The Paris Pantheon was first commissioned by King Louis XV as a new church in honor of the Saint patron of Paris, Saint Genevieve, in the mid 18th century. It was designed by one of the great talents of French Neoclassical architecture, Jacques-Germain Soufllot, as a great classical temple whose size and magnificence was meant to overwhelm the Pantheon of Rome. The French Revolution transformed the unfinished church into a Revolutionary temple dedicated to the men of the Enlightenment and revolutionary heroes. Through the constant political turbulence of the 19th century its function and symbolism kept shifting until its final incarnation as a secular temple “dedicated to the Great Men (and more recently “great women”)” of France under the Third Republic.

Its story, architecture, paintings and sculptures are an excellent resumé of the history of modern and contemporary France and the men and women honored but also often rejected or forgotten by the onward march of politics and culture.