The Pantheon began as an 18th-century church commissioned by Louis XV to honor Saint Genevieve, Paris’s patron saint, before the French Revolution transformed it into a national mausoleum for France’s most celebrated figures.
Its crypt holds the tombs of Voltaire, Rousseau, Victor Hugo, and Marie Curie, and more recently Josephine Baker and Simone Veil. Inside the main hall, a replica of Foucault’s pendulum still demonstrates the Earth’s rotation, just as the original did in 1851.
Most visitors spend around 1 to 1.5 hours touring the interior and crypt; add another 30 minutes if visiting the rooftop colonnade, open seasonally from April to October.