Women in the Panthéon: The Scientists, Resistance Heroines and Pioneers Honoured in Paris

The first woman buried in the Panthéon was not honoured for her own work. Sophie Berthelot, born Sophie Niaudet in Nantes in 1837, was the wife of the chemist and politician Marcellin Berthelot, and the couple had six children. She died on 18 March 1907, only hours before her husband.

Marcellin was granted a place in the Panthéon. The family asked that they not be separated, and the government passed a special law allowing Sophie to be buried with him, officially in homage to her conjugal virtue. They received a joint state funeral and share a single tomb.

For almost ninety years she remained the only woman in the crypt. It took until the end of the 20th century for a woman to be admitted for what she herself had done.

The wait ended on 20 April 1995. Marie Curie, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903 and in Chemistry in 1911, was carried into the crypt with her husband Pierre, and she became the first woman honoured there for her own achievements, rather than as someone’s wife.

The couple had lain in the cemetery at Sceaux, south of Paris, since her death in 1934, and the transfer was decided by President François Mitterrand, with the Polish president Lech Wałęsa at the ceremony. How the move was handled, and why lead was part of it, is told on Marie Curie’s grave in the Panthéon.

The ceremony drew attention to how male the crypt still was, almost two centuries after the Revolution. Other women would not follow for twenty years, until two heroines of the Resistance entered together.

On 21 February 2014 President François Hollande announced that Germaine Tillion and Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz would enter the Panthéon, along with Pierre Brossolette and Jean Zay. Both women had been deported to Ravensbrück for their resistance work. They entered in May 2015.

Germaine Tillion was an ethnologist who lived to be a hundred. Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz, niece of Charles de Gaulle, later led the anti-poverty movement ATD Quart Monde from 1964 to 1998 and fought for a law against poverty, passed in 1998.

Their families chose not to move their bodies, so their coffins in the crypt hold soil from their graves. The honour, in both cases, is symbolic, which the Panthéon allows.