The Panthéon: Pendulum, Crypt and the Nation's Great
Why is it significant?
Stop on the square at the top of the hill and tilt your head all the way back. Huge columns, a triangular pediment, and above it a dome that dominates the whole Left Bank. Across the front, in gold letters, the inscription reads: to great men, the grateful homeland.
Key Facts
| Place | The Panthéon: Pendulum, Crypt and the Nation's Great |
|---|---|
| Address | Place du Panthéon, 75005 Paris, France |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.84620, 2.34610 |
| Part of Walk | Students, Saints and Gladiators: Paris's Latin Quarter from the Sorbonne to the Panthéon |
| Generated | Generated |
Stop on the square at the top of the hill and tilt your head all the way back. Huge columns, a triangular pediment, and above it a dome that dominates the whole Left Bank. Across the front, in gold letters, the inscription reads: to great men, the grateful homeland.
It was never meant to be a tomb. In 1744 King Louis the Fifteenth fell gravely ill and vowed that if he recovered, he would build a magnificent church to Sainte-Geneviève, patron saint of Paris. He recovered. The architect Jacques-Germain Soufflot spent the rest of his life on it and died in 1780 before it was finished. It was completed just in time for the Revolution, which in 1791 turned it into a temple for the heroes of the nation and bricked up its windows to make it more solemn.
Voltaire was carried in that same year, Rousseau in 1794, and the two old enemies now lie almost face to face in the crypt. In 1885 Victor Hugo's coffin lay in state under the Arc de Triomphe before being brought here, and some two million people followed it. In 1995 Marie Curie became the first woman buried here for her own achievements. And in November 2021 Joséphine Baker, singer, Resistance agent and civil-rights campaigner, became the first Black woman honoured here, though her body remains in Monaco.
Inside, look for the long wire falling from the dome. In 1851 the physicist Léon Foucault hung a heavy ball from a wire sixty-seven metres long here, set it swinging, and invited Paris to watch. Hour after hour the swing seemed to rotate slowly around the floor. The pendulum was not turning... the Earth was turning beneath it. For the first time, ordinary people could see the planet move with their own eyes.
Soufflot's dome was so heavy that cracks soon appeared, and engineers have been reinforcing it ever since. Now walk to the left-hand corner of the Panthéon, behind it, where an older and much stranger church stands almost shoulder to shoulder with it.