10.03.07
The Pantheon: Yesterday and Today
What is now the Pantheon, a secular monument to the “great men” (and now one woman, Marie Curie) of France that are buried in its crypt, was originally built in the mid-18th-century as the Sainte Genviève church. The Revolutionaries turned it into the monument it is today, but it hasn’t been a continuous trajectory: each new regime (First Empire, Restoration, Second Republic, Second Empire, Third Republic…) gave it a different meaning, at times turning it back into a church and finally in the 1880s reassembled what it is today.
I’ve found some pictures of the Pantheon from the late 19th century to the present day, which I thought were interesting. The more things change…
circa 1880, photo taken from the Luxembourg Gardens side. This little round-about and fountain are no longer at the end of rue Soufflot, which has since been widened.
1910
1944, German soldiers posed in front of the Pantheon during the Occupation.
Fall 2007