Pantheon

Pantheon

Pantheon was originally a church dedicated to Saint Genevieve, Paris' patron saint. While gravely ill in 1744, Louis XV vowed to God that he would rebuild the Abbey of Saint Genevieve if he recovered.

Recover he did, and Louis enlisted the architect Soufflot to design the new church. His inspiration came from the Roman Pantheon. The new building wasn't completed until 1790, by which time the Revolution and its secular ideals had spread throughout the country. As a result, the church was renamed the Pantheon and was dedicated to France's Great Men. Enlightenment thinkers Voltaire and Rousseau were the first to be buried there. The Pantheon was briefly remade into a church during the Restoration, but, upon Hugo's death in 1885, the government decided once and for all to secularize the monument as a burial place for France's most illustrious citizens.

The Pantheon is the resting place of famous writers and philosophers Emile Zola, Victor Hugo, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, Mirabeau, the scientists Pierre and Marie Curie, Andre Malraux, minister under General Charles de Gaulle's presidency and Soufflot, its architect. The remains of Jean Moulin - hero of the French Resistence during the Second World War - were moved here by Charles de Gaulle.

Hanging from the top of the dome is Foucault's Pendulum, still tracing patterns in the fine sand on the floor below it. The pendulum was used to prove the rotation of the earth.

Le Pantheon

Place du Panthéon, Paris, 75005
Open

1st Apr- 30th Sep: 9:30a-6:30p M-Su, 1st Oct-31st Mar: 10a-5:30p M-Su