Let us now praise famous men

With due apologies to Agee and Evans, the Pantheon was certainly on my must-visit list, although it was more of a pilgrimage, much like Pere Lachaise. The Pantheon is the former Eglise de Sainte-Genvieve, and it was converted to a resting place for France’s greatest men (et une femme, aussi!) A tomb in the Pantheon is the highest honor the French can bestow on a Frenchman; space is severely limited in the crypt, and it is not even half full yet. Andre Malraux was the last man interred there, in 1996.

My first stop was the tomb of the Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, followed by a stop at the great satirist and Enlightenment gadfly, Voltaire. In one chamber were buried the remains of Alexandre Dumas, Emile Zola and Victor Hugo (ironically, it was Victor Hugo, by being the first modern, post-revolutionary “great man” buried in the Pantheon, who gave it its modern significance to “les grands homes de la France” – Victor Hugo hated the Pantheon). In another chamber was Pierre and Marie Curie.

The memoir I found most bizarre – although his remains are not interred there – was the one to Pierre Dominique Toussaint L’Ouverture, the slave insurgent who overthrew white rule on Santo Domingo (Haiti) and delivered it its independence. Unfortunately, L’Ouverture was also bloody and brutal, and the revolution led to the butchering of any white man, woman or child who failed to flee. The French are perhaps unaware of this, but the Haitian rebellion caused mass panic in the southern American states, and it, along with such less successful American versions as Nat Turner’s rebellion, was certainly one of the considerations that led to nullification laws, and eventually, secession.