The Paris Panthéon switched between church and national tomb again and again
Louis XV promised a grand church to Saint Genevieve if he survived an illness. By the time it was finished, revolutionaries had turned it into a tomb for great citizens, and over the next ninety years kings, emperors and republics kept flipping it back and forth, repainting its dome to match.
The hill it crowns has long been sacred ground. The forum of Roman Lutetia stood there, Saint Genevieve, who rallied Paris against the Huns in 451, was buried there, and Clovis, King of the Franks, raised a church on the spot in 508. After falling ill in 1744, Louis XV vowed to replace the crumbling abbey church, and in 1755 Jacques-Germain Soufflot, who had studied classical architecture in Rome, got the commission.
Soufflot aimed to marry Gothic lightness with classical order. His Greek-cross plan was revised five times, foundations went down in 1758, and money troubles slowed everything. He died in 1780 and his student Jean-Baptiste Rondelet finished the job in 1790. Critics doubted four pillars could hold the huge dome, so Soufflot braced the stone with iron rods, an early ancestor of reinforced construction; those rods were replaced during a restoration from 2010 to 2020. The dome is really three shells nested inside one another.
When Mirabeau died in April 1791, the Assembly declared the building a temple of the nation. Voltaire's ashes arrived that July, followed by Rousseau and Marat, though Mirabeau and Marat were later thrown out as enemies of the Revolution. Windows were bricked up to make the interior gloomier. Napoleon handed it back to the Church while keeping the crypt for notables, 41 of whom were laid there under his rule. Louis XVIII had the painter Gros replace Napoleon in the dome fresco with himself, and then Louis Philippe made it secular again in 1830.
The switching continued. In 1851 Léon Foucault hung his pendulum beneath the dome to show the Earth turning, but it came down that December after Church complaints, and Napoleon III soon made the building a basilica. Only in 1881 did the Third Republic settle it as a mausoleum for good. Victor Hugo's burial in 1885 was the first in more than 50 years, and by December 2021 it held 81 people, just six of them women.
Source: Panthéon
