Panthéon
Built as a church dedicated to Sainte-Geneviève but turned into the nation’s mausoleum during the Revolution. Soufflot sought to combine the lightness of Gothic with the order of antiquity: a cruciform plan with slender columns and a great dome. Voltaire, Rousseau, Victor Hugo and Marie Curie rest here.
When Louis XV lay gravely ill at Metz in 1744, he vowed to build a new church for Sainte-Geneviève, the patron saint of Paris, if he recovered. Jacques-Germain Soufflot received the commission in 1755, and the foundation stone was laid in 1764. Soufflot wanted to unite the light, airy construction of Gothic with the classical orders, and the church became one of the earliest large Neoclassical buildings. The structure was daring, and cracks appeared in the piers beneath the dome while it was still being built, which led to harsh criticism. Soufflot died in 1780, and his collaborator Jean-Baptiste Rondelet completed the church around 1790. The building is of limestone, and the stone was reinforced with a system of iron bars within the masonry, an early form of reinforced construction.
The plan is a Greek cross with slightly elongated arms. Each arm is covered by a low dome, and over the crossing rises a great triple-shelled dome with a ring of columns around the drum, modelled on St Paul’s in London. The interior walls are largely carried by free-standing Corinthian columns with a straight entablature, which gives the space a light and airy character. The portico has Corinthian columns and a pediment that in the 1830s received a relief of the fatherland’s gratitude to its great men. The crypt beneath the church contains the tombs. The interior walls are adorned with large paintings from the late 19th century, including works by Puvis de Chavannes depicting the life of Sainte-Geneviève.
In 1791 the National Assembly decided to turn the church into a burial place for the nation’s great men, the Panthéon. The lower windows were bricked up to give the building a more solemn and enclosed appearance. During the 19th century it switched several times between church and pantheon, until Victor Hugo’s funeral in 1885 made it definitively secular. In 1851 Léon Foucault demonstrated the rotation of the earth here with his pendulum, and a copy still hangs there. Among those who rest here are Voltaire, Rousseau, Victor Hugo, Émile Zola and Marie Curie. An extensive restoration has been under way since the 2010s. The Panthéon influenced Neoclassicism throughout Europe, including Sweden, where French models dominated under Gustav III and architects such as Louis Jean Desprez worked in the same spirit.