Panthéon

Image: Jean-Pierre Lavoie CC BY-SA 3.0

Built as a church under Louis XV, this imposing building was secularised under the Revolution and used as a mausoleum for grand hommes. Napoleon had it reconsecrated, then it was deconsecrated under the Second Republic. Then it was consecrated under Napoleon III, then... You get the idea. Finally, when Victor Hugo died miserably in 1885, they settled on the secular, but proceeded to fill it with all sorts of heroic murals and sculptural tableaux. I noticed there was a predilection for mostly naked women and bearded but mostly dressed men. Go figure.

It’s impressive, no doubt, but just a bit lacking in imagination if you ask me. Picture the interior if they had set Georges Seurat to doing a pointillist mural on every wall. Might have taken him a while, but I’m thinking something like this would improve l'ambiance a bit. There’s a Seurat and friends exhibition on at Musée de l'Orangerie at the moment, as it happens. It’s splendid.

The crypt is a whole different baril de biscuits. For a start, it has low, vaulted ceilings, and no, they don’t line up. (2 -1 to the wanderers.) It did hold the remains of most of the revolutionary heroes, but many were disinterred once Napoleon delivered his whiff of grapeshot. The dreadful Marat for example. Voltaire and Rousseau are still in the crypt.

There are some literary heroes too. There are “tables of contents” to locate specific tombs, and I went straight for the letter ‘H’. Victor Hugo shares a room with Alexandre Dumas and Émile Zola. Not a bad lineup for a book-week luncheon. The Curies are there, as is mathematician Gaspard Monge. I’m staying in a street named after him.

They’re still adding people. Simone and Antoine Veil got a berth in 2018.

I can’t help feeling they missed an opportunity for a bit of token accessibility when it comes to Louis Braille though: