The story of this place
Commissioned by Louis XV as a church to Saint Geneviève and finished in 1790, the neoclassical Panthéon was swiftly converted by the Revolution in 1791 into a mausoleum for the nation's great citizens, inscribed 'Aux grands hommes la patrie reconnaissante'. Voltaire and Rousseau entered first; Victor Hugo's 1885 funeral drew two million mourners. Marie Curie, interred in 1995, was the first woman honoured for her own achievements. Resistance heroes Jean Moulin and, in 2015, four fighters including Germaine Tillion joined them. Beneath the dome, Foucault's pendulum famously demonstrated the Earth's rotation in 1851.