No building in Paris has changed jobs as often as this one: a church and a secular temple by turns, once for every change of regime, from the Revolution to the Third Republic. It stands at the top of the rue Soufflot, on the montagne Sainte-Geneviève. Today it is the place where the French Republic buries the people it has decided to remember, and under the dome swings a pendulum that proves the Earth turns.
Before you buy your ticket, though, you need to know the thing that ruins more visits here than anything else: the view from the colonnade is closed for works. The official page says so twice, and it specifies that the ticket gives access to the nave and the crypt. The climb around the dome, which for many people is the whole reason for coming, cannot be done at the moment, and no reopening date has been published.
There is, however, a way of paying less, and it is written in a single line on the site. From April to September full price costs 16 euros, but on Wednesdays it costs 13. If your day is flexible, I suggest you move the visit there.
How did a pendulum end up inside the monument to the great men of France?
Let’s go!
1. A king’s vow, and an architect nobody had heard of
In 1744, during the War of the Austrian Succession, Louis XV fell gravely ill. He recovered, and to discharge the vow he had made during his illness he decided to rebuild the church of the abbey of Sainte-Geneviève, the patron saint of Paris. He gave the commission to Jacques-Germain Soufflot, at the time a little known architect.
Almost a generation went by between the vow and the building site: the king laid the first stone on 6 September 1764, twenty years later. Soufflot died in 1780 without seeing his church finished, and it was completed in 1790, the wrong year: ten months later a decree of the Constituent Assembly would change what it was for.
2. The pediment, and an inscription that was erased and put back
Why does a church say that the country is grateful to its great men?
Because the church lasted no time at all. Mirabeau died on 2 April 1791, and two days later, on 4 April, the Constituent Assembly decided that the building should become a national necropolis. With the same decree, on a proposal from Emmanuel Pastoret, it ordered that AUX GRANDS HOMMES LA PATRIE RECONNAISSANTE be carved on the pediment.
That inscription was erased and put back at the rhythm of the regimes: under the Second Empire the building returned to Catholic worship and the line disappeared, then it came back. The carved pediment you see now was commissioned by Louis-Philippe in 1830 from Pierre-Jean David d’Angers, and it was unveiled on 31 August 1837. At the centre the Nation hands out the crowns that Liberty offers her; on one side is history, with Napoleon and the students of the École polytechnique, on the other the sciences, with Bichat, Berthollet, Monge and Laplace.
The nineteenth-century back and forth comes down to five dates, which are also the quickest summary of that century in France: 1806, 1815, 1830, 1848 and 1851, the times the building changed function. The matter was settled only with the funeral of Victor Hugo, in 1885, which fixed the Panthéon in the form you visit today.
One sign of all that coming and going is still there, and nobody takes it down: go back for a moment to the photograph at the top and let your eye climb to the lantern, because up there is still a cross.
3. The dome that nearly brought the whole thing down
Soufflot wanted a building that sounded impossible: the lightness of a Gothic cathedral inside the forms of an ancient temple. Slender columns instead of heavy piers, a dome on a drum, the structure pared to the bone.
It did not work. The cracks appeared while the site was still open, the critics accused him of having underestimated the loads, and his successor Jean-Baptiste Rondelet had to replace some of the columns with more massive piers to hold up the dome. The building you walk through is therefore the compromise between an idea and gravity, and the piers you walk between are the part added afterwards. The measurements run like this: 110 metres long, 84 wide, a dome 83 metres high.
When you are under the intermediate shell, look up: there is the Apotheosis of Saint Genevieve by Antoine-Jean Gros, and it is the only point where the religious purpose of the building has left a monumental decoration.
4. The life of Saint Genevieve on the walls of the nave
In the second half of the nineteenth century the Third Republic covered the walls of the nave with a cycle of mural paintings given to the leading academic painters of the day. The name that matters is Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, who devoted the most famous panels of the cycle to the life of Saint Genevieve.
Stop in front of the scene of Genevieve watching over a sleeping Paris: you will recognise it at once. Puvis paints in muted colours, almost like an ancient fresco, and builds motionless figures in still air: it is the opposite of the noisy history painting being made at the time, and it is why the Symbolists took him as their master. In a building that had meanwhile become secular, the saint stayed on the walls.
5. Marianne in the place of the altar
In the apse, exactly where the high altar used to stand, there is an enormous sculptural group: 6.40 metres high and 9.60 long. It was made by François-Léon Sicard, who spent almost four years on it, and he presented it in 1911.
It is called La Convention nationale. At the centre is Marianne, the Republic; on the left the deputies taking the oath, on the right General Hoche on horseback and the republican soldiers. Underneath is the line that was the formula of the revolutionary oath: VIVRE LIBRE OU MOURIR.
It is the sharpest substitution in the whole building, and you only grasp it if you know what was there before: in a church, that spot is God’s.
6. Foucault’s pendulum, and the sphere that is no longer here
In 1851 Léon Foucault hung a brass and lead sphere weighing 28.3 kilos under this dome on a steel wire 67 metres long and let it swing. The plane of the swing stays fixed, but the marks on the floor shift hour after hour: it is not the pendulum that turns, it is the Earth beneath it.
It was not his first attempt. Foucault had already set his pendulum up on 3 January 1851 in the cellar of his house and on 3 February at the Observatoire de Paris: here, a few months later, the experiment became public, and it was done under this dome because he needed a building tall enough to take a wire 67 metres long.
The experiment lasted only a few months: the coup d’état of December 1851 handed the building back to religion and the pendulum was taken down. Fifty years later the astronomer Camille Flammarion set it going again, and the pendulum came back for good in 1995.
There is one thing, though, that no panel tells you, and which I checked because I had already written about this pendulum for the museum that keeps it. The sphere swinging here is not the one from 1851. The original is at the Musée des Arts et Métiers, on the other side of the Seine, where on 6 April 2010 the cable snapped and the sphere fell to the floor and was dented beyond repair. Today you will find it in a case, next to the copy that goes on swinging in its place. Two museums, two pendulums, and neither of the spheres you see moving is the one from 1851.
7. Twenty-six caveaux and eighty-one burials
You go down to the crypt from the nave, and the first thing that surprises you is that it is neither dark nor cramped: it is a low, regular space, with galleries at right angles opening on to 26 caveaux, the burial chambers, holding 81 burials in all.
The two oldest residents face each other as soon as you walk in: Voltaire, who arrived in 1791, and Rousseau, who arrived in 1794, who cordially detested each other in life and spend eternity opposite one another. Further along is the Curie chamber: Marie Curie arrived in 1995, and she is the first woman admitted on her own merits.
You will almost always find flowers on the tomb, and almost always red and white ones, which are the colours of Poland. And on the inscription, in front of her husband’s surname, stands her own maiden name: Skłodowska.
The arithmetic of the crypt comes from the Centre des monuments nationaux and is worth reading carefully: of the 81 burials, 35 are figures honoured by the Republic, 42 are dignitaries of the Empire buried here under Napoleon, and 4 people lie here with no decree at all. Most of the bodies, in other words, are not there because republican France wanted them.
8. Eighty-five names, eight women, and some who are not here
Who decides who goes into the Panthéon?
The President of the Republic decides, by decree, and the ceremony is called a panthéonisation. The people admitted so far number 85, of whom 77 are men and 8 are women, and the last five ceremonies are recent: Maurice Genevoix on 11 November 2020, Joséphine Baker on 30 November 2021, Missak and Mélinée Manouchian on 21 February 2024, Robert Badinter on 9 October 2025 and Marc Bloch, with his wife Simonne Vidal, on 23 June 2026.
And here comes the detail that explains why the two counts do not match: going into the Panthéon does not mean being buried in the Panthéon. Several panthéonisations are cenotaphs, empty tombs, and in front of one or two of the ones you will visit there is nobody at all: Joséphine Baker rests in Monaco and Robert Badinter in Bagneux, and their chambers hold objects and earth. The crypt counts bodies, the decree counts honours, and the two numbers cannot coincide by construction.
In the nave, until 31 January 2027, there is also Vies minuscules: some thirty artists from the collections of the Centre Pompidou, which is closed until 2030, fill the space with stories of anonymous lives, and it is included in the ticket. What is on at the moment I keep up to date in the table of exhibitions in Paris.
Practical information
Details checked on 28 September 2026 on the official site paris-pantheon.fr. Prices and opening hours change: check again before you go.
Tickets. From 1 April to 30 September full price costs 16 euros, but on Wednesdays it costs 13 euros. From 1 October to 31 March it costs 13 euros every day. The combined ticket with the basilica of Saint-Denis costs 26 euros all year round. What it covers. The ticket gives access to the nave and the crypt. Warning: the view from the colonnade is closed for works and is not included: the site publishes no reopening date. Opening hours. From 1 April to 30 September it opens 10:00-18:30, from 1 October to 31 March 10:00-18:00. The last admission is 45 minutes before closing, and on busy days the monument may close earlier. Closing days. The monument closes on 1 January, 1 May and 25 December. On the first working Monday of each month it opens at 12:00, and on 24 and 31 December it closes at 17:00. Free admission. Under-16s accompanied by an adult and disabled visitors with their companion go in free without queuing at the desk. Visitors aged 16 to 25 who are citizens of the European Union or legally resident in France, French teachers with the pass éducation and anyone looking for work, with a certificate less than six months old, go in free after calling at the desk. Admission is free for everyone on the first Sunday of January, February, March, November and December. The pass. The Panthéon is included in the Paris Museum Pass, which is worth it if you visit at least three or four national monuments over two days. Getting there. The address is place du Panthéon. The stops are Cardinal Lemoine and Maubert-Mutualité on line 10, and Luxembourg on the RER B. How long it takes. The nave and the crypt take an hour to walk round, and an hour and a half with the exhibition on.
Where to go from here
You come out of here with half a day ahead of you, and there are places round about that take an hour: the Musée Curie is five minutes away and keeps Marie Curie’s actual laboratory, and she lies buried in the crypt below here, while the Grande Galerie de l’Évolution and the Institut du monde arabe are down towards the Seine. The other sphere of the pendulum, the one from 1851, is at the Musée des Arts et Métiers. And if you want to see how power presented itself before the Republic invented its own temples, the palace of the Capetian kings is the Conciergerie, on the île de la Cité.
Photo credits: pediment and dome by Jean-Pierre Dalbéra (CC BY 2.0); interior of the nave by Zairon (CC BY-SA 4.0); Foucault’s pendulum by Benoît Prieur (CC0); tomb of the Curies by Immanuelle (CC BY 4.0), from Wikimedia Commons.
