Panthéon

Landmark · Latin Quarter (5th)Paris,France

A vast, near-empty stone hall above the Latin Quarter, its windows walled up, with Foucault's pendulum swinging over a crypt of the nation's dead.

The Panthéon is a vast, near-empty stone hall on the hill above the Latin Quarter, with a brass ball swinging on a long wire under its dome. Light falls almost only from the round opening at the top. The floor below is bare: a few statues, no pews, no altar. Léon Foucault hung the first pendulum here in 1851 to show that the earth turns. Steps lead down to a crypt where Voltaire, Rousseau, Zola and Marie Curie lie among the country's honoured dead. The building was finished as a church in 1790 and turned into a tomb for the nation's dead a year later. Louis XV had ordered it after recovering from a serious illness, and Jacques-Germain Soufflot designed it to be full of light; the Revolution wanted a solemn hall instead, so thirty-eight of the forty-two windows were walled up. What you walk into is far darker than the building Soufflot drew. It swapped between church and national tomb for most of the next century, until Victor Hugo's funeral in 1885 settled it. Nobody has worshipped here since.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Do not count on the walk around the dome — It opens only in warm months, closes in high wind and for long repairs, and the climb is steep with no lift.
Look at the door of Rousseau's tomb — It is carved as a small country temple, with the door left ajar and a hand pushing through the gap holding a lit torch.
Stand on the top step between the columns and look straight out — Rue Soufflot was laid out as the approach to this building, and it runs downhill straight to the Luxembourg Gardens.
Give the crypt more time than the hall above — Its corridors run under the whole building, and the eighty-odd graves sit in more than twenty separate vaults rather than one room.
Expect cold stone and a lot of echo — The bare floor and walls stay cold in every season, and a few dozen visitors are enough to fill the hall with footsteps.

Things to do

1
Mark where the pendulum swings, then come back
Stand at the rail under the dome and note which mark on the floor dial the swinging ball is crossing. Walk once round the barrier, look up into the deep square panels inside the dome, then come back a quarter of an hour later. The line of swing has crept clockwise off your mark, and nobody touched it.
2
Stand between Voltaire and Rousseau
Take the stairs down and stop in the first vaulted chamber. Voltaire's tomb stands on one side, with a marble statue of him in front of it. Rousseau's is opposite. The two men attacked each other in print for years, and they were carried down here three years apart, into a room that now sets them face to face.
3
Find the painted night scene on the hall walls
The main hall's lower walls carry pale paintings, several by Puvis de Chavannes, who kept his colours chalky so they would not fight the stone. Look for his night scene: Saint Geneviève, the saint the church was first built for, stands on a terrace by lamplight above a sleeping city. He finished it in 1898 and died that year.