How France’s Panthéon started living up to nation’s ideals
Resistance heroine Simone Veil was laid to rest this summer alongside Voltaire and Rousseau — the fifth woman so honoured, writes Robert Zaretsky
When architectural critics gaze at the Panthéon in the Latin Quarter of Paris, one thought often comes to mind: Rarely have so many blocks of stone been heaped so high to so little effect.
This 18th-century pile of stone is as banal as it is big, vacuous as it is vast. In his novel Notre-Dame de Paris, Victor Hugo declared that the design, by the architect Jacques-Germain Soufflot, failed to provide the “sacred horror” expected of great churches. All it inspired, he huffed, was the image of a great sponge cake.
The last laugh was on Hugo: The Panthéon is his final resting place. Hugo’s tomb now gathers dust alongside several dozen of France’s most notable figures, ranging from writers and philosophers to war heroes.
But while the Panthéon might be empty of sacred horror, it is filled with secular wonder, crypt and all. This becomes clear in the remarkable history behind the building’s latest chapter: the interment this summer of the remains of French Resistance heroine and courageous politician Simone Veil.
The event was attended by tens of thousands of spectators, standing under a blinding sun, with many wearing T-shirts emblazoned with the words “Merci, Simone”.
The engraving over Panthéon’s front portal has long said, “To great men, a grateful country.”
Over time, one meaning of that inscription became clear: The Panthéon was reserved for men. The one exception was Sophie Berthelot, whose interred husband, the chemist and politician Marcellin Berthelot, had requested a tombeau à deux.
This was no surprise. Women in France would not get the vote until 1945, and would not be able to open a bank account without their husband’s signature until 1965.
Women were only officially welcomed at the Panthéon in 1995. That year, President François Mitterrand declared the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Marie Curie as worthy of “panthéonisation”. And yet, because her colleague and husband, Pierre Curie, accompanied her into the crypt, some observers wondered if an asterisk should be placed next to her name.
For the next two decades, Marie Curie was as good as it got for grandes femmes at the Panthéon. It was not until 2015 that President François Hollande, a socialist like Mitterrand, announced the panthéonisation of two more women, Germaine Tillion and Geneviève de Gaulle-Antonioz. Both women fought in the French Resistance during World War II, both were captured and imprisoned in the Ravensbrück concentration camp, and both continued to fight on behalf of deportees and the dispossessed in the years following their liberation. (No significant other, by the way, accompanied either woman into the crypt.)
After Simone Veil’s death last year, the campaign to induct the beloved political figure was not limited to women. Left and right, men and women, believers and atheists, clamoured for her candidacy.
Though the feminist movement in her day left her ambivalent, Veil would have welcomed recent legal and cultural changes. France’s version of the #MeToo movement, known as #BalanceTonPorc, or #Throw Out Your Pig, has made progress. In March, the national government’s Minister of Gender Equality announced legal proposals, including on-the-spot fines for sexual harassment in public places. In 2022, the government will begin to fine French companies for unexplained wage differences.
Veil’s new tomb in the Panthéon is located in the same section as those of celebrated Resistance figures like Jean Moulin. This reflects Veil’s personal history: She was the lone survivor of a family deported to Auschwitz during the war.
Yet Veil’s most important act of resistance came in 1974 when, as Minister of Health in the centrist government of President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, she spearheaded the effort to legalise abortion in France. Given the vitriol and violence of
her critics, the task would have reduced most anyone else, man or woman, to tears. When Gaullist and religious opponents in the National Assembly were not denouncing Veil’s effort, to quote one infamous speech, “to toss the unborn into crematory ovens”, they played in the vast chamber of the National Assembly a recording of a fetus’s heartbeat. Yet Veil never wavered, and shepherded the proposed legislation into law. The courage and compassion she demonstrated made Veil one of France’s most admired public figures.
In his speech at the Panthéon, President Emmanuel Macron came close to capturing the nature of Veil’s life. “This woman presents us with a life marked by abysses from which she should never have returned and stunning victories only she knew how to achieve. To this mystery of existence and character, this mystery that defies reason and inspires our respect and fascination, the French have a word that is anchored in our national genius. The word is greatness.”
With the arrival of Veil — whose coffin was accompanied into the crypt by that of her husband Antoine, who had died a few years before — five women have been pantheonised. While the principle of parité, or gender parity, has already been introduced into political life — parties are now obliged to present an equal number of male and female candidates on their electoral lists — it will be slower going at the Panthéon.
Still, a number of French feminist organisations, led by Osez le feminisme (“Dare to Be Feminist”) continue to push for greater balance to be introduced into the recipe of Soufflot’s sponge cake. Needless to say, there is no shortage of candidates, ranging from two other Simones (the philosophers Simone de Beauvoir and Simone Weil) to the revolutionary actor Olympe de Gouges, who authored the Declaration of the Rights of Women and Citizenesses, which opens with the phrase: “Woman, awake: the tocsin of reason resounds through the whole universe: discover your rights!”
De Gouges ended her days by offering to defend Louis XVI at his trial — an offer, she explained, motivated by her desire to show that women were no less capable of “heroism and generosity” than men. For her opposition to the Terror, she exited from life on the same bloody stage, the guillotine, as did Louis. De Gouges’s life — as well as those of Tillion, de Gaulle-Anthonioz and Veil— reminds us that heroism and generosity have never been gendered. Nor should the Panthéon’s welcome mat. It is time to revise it once and for all: Aux grands hommes et femmes, la patrie reconnaissance.