Marie Curie’s Grave in the Panthéon: Where She Is Buried in Paris

Marie Skłodowska came to Paris from Warsaw in 1891 to study, and in 1895 she married Pierre Curie at Sceaux, south of the city. They shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903 with Henri Becquerel, and in 1911 she won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry alone, the first person to receive two Nobel Prizes.

Pierre died in 1906, and the following year she moved to Sceaux to be closer to where he was buried. She kept working for almost three decades more, running what is now the Curie Institute in Paris.

She died on 4 July 1934, aged 66, at the Sancellemoz sanatorium in Haute-Savoie, of aplastic anaemia believed to have been caused by her long exposure to radiation. She was buried at Sceaux, in the Curie family vault beside Pierre, and there the couple stayed for sixty years.

By the 1990s the Panthéon had honoured dozens of men, and only one woman, Sophie Berthelot, who had been admitted in 1907 so as not to be parted from her husband. President François Mitterrand decided that the Curies would enter together, in honour of their scientific achievements.

On 20 April 1995 their remains were brought from Sceaux and placed in vault VIII of the crypt. The ceremony had a Polish as well as a French dimension: Lech Wałęsa, then President of Poland, attended alongside Mitterrand, fitting for a scientist who never lost her sense of Polish identity.

The move made her the first woman in the Panthéon on her own merits, and for twenty years she remained the only one, until two women of the Resistance followed in 2015.

The worry was reasonable. Curie had handled radium for decades without protection, and during the First World War she also ran mobile X-ray units for field hospitals. Her original coffin already held a layer of lead between two layers of wood, and in the Panthéon her remains were placed in a lead-lined tomb.

When the body was exhumed in 1995, however, the French radiation-protection office found only low residual radioactivity. It concluded that she could not have been exposed to lethal levels of radium while alive, and suggested her illness owed more to her wartime X-ray work, since radium is dangerous mainly when ingested.

The lead, in other words, was a precaution rather than a necessity. What does stay radioactive are her papers: radium-226 has a half-life of about 1,600 years, so her notebooks will remain so for well over a millennium.