The Panthéon

Louis XV vowed to build a church to Saint Genevieve, patron of Paris, if he recovered from an illness, and Jacques-Germain Soufflot built it between 1758 and 1790. In 1791 the Revolution turned it into a mausoleum for the nation's great men, as its pediment says.

The crypt holds Voltaire, Rousseau, Victor Hugo, Émile Zola, Marie Curie, Simone Veil and, since 2025, former minister Robert Badinter. Under the dome swings a copy of the pendulum with which Léon Foucault demonstrated the Earth's rotation in 1851.