The Story of the Panthéon in Paris, A Tale of Kings, Revolution, and the Great Souls Who Rest In Its Crypt

We were in Paris this year to bring in the New Year, and on New Year’s Day, with the city quiet and a little hungover, we went to the Panthéon. Nothing really prepares you for it. You walk in under that vast dome, and there in the middle is Foucault’s pendulum, swinging slowly back and forth, marking the turn of the earth itself. 

But for me, I was most fascinated by the crypt where all the tombs lay. And, believe it or not, it was warmer down there among the tombs than it was upstairs under those stunning painted ceilings. 

The Panthéon has been on my mind again this week, because on Tuesday, President Macron stood inside it for the induction of the historian and Resistance fighter Marc Bloch, alongside his wife, Simone Vidal. 

Two coffins were carried in procession into that great hall, and Bloch became the 84th person, and the very first historian, to be laid to rest among France’s great and good. More on that pair shortly, because their story is a heartbreaker.

First, though, let me tell you how this extraordinary place came to be. Because the history of the Panthéon in Paris is every bit as dramatic as the people inside it.

It Started With a King’s Deathbed Promise

In 1744, King Louis XV fell gravely ill and, fearing the worst, made a vow. If he pulled through, he would rebuild the crumbling old abbey church of Sainte-Geneviève, dedicated to the patron saint of Paris, as something truly grand. He recovered and eventually kept his word.

He handed the job to the architect Jacques-Germain Soufflot, who dreamed up a soaring neoclassical temple that would marry the lightness of a Gothic cathedral with the grandeur of ancient Rome. 

Work began in the late 1750s; the foundation stone was laid in 1764, and then, well, it dragged on for decades. Money ran short, and at one point, a royal lottery helped fund it. Poor Soufflot died in 1780 without ever seeing it finished, and it was left to his student to complete the thing in 1790.

The timing could not have been worse. The paint was barely dry when the French Revolution swept the monarchy away.

From Church to Temple of the Great

In 1791, the revolutionaries decided this brand new church was far too magnificent to waste on God alone. They stripped it of its religious purpose and turned it into a mausoleum for the heroes of the nation, modeled on the Pantheon in Rome. 

Across the front, they carved the words that are still there today: AUX GRANDS HOMMES LA PATRIE RECONNAISSANTE, which means “to the great men, the grateful homeland.”

Voltaire was moved in that same year, and Rousseau a few years later. But France, being France, the building couldn’t quite make up its mind. 

Over the next century, it flip-flopped between church and mausoleum as one regime toppled the next. It wasn’t until the writer Victor Hugo died in 1885, and around two million people lined the streets for his funeral, that the Panthéon settled, once and for all, into the role it holds today.

It was also the tallest building in Paris for the best part of a century, right up until a certain iron tower went up in 1889.

The Pendulum That Proved the World Turns

Back in 1851, the physicist Léon Foucault hung a 220-foot pendulum from the center of the dome and used it to prove, for all to see, that the earth rotates on its axis. As the hours passed, the swing appeared to rotate, when in fact it was the ground, and all of us on it, turning underneath. 

The original now lives in a museum across town, but a working copy still swings beneath the dome, and trust me, you’ll stand and watch it far longer than you expect.

The Panthéon sits up on the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève in the Latin Quarter, the 5th arrondissement, which is hands down my favorite corner of Paris. It’s within strolling distance of Notre-Dame and the Seine.

Who Is Down In the Crypt?

The crypt is a warren of little rooms, each one holding a single tomb or sometimes three or four together, and it’s easy to get lost down there. And the names. Voltaire and Rousseau, the two great minds of the Enlightenment, glaring at each other across the aisle as they did in life. 

Victor Hugo and Émile Zola. Louis Braille, who gave the blind the gift of reading. Jean Moulin, the great hero of the Resistance. The scientist Marie Curie, the first woman to be laid here on her own merit, in 1995. 

Alexandre Dumas, who arrived in 2002 to a swashbuckling fanfare worthy of his musketeers. And more recently, the politician and Holocaust survivor Simone Veil, and the Resistance fighter Missak Manouchian.

Finding Josephine

I’ve long been a huge admirer of Josephine Baker, so she was the first tomb I went looking for.

If you don’t know her story, you’re in for a treat. An American girl born into grinding poverty in St. Louis, she came to Paris at nineteen, became the toast of Europe, and then, when war came, threw herself into the French Resistance. 

She smuggled secret intelligence hidden in her sheet music, sheltered refugees and Resistance fighters, and hid a radio transmitter at her château in the Dordogne, Les Milandes. For all that, France awarded her the Croix de Guerre and made her a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur. In 2021, she became the first Black woman to enter the Panthéon. Quite right too.

What you stand in front of in the crypt isn’t actually her grave. At her family’s wish, her body remains in Monaco, so what rests here is a cenotaph, a symbolic tomb filled with soil from the places that shaped her: the United States, Paris, the south of France, and Monaco. A handful of earth from every chapter of an extraordinary life. I found that unbearably moving.

The newest arrivals

Which brings me back to Marc Bloch and Simone Vidal, laid here this Tuesday.

Bloch was one of the most important historians France ever produced, the kind who changed how history itself is written. When war came, this middle-aged scholar, who could easily have stayed safely at his desk, joined the Resistance instead. 

The Gestapo caught him, tortured him, and shot him in June 1944, just days after the Normandy landings. His wife, Simonne, hiding under a false name to conceal that she was Jewish, died of illness only weeks later, never even knowing her husband was gone.

Like Josephine’s, their caskets were largely symbolic. Bloch’s family didn’t want his remains disturbed, and Simonne’s were never found, so the coffins instead held his medals and photographs and her letters to their children. 

On the column beside them stands his epitaph, the words he chose himself: dilexit veritatem. “He loved the truth.” 

Planning your own visit

If this has whetted your appetite, the Panthéon doesn’t disappoint. Getting there is easy enough on the metro, though do read up first, because the whole Paris ticketing system changed in late 2025. 

As for timing, I went in the depths of winter and loved having it almost to myself, but if you’d rather milder weather with the crowds still thin, Paris in March is hard to beat.

And do make a proper day of it in the Latin Quarter while you’re up there. The wonderful Musée de Cluny, with its medieval treasures, is a 5-minute stroll away, as is Rue Mouffetard, an old, historic street worth a visit. 

When your legs give out, there’s no lovelier spot for lunch than one of the grand old bouillon restaurants nearby. They’re cheap and cheerful with wonderful French classics.