When the past speaks, time to listen

They depict a man holding a finger to his lips, urging everyone to be quiet.

The signs don’t seem necessary. The solemnity of the tombs here encourages silence and inspires respect.

The crypt is the place where France inters the remains of the nation’s heroes. Soldiers and scientists, politicians and poets, philosophers and resistance fighters, teachers and clergy members, revolutionaries and reactionaries all are buried here.

Victor Hugo, Emile Zola and Alexandre Dumas, writers whose often massive books helped define the French experience in the 1800s, found their final resting places here. So did Marie Curie, the only person in history to win a Nobel Prize in two fields of science, and Josephine Baker, the enchantress who symbolized the Paris of the Lost Generation before becoming a resistance fighter in World War II and a civil rights activist.

Even the tour groups from other nations walk through the crypt in hushed silence.

The site encourages that.

The Pantheon began its life in the waning days of the French monarchy. Construction started during the reign of Louis XV. It was intended to be a church, one of awe-inspiring dimensions.

When the French Revolution occurred, the plan changed.

The Pantheon became a place to honor those who had made great contributions to the nation, its lower realm a place to entomb honored dead.

During the 19^th century, as France rotated between reprises of revolutionary spirit and restorations of monarchy and emperors, the Pantheon shifted between serving as church and national monument until the death of Hugo in 1885, when it finally, firmly, became the place the French paid tribute to those who helped define the nation.

It is a stunning structure.

Built on a hill in the Latin Quarter a little bit less than a mile from Notre Dame with a stunning view of the Eiffel Tower from its entry doors, the Pantheon echoes eternity. The high dome in the center, under which Foucault demonstrated the earth’s rotation using a pendulum, evokes the majesty of the centuries. The frescoes along the walls, which include religious iconography, depict moments and figures from French history.

All around, the sacred and secular mingle, striving to unite a nation’s often fractious past into a coherent present.

If there is an animating spirit to the Pantheon, it is one of reconciliation, of acknowledging and accepting the strains and tears that went into making France a nation.

That is perhaps the most moving thing about the Pantheon.

One myth—if not a cliché—regarding the United States is that what makes our country exceptional is that we Americans alone do not share a common national identity.

That is not entirely true.

As Graham Robb pointed out in his splendid book, “The Discovery of France,” until the beginning of the 20^th century the French nation was far from a singular unity. Many French residents considered themselves citizens of their hometowns or provinces rather than the nation.

Part of what changed that was the French eagerness to engage with and embrace the disputes and wrongs of the past.

France’s two most recent Nobel laureates for literature, Patrick Modiano and Annie Ernaux, built their oeuvres exploring some of the nation’s most painful periods. When Ernaux delivered her Nobel lecture in 2022, she drew the title from a credo she drafted for herself when she first began to write 60 years earlier: “I will write to avenge my people.”

The Pantheon is part of that movement to come to terms with the past, no matter the anguish involved.

In 1998, the remains of Haitian revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture, who fought against Napolean’s attempts to subjugate that island nation, were interred at the Pantheon, his reburial an opportunity for the nation to confront its legacies of imperialism and racism.

It is impossible for an aware American to walk through this sepulchral site without thinking that we could use an equivalent in our country.

Too many U.S. citizens view American history not just as a product of immaculate conception but the execution of immaculate existence. We have such a hard time coming to terms with and fixing our mistakes because we cannot even acknowledge they have been made.

Those who forget the past, George Santayana said, are condemned to repeat it.

Many of those buried in the Pantheon would agree with him.