Construction of Panthéon

The Panthéon in Paris began as a church dedicated to Saint Geneviève, the patron saint of the city, which King Louis XV had promised to build after recovering from an illness. The architect Jacques-Germain Soufflot designed it in a neoclassical style, with a dome and a portico of Corinthian columns, and work began in the 1760s. It was finished only after his death, in the revolutionary period. In 1791 the National Assembly converted it into a mausoleum for the great men of the nation, with the inscription To great men, the grateful homeland. Among those buried there are Voltaire, Rousseau, Victor Hugo, Émile Zola and Marie Curie.

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