Pantheon for the Patriarchy

I’ve just been flaneusing on the left bank. Headed to the market at Place Maubert. Of course, for once I prepared with my binaural microphones ready to get the market calls. Because of this it was a quiet affair — no shouting — just a few fruit stalls to choose from. A few butchers. Not much need to compete. Nothing to yell about. I bought brocoli, courgette and capsicum, one of each, probably using the wrong gender for all of them. 

Then I headed up to the Pantheon, because I see it out my window. On the way a van with an anonymous mask hanging over the seat  and a mobile curtain of beads. Is the van driver ready for some anonymous rioting followed by belly dancing at any moment in time?

The Pantheon is all cordoned off as they build some huge audience seating  in the courtyard – some patriotic event? I take photo of the bas relief wording across the top.

«Aux Grands Hommes La Patrie Reconnaissante»

“To the Great Men,  The Grateful Homeland”

The great men. One might want to think this is merely the generic use of the term but a woman wasn’t interred in there until 1907. Sophie Berthelot was interred because her famous chemist husband refused to lay dead alone.

As of today there are 75 men and 6 women. Madam Curie (and her husband) arrived in 1995, 69 years after her death. Then in 2015 it seems like someone said we should make a bit of an effort and resistance fighters Germane Tillion, Genevieve de Gaulle-Anthonioz, arrived. Simone Veil (with husband in tow) was interred in 2018. Josephine Baker is the first black woman to be so honoured when she arrived in 2022. All this is despite the fact the church was initially built for St Genevieve who wikipedia tells me led the resistance against the huns in 451. 

It’s just another little thing — some may say semantics, or that there are contexts and circumstances — but each of these contexts and circumstances add up (and wear down). And when text is writ large in stone, with lighting towers being built to shed more spotlights on it, then it’s hard to shift the context. And, by the by – the wars these building celebrate, or commemorate, were wars started by….