's dilapidated church with a building worthy of the patron saint of Paris. He recovered.

Ten years passed before work began: in 1755 the marquis de Marigny, director of the King's public works, gave the commission to Jacques-Germain Soufflot. Foundations were laid in 1758 on ground riddled with the shafts Gallo-Roman potters had sunk for clay, and Louis XV laid the first stone on 6 September 1764.

From 1764 the clergy objected to a church whose ground plan was not a Latin cross, so Soufflot lengthened the eastern arm into an apse flanked by two towers; the design was revised five times and not finalised until 1777. Critics doubted that four pillars could carry so large a dome; Soufflot reinforced the stonework with iron rods, a forerunner of modern reinforced building. He died in 1780 and his pupil Jean-Baptiste Rondelet completed the church in 1790, after the Revolution had begun.

On 4 April 1791, two days after the death of the Comte de Mirabeau, president of the National Constituent Assembly, the Assembly decreed "that this religious church become a temple of the nation", and approved the inscription "A grateful nation honors its great men". Mirabeau's funeral was held there the same day.

The ashes of Voltaire arrived on 11 July 1791, followed by Marat and Rousseau. Both Mirabeau and Marat were later declared enemies of the Revolution and their remains removed; in February 1795 the Convention ruled that no one could be admitted who had been dead less than ten years. Quatremère de Quincy bricked up the lower windows and frosted the upper glass to darken the interior, and the religious friezes and statues were destroyed in 1791.

Napoleon's Concordat of 1801 restored the building to the Church under the canons of Notre-Dame, while the crypt kept its role as a resting place for illustrious Frenchmen: forty-one were placed in it during his reign. In 1816 Louis XVIII returned the whole building, crypt included, to the Catholic Church, which consecrated it at last in the King's presence, a ceremony omitted during the Revolution, and the crypt was locked to visitors.

The revolution of 1830 brought Louis Philippe I, and on 26 August 1830 the church became the Pantheon again, though the crypt stayed shut and no new remains were added. In 1851 Léon Foucault hung a 67-metre pendulum beneath the dome to demonstrate the rotation of the Earth; on complaints from the Church it was removed that December. Under Louis-Napoléon, Emperor from 1852, it was returned to the church as a "National Basilica". It was damaged by German shelling in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, and again in May 1871 in fighting between Commune soldiers and the French Army.

A decree of 1881 made the church a mausoleum for the last time. Victor Hugo was placed in the crypt in 1885, the first entombment there in over fifty years; Émile Zola followed in 1908, Léon Gambetta in 1920 and Jean Jaurès in 1924. The Fourth Republic admitted the physicists Paul Langevin and Jean Perrin, the abolitionist Victor Schœlcher and, in 1952, Louis Braille; the Resistance leader Jean Moulin was the first interred under the Fifth Republic. Marie and Pierre Curie were moved there in 1995, Marie the first woman interred on merit, and Alexandre Dumas in 2002. Simone Veil was interred in 2018 and her husband Antoine beside her so that they would not be separated, Josephine Baker in 2021, and Marc Bloch with his wife Simonne Vidal in 2026. Interment is allowed only by act of parliament.

In January 2007 President Jacques Chirac unveiled a plaque to more than 2,600 people recognised as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem for saving Jews who would otherwise have been deported to the concentration camps. Soufflot's iron rods had deteriorated by the 21st century and were replaced in a restoration between 2010 and 2020. Listed as a monument historique since 1920, the Panthéon is managed by the Centre des monuments nationaux and open to the public.