On November 11, 1920, a procession stopped on the forecourt between two rows of eight torches. The heart of Léon Gambetta, taken during his embalming in 1883, is carried in glory in a high glazed reliquary, drawn by six black horses. Alongside the remains of the former President of the Council, a figure of the Third Republic, the coffin of the Unknown Soldier is simpler, only covered with a tricolor flag, and surrounded by a fictitious family: «A father, a mother, a widow and an orphan embody France in mourning”, says historian Jean-Yves Le Naour (1).
The procession stops there, the time of a speech, before continuing on its way to the Arc de Triomphe, where the body of the hairy will be buried. Despite the First World War, the“sacred union” of the right and the left against Germany, the parliamentarians refused that the hero of Verdun rests in the Pantheon with the relic of Gambetta. “Church abandoned by the Revolution, the Pantheon is not a place of consensus but the republican temple that the right has never accepted as national”, explains Jean-Yves Le Naour.
Let’s go back a few decades. It is the fear of the red flag which presides over the organization of the funeral of Victor Hugo. The day after the writer’s death on May 22, 1885, the government of the Third Republic decided that his body would be exhibited at the Arc de Triomphe and then buried in the Père Lachaise cemetery, where, coincidentally, the far left met on May 24 for its annual pilgrimage in commemoration of the revolutionaries assassinated in 1871. On the spot, the demonstration degenerates in front of the wall of the federated. The red standard of the communards – which the painter Jules-Élie Delaunay subtly slipped into the hands of a barbarian on his representation Attila’s March at the entrance to the Pantheon – is agitated despite his prohibition.
“Addiction to sacrilege”
The press is on fire, as noted by historian Avner Ben-Amos (2). The far left accuses the Republican government of“murders” (the clashes at Père Lachaise injured around thirty people). The right fears that the funeral of Victor Hugo will be a new revolutionary day (demonstrations are, at the time, only tolerated in cemeteries). Fearing a destabilization of the regime, the republican government decided, by decrees of May 27, to avoid Père Lachaise and to deposit the body of the poet in the Sainte-Geneviève basilica, retransformed for the occasion into the Pantheon. Catholics are enraged.
The cross thus relates the events of May 28. «In the afternoon, while some faithful were praying around the shrine (from Saint Geneviève, Editor’s note), individuals walked around with their heads covered, talking aloud. A clam was covered in spit. Police officers don’t deal with that. Indifference – or better said, a sort of habituation to sacrilege – characterizes this impious crowd. » On May 29 and 30, a few fights broke out between believers and atheists, place du Panthéon.
But on June 1, the mood changes. One to two million people, more than a third of the population of Paris, follow the national funeral of Hugo. The procession lasts eight hours. On the route from the Arc de Triomphe to the Panthéon, the windows or balconies were rented, some for several thousand francs. No red flag is displayed. The Minister of the Interior, François Allain-Targé, welcomes this in a telegram to the prefects: «Victor Hugo’s funeral took place amid a huge crowd. Respectful and collected population attitude. No incidents. » The new civil war will not take place.
Funeral of Victor Hugo at the Panthéon, in Paris, June 1, 1885. / Bridgeman Images
Since the Commune, insurrection has been the obsession of the Third Republic, ready to do anything to avoid it. This spirit of conciliation will lead to an entirely new decorative choice for the Pantheon. Admittedly, the return to the cult of great men led to the commissioning of new statuary: in 1907, the Under-Secretary of State for Fine Arts, Étienne Dujardin-Beaumetz, notably resumed the Convention’s project to erect monuments in homage to Voltaire and Rousseau. The ensemble sculpted by Albert Bartholomé (southeast pillar of the crossing of the transept) was inaugurated in 1912, to the sound of a Marseillaise sung by 1,600 singers, says the general heritage curator François Macé de Lépinay (3).
Still traumatized by the defeat of 1870, the Third Republic also pays tribute to the victors of the Prussians in 1792 – Valmysculpted by Jules Desbois –, as well as the sailors of the Avenger and to the generals of the Revolution (see episode 1: “Saint Geneviève, a shrine story”). But what really makes the originality of the new decoration is that it does not completely replace the old one. Now is the time for accumulation.
A vast collocation
The dome’s cross, too heavy to be taken down before Hugo’s funeral, is finally left up there. Inside, no one dares to tear off the canvases representing Saint Geneviève, Joan of Arc or Clovis. Above all, we leave in the choir this impressive mosaic of 42 m2, Christ showing to the angel of France the destinies of his people, by Antoine Hébert, unveiled in 1884, barely a year before Hugo’s pantheonization and the secularization of the basilica. «The angel of France, naked sword in hand, seems, from the expression of pain that one reads in his eyes, to witness some lamentable disaster of the country of which he is the guardian.», commented at the time the very monarchist Chennevières, sponsor of the work. By evoking the “country disasters”the man was no doubt thinking of a few revolutionary episodes, founding the First or the Second Republic.
He was far from imagining this huge stone sculpture that the third of the name would install less than half a century later, in place of the altar. On September 23, 1924, the monument to François-Léon Sicard, The National Convention, indeed completes the choir of this syncretic Pantheon, forever temple-church (the building was classified as a historic monument in 1920). The proportions of the sculpture are imposing: on the left, deputies take an oath. To the right, exhausted soldiers seem cheered up by the sound of the drums. In the middle, under the mosaic representing Christ, Saint Geneviève and the Angel of France, Marianne stands with her weightlifter’s arms, one of which carries a sword raised very high. 1789 is so far away. The Pantheon has become, after weary war, the place of a certain concord. A vast collocation where Catholic saints and heroes of the Revolution now meet.
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Originally the Kremlin Wall Necropolis
Ceremony in tribute to Yuri Gagarin, in April 2019. / Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP
In the East, the First World War dragged on. We are in July 1917 and hundreds of Russian soldiers are arrested for mutiny and desertion. Locked up in the fortress of Dunebourg (now Latvia), 869 of them were transported to Moscow, where they began a hunger strike. The population supports them and the power in place fears a riot. On September 22, 593 detainees were released.
But the October Revolution begins and the soldiers of Dunebourg form the first force of the Bolsheviks in Moscow. On the night of October 27 to 28, violent clashes set them against loyalist troops near Red Square. Many soldiers die on the barricades. In the days that followed, the revolutionaries managed to seize the Kremlin, the center of power. The new administration decided to bury his dead directly on Red Square.
«Voices reached us across the huge square, and the sound of pickaxes and shovels, says American journalist and socialist activist John Reed (4). Mountains of dirt and rock were piled near the base of the wall. Climbing them, we looked down into two massive pits, where hundreds of soldiers and workers were digging by the light of huge fires”. Two hundred and thirty-eight people will be buried in these graves. The place will become the Russian equivalent of the Pantheon, where we will build in particular, in 1930, the imposing mausoleum of Lenin.