Start at the top for one of Paris’s most dramatic dioramas. Then descend the colonnade stairs and walk to the central dome to find physicist Léon Foucault’s 1851 pendulum demonstrating the rotation of the earth.

Go one step deeper to the crypt where some of Frances’s most famous heroes are interred:

Victor Hugo, Jacques-Germain Soufflot, Voltaire, Marie Curie (the only woman),Jean Moulin, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Alexandre Dumas, Émile Zola,André Malraux, Jean Jaurès, Pierre Curie, Louis Braille, Jean Monnet,Victor Schœlcher, Félix Éboué, Léon Gambetta, Gaspard Monge, René Cassin, Marie François Sadi Carnot, Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de Condorcet, Lazare Carnot, Jean Lannes, Joseph-Louis Lagrange, Henri Grégoire, Paul Langevin, Jean Baptiste Perrin, Jean-Étienne-Marie Portalis, Joseph-Marie Vien, Claude Juste Alexandre Legrand, Pierre Jean George Cabanis, François Séverin Marceau-Desgraviers, Jean-Nicolas Démeunier, Paul Painlevé, Jan Willem de Winter, Charles Pierre Claret de Fleurieu, Justin Bonaventure Morard de Galles, Giovanni Battista Caprara, Jean Reynier, Théophile Corret de la Tour d’Auvergne,Jean Baptiste Treilhard, Nicolas-Marie Songis des Courbons, Alexandre-Antoine Hureau de Sénarmont, Louis-Vincent-Joseph Le Blond de Saint-Hilaire.

In 2002, in an elaborate but solemn procession, six Republican Guards carried the coffin of Alexandre Dumas (1802–1870), the author of The Three Musketeers to the Panthéon. Draped in a blue-velvet cloth inscribed with the Musketeers’ motto: “Un pour tous, tous pour un” (“One for all, all for one,”) the remains had been transported from their original internment site in Aisne, France. In his speech, President Jacques Chirac stated that an injustice was being corrected with the proper honoring of one of France’s greatest authors.