Panthéon

King Louis XV commissioned the church of Sainte-Geneviève in 1744, and it was built between 1758 and 1790 to a neoclassical design by Jacques-Germain Soufflot, crowned by a triple dome 83 metres high. In 1791 the revolutionary National Constituent Assembly voted to turn it into a burial place for great citizens; the pediment still bears the inscription Aux grands hommes la patrie reconnaissante, to great men, the grateful homeland.

In 1851 the physicist Léon Foucault demonstrated the rotation of the Earth here with a 67-metre pendulum hung from the dome, and a replica still swings beneath it. The crypt holds more than 80 people, among them Voltaire and Rousseau, Victor Hugo, Marie Curie and Josephine Baker, who entered the Panthéon in 2021.

On Tiqets you can buy an entry ticket, or a combined ticket with the Basilica of Saint-Denis, the burial place of the French kings. Temporary exhibitions in the Panthéon are listed on this page when they are on.

The Panthéon stands at the top of the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève in the Latin Quarter, close to the Sorbonne and the Luxembourg Gardens. A staircase leads up to the colonnade around the dome, with views across Paris; check on the day whether it is open.