The Marble Was Never Sacred

I was walking through Paris’s 5th arrondissement this morning. No particular plan, the kind of stroll where you look up for no reason. Place du Panthéon, I stopped under the pediment and read, as if for the first time, the gilded letters I have known since I was a child:

Aux grands hommes la patrie reconnaissante. To great men, the grateful homeland.

Small discomfort. Not outrage, just a slight gap. The sentence speaks to me from a world that isn’t quite mine anymore. On 23 June, Marc Bloch will enter the crypt. Beneath a pediment that names only “men”, the building already holds Marie Curie, Simone Veil, Joséphine Baker. Something has stopped lining up between the façade and what it shelters.

I wanted to understand before judging. Here’s what I found.

A French debate, in plain view

In late August 2025, Élisabeth Borne, then minister of education, suggested “degendering” the inscription, toward something like Aux grands hommes et femmes la patrie reconnaissante, “to great men and women, the grateful homeland”. The reaction was immediate. The right and the far right called it foolishness. A familiar argument came back, asserted as obvious:

“Homme with a capital H means humanity, all of it.”

You have to take this seriously, because it is not entirely wrong. In 1791, homme did mean “human being”: it is the homme of the Déclaration des droits de l’homme. The Enlightenment filed the whole species under that word. Dismissing the etymology as a smokescreen would be unfair to the engravers of the Revolution.

But a monument doesn’t speak the language of its builders. It speaks the language of its readers. And in 2026, nobody standing in front of those letters, not even the formula’s defenders, spontaneously sees “humanity.” They see men. The first meaning has slipped. What remains is what the word signals, not what it once meant. A national temple that needs a linguistic footnote to be inclusive is asking too much of its visitors.

That said, Borne’s fix is itself already dated. Aux grands hommes et femmes freezes the inscription into a strict binary at the precise moment the debate is trying to open it. It repairs half the problem by carving the other half into stone. If you are going to touch the pediment, aim better.

The crypt already contradicts the façade

The serious objection isn’t political, it’s patrimonial: you don’t rewrite a historic monument. The marble is sacred.

Except it never was. The history of this pediment is a festival of erasures.

1791. The Constituent Assembly turns the church of Sainte-Geneviève into the Panthéon at the death of Mirabeau. The inscription is decreed the same year; bronze letters go up by around 1793.
20 February 1806. Napoleon returns the building to Catholic worship.
12 April 1816. Under the Restoration, a royal ordinance orders the suppression of “all ornaments and emblems foreign to worship”. The inscription disappears.
26 August 1830. Louis-Philippe restores it as the Panthéon and commissions David d’Angers’s sculpted pediment, unveiled on 31 August 1837.
6 December 1851. By decree of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, the building returns to worship; a gilded cross goes back on the dome. The inscription fades again.
1885. At the death of Victor Hugo, the Republic makes the Panthéon, definitively, a Panthéon. And re-engraves the phrase.

Church, temple, church, temple. Six times in less than a century, France changed its mind about this building, erased and reinscribed these words at the rhythm of its regimes. The pediment is not an untouchable relic. It is a palimpsest, a surface every era has rewritten in its own image. Engraving “to great men” was, in its day, a radical political act: France was chasing God off the pediment to put humans there. To pretend today that those letters fell from heaven and must never be touched is to forget that they are themselves a scratched-out replacement.

Then there is the crypt. Sophie Berthelot enters in 1907, but “as the wife of”. Marie Curie in 1995, the first woman on her own merits. Germaine Tillion and Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz in 2015. Simone Veil in 2018. Joséphine Baker in 2021. The content of the monument has evolved. Its frontispiece has not. The façade lies, quietly, about what it shelters.

What the French are arguing about

If you accept that you can rewrite a façade, the next question is brutal: with what? The debate has settled into a handful of candidates, each with a constituency.

The most institutional, Aux citoyennes et citoyens illustres (“to illustrious citizens”), doubles the length, crushes the cadence, and remains binary. The most literal, Aux grands humains (“to great humans”), is unimpeachable in substance but sounds like anthropology, not epitaph. The most elegant, Aux grands esprits (“to great minds”), honors the intellect cleanly but excludes the physical courage of, say, the resistance fighters of the Musée de l’Homme network.

The two contenders with the best shot, to my ear, are Aux grandes figures (“to the great figures”) and Aux grandes âmes (“to the great souls”). Both use French grammar to neutralize gender: the nouns are grammatically feminine, and the masculine generic vanishes. Figures is more conservative; âmes has more breath. One reads like a Republican circular, the other like an epitaph. Picking between them is the kind of fight you would expect a country to have about something it lets stand for centuries.

What a façade owes its readers

I am not naïve: nobody is going to chisel the Panthéon because a passing visitor felt a small jolt on a June morning. The exact wording matters less than what it says about who is doing the picking. A nation tells itself by what it inscribes as much as by whom it buries. In an era that would like to shrink the list of people who count, choosing a wider word is not a typographic detail.

Aux grands hommes had two centuries. It served. But a living monument should speak to those who walk past it, not only to those who signed it. The marble was never sacred. It never stopped being rewritten. The only real question is who, today, France agrees to see inscribed there.

This morning, I would have liked to read: Aux grandes âmes la patrie reconnaissante. To the great souls, the grateful homeland.