French Places - a site for the culture, history, monuments, literature and regions and cities of France

 

 

 

 

Le Panthéon des Grands Hommes

 

 

 

Jacques-Germain Soufflot was the architect who designed this granite pile, and gave his name to the street which leads up to it from the Boulevard Saint Michel.  But he was not commissioned by the leaders of the Revolutionary government, as might be thought.  Rather, his patron was King Louis XV and the temple was meant to be yet another place of Christian worship.

A full half century before his grandson was beheaded on the Place de la Concorde, the monarch fell gravely ill with a fever.  During a relapse, he pledged that if he was saved he would replace the ancient church where the relics of the patron saint of Paris were kept.  Genevieve was the nun who miraculously saved the city from destruction by Atilla the Hun, by having him go elsewhere to wreak havoc. 

So it was that 20 years later, in the company of the future Louis XVI, his grandson, and before a full-sized painting of the façade suspended on a wooden scaffold, the King solemnly placed the cornerstone of the huge building.  It is worth noting that it began to go up at the same time as the not-dissimilar Madeleine church, another example of the Neo-Classical style, on the right bank of the Seine. 

It was modelled on the Pantheon of Rome and meant to outshine the recently completed Cathedral of Saint Paul, in London. Especially, it would be topped with the same sort of dome, in fact three domes, one for the roof and two smaller ones inside.  The outer dome is so high that it would have been impossible to enjoy its decoration from inside the church. The inner dome is flatter with a large oculus or "eye" in the middle, through which one can see the frescoes painted on the middle dome, as if they are floating in heaven. 

 

 

But the ground underneath the foundations was soon discovered to be a honeycomb of mining shafts, from which clay had once been extracted to make pottery 1,000 years earlier, when Paris was the Roman Lutetia. When cracks began to appear in the great walls the work had to stop until the necessary reinforcements could be made.  This and a general lack of funds meant that the Church of Saint Genevieve was not finished until 16 years later, at the start of the Revolution.

Just before the King and Queen tried to flee to safety and were captured in Varennes, the revolutionary firebrand Mirabeau died, not violently but from the effects of his life of debauchery.  This colourful figure was a dissolute aristocrat who had been disowned by his father, but he was gifted with eloquence and, as well as being one of the authors of the Declaration of Human Rights, he was a stirring orator much loved by the Parisians.  In view of his popularity it was decided to create a Temple of Reason where his remains and those of other heroes of the people would be enshrined.

After choosing the not yet consecrated Church of Saint Genevieve, the revolutionary architects tried to give it an appropriately sepulchral and unreligious appearance.  Most of the windows which Soufflot had designed to fill the nave with light were walled up, and the two belfries were removed, as well as all the devotional paintings, sculptures and reliefs. A vast lower church had been built beneath the nave, to house a broterhood of monks who would pray in perpetuity to Saint Genevieve. The revolutionaries divided its massively vaulted passageways into 300 crypts.

However, a few years after Mirabeau was laid to rest, he was found to have been a traitor.  A sealed-up closet was discovered in the royal palace containing letters he wrote to Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, clearly showing that, while preaching revolution, he had worked as a secret agent in the service of the trapped monarchs.  It seems that Mirabeau hoped that a constitutional monarchy would be created and that, as a reward for saving the throne, he would be given a high and lucrative position. This shocking revelation led to his bones being torn from the tomb and cast into the gutter. 

Just as Mirabeau was being taken out ignominiously through a side door, the body of Marat, "'l'ami du peuple", who had just been stabbed to death in his bathtub, entered through the front door, and a carefully-staged proclamation was read reviling the one and praising the other.  But it was not long before Marat fell into disgrace, too, after the downfall of his close friend Robespierre.

 The second celebrity to receive the honour was Voltaire, who died fifteen years before the Revolution but, as a champion of freedom and enemy of religion, was revered as one of its heroes.  His bones were transferred to the Pantheon amid a tumult of acclaim, from an obscure graveyard outside the city, where he had been buried because the Church denied him a Christian burial.  

It is said that a few decades later, when the royalty briefly returned to power and restored the Pantheon to its original function, it was suggested to the new king, Louis XVIII, that Voltaire be removed.  "Let him stay where he is", he quipped, "it's punishment enough for him to have to hear Mass every day".

The other great philosopher of the Age of Enlightenment, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, no friend of Voltaire's in life, was placed just across the aisle from him. His sepulcher was made of unpainted wood, to symbolize his love of nature, a revolutionary position in itself, in the 18th century!

Napoleon Bonaparte was the first sovereign to return the edifice to its vocation as a church in 1806, reserving the crypt for himself and his Imperial associates.  But, by a twist of fate, his own cadaver was entombed in the Hôtel des Invalides, after the British sent it back from Saint Helena.

For the Universal Exhibition of 1851, the physicist Foucault, inventor of the gyroscope, chose the dome of the Pantheon to hang his pendulum which demonstrated the rotation of the earth on its axis. A century and a half later a working replica of the pendulum - smaller copies of which exist in museums around the world - was installed there once more, for the enlightenment of the people and the entertainment of the tourists.  A good idea, since, unless you have a special interest in the monument, it is not a very entertaining place to visit.

During the uprising of 1871, when the Parisians rebelled against the government and established their own direct democracy, hundreds of insurgents turned the Pantheon, then the highest point in the city, into a fortress.  In spite of then being a church, it was still the living symbol of France's recent revolutionary heritage, one which France's conservative leaders would have dearly liked to shake off. 

The army responded by firing five cannon balls which nearly brought the church down, and when the rebels finally came out to surrender they were mercilessly shot dead to a man, on the front steps.  The commune, as the "small revolution" is called, only lasted two months and ended with the massacre of most of the insurgents, but for radicals around the world, such as Karl Marx, it was the first heroic instance of a Communist society in action.  Commune, by the way, has nothing to do with Communist - it refers to the Commune de Paris, the City (government) of Paris, which was the bone of contention.

A lifetime after his bones were tossed out of the Pantheon, its first occupant, the two-faced but captivating Mirabeau, was allowed to return in marble, delivering one of his eloquent speeches.  In the end, at least in France, le charme always wins out over virtuousness.  It is so much more entertaining!

In this way, the Pantheon changed from mausoleum to church and back to mausoleum again according to the political colour of the moment.  In fact, it had ceased to be a revolutionary temple for more than a third of a century when, in 1885, the death of the illustrious Victor Hugo died settled the matter once and for all.  After a stormy debate between freethinkers and Catholics, it was agreed that he should be “pantheonized”, which meant once more clearing out the religious artifacts and replacing them with political ones.  Hugo's funeral, expressedly held without crucifix nor priest, was attended by huge crowds, endowing the Pantheon with such prestige that no one ever again challenged its right to exalt human rather than divine grandeur. 

I myself find the Pantheon ugly, with its dowdy grey bonnet rising out of the wedding-cake colonnade, and disconcertingly out of place atop the picturesque hill called La Montagne Sainte-Geneviève. But of all the city’s monuments, it is the one which best illustrates France’s history in the crucial century that followed the taking of the Bastille.  That amazingly well-paced succession of popular uprisings, royal restorations and imperial coups d’état makes it clear, as an historian put it, that the République was not made by the guillotine alone.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In early May 2007, I visited the Pantheon for the first time in many years, with my old friend Jean-Claude Elias.  Since the weather was perfect, I took along my camera. 

 

Foucault's pendulum, with Wijjie and August.  It was not there when I last entered the Panthéon, 25 years ago.

 

 

 

 

The Crypt...

 

 

 

 

where Great Men are buried, such as Voltaire, on the other side of the aisle from his old enemy...

 

 

 

 

...Jean-Jacques Rousseau. 

 

 

 

The view from the Colonnade, north-east towards the Church of Saint Etienne du Mont, home to the relics of Saint Genevieve.  Pascal and Racine are buried there, but they died long before the Revolution.

 

 

 

 

In the foreground, the Sainte Geneviève Library, a major depository of ancient documents.  The green dome is the Observatory of the Sorbonne, on the Rue Saint Jacques.  My friend Jean-Claude Elias is on the left.

 

 

 

 

 

The gilded inscription above the columns reads

"Aux Grands Hommes, la Patrie Reconnaissante"

To Great Men, the Nation's Gratitude

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This curious engraving shows how the great building was made, in the 18th century.

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