The Pantheon

Hardly 54 meter above sea level, the former mount Leucotitus, now montagne Saint Geneviève is the highest point on the rive gauche of Paris. From here you could study the animals stomping across the plains of Montmartre, see the Mammoth and the wild horses flee from hunters and advancing marauding enemy.

After the Parisii tribe arrived, the hill top was less attractive for their aquatic advance on the ile de la Cié. Once the Romans came, however, they found this piece of rock overlooking the Seine where the sun hit morning and night was dry, fresh and soothing, with a view worth a bungalow, and they built the Forum where senators went after the bath and later shopped on the market that has since moved down to Mouffetard.

During the Dark Ages the Huns came and attacked Paris like only Germanesque troupes can do through the ages. But Paris was saved, mostly by the Gaulish resistance and the willpower of the people driven by a woman whose name was Geneviève. They were left to their own resources.

They soon ran out of food under the siege the Huns established. Geneviève, a valiant woman, courageous woman as a woman should usually be, she left Paris on boat one night and returned with bread and wheat. She saved Paris and became a saint. She was buried on the hill that carries her saintly name. A church once stood there, surrounded by land of the abbey, but the church, in the 18th century was coming down.

Louis XV who fell ill in Metz during one of his wars, attributed his convalescence to the prayers of Sainte Geneviève and her followers, and laid the first stone to the church he proposed to build to replace the old one, paid for from his own royal purse, on September 6, 1764. All Paris stood by.

In 1791 the revolutionary assembly decreed the name of Pantheon where the ashes of the great men of France should be buried. Mirabeau, Voltaire, Marat, Le Pelletier, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau where the first to arrive.

Napoleon returned the function of the Pantheon to hold mass, while keeping it as a necropolis where future emperors and dignitaries of the empire are buried.

It was only in 1885, the day when Victor Hugo dies, that a new decree constitutes the Pantheon as the Pantheon you see today, became necropolis of the great and worthy.

Victor Hugo had written:

C'est pour ces morts, dont l'ombre est ici bienvenue,

Que le haut Panthéon élève dans la nue,

Au-dessus de Paris, la ville aux mille tours,

La reine de nos Tyrs et de nos Babyloncs,

Cette couronne de colonnes

Que le soleil levant redore tous les jours !

The Pantheon has a dome that rises at its cusp over 85 from the street level. The dome, inside, is decorated by golden frescos. In its center swings the pendulum of Foucault   on a long cord.

The top floor, in other words the 450 some steps you need to climb the terrace of the dome, is only open from April on.

It is certainly worth a visit.