A temple to political philosophy: the Pantheon, Paris

The Pantheon in Paris is a massive neoclassical building that sits upon the Mount of Saint Genevieve (Paris’s patron saint) looking out of the sprawling rooftops of the universities of Paris, towards the Eiffel Tower. Though it looks, by all accounts, like a temple, this building is not spiritual, but secular like the country that it exists to honour. If it is religious, it is dedicated to a national religion built on three famous words engraved on many of the edifices of Paris: liberté, égalité, fraternité.

The Pantheon is, in fact, a mausoleum to the great men and, more recently, women of the republic. But more than that is is a monument to the ideals and characteristics of the men that executed the French revolution and founded much of what we know today as modern France. Inscribed on the walls are massive murals depicting death, honour, glory, hope etc. Large statues, adorned with both pagan and religious symbols, from sources as diverse as ancient Egypt and freemasonry, honour the dead. Famously, from the centre of the great dome, a 67m wire suspends a brass ball just a few feet from the floor as it sweeps back and forth over the marble, just as it was when Foucault used it to demonstrate the slow rotation of the Earth on its axis.

Suitably for a building that exists to commemorate a political movement that spread from France in the 18th and 19th centuries, though admitted also unexpectedly, the south transept contains four cheap, flatpack bookshelves laden with the works of many of France’s most famous sons, Rousseau and Hugo, Voltaire and Diderot. These books, accompanied by some lounge chairs are free for the public to come and read as they please. Well worth a visit if you are politically inclined.