Panthéon

Panthéon was originally built as a church, on the instigation of Louis XV to celebrate his recovery from illness in 1744. Dedicated to St.Genevieve, the structure was finished in 1790 and was in intended to look like the Pantheon in Rome, hence the name. During the Revolution it was turned into a mausoleum for the city’s great achievers, but Napoleon gave it back to the church in 1806. It was later reverted to the church once more, before finally becoming a public building in 1885. Beneath the central dome shows the iron sphere from the pendulum which demonstrated the rotation of the earth of Physicist Léon Foucault since 1851. It is also Tomb of Voltaire and Victor Hugo who wrote Les Misérables and the Hunchback of Notre-Dame.