Now there is nothing wrong with Uppsala Cathedral, where the remains of Carl Linnaeus now lie. It’s a grand old building shaped in the steepled Lutheran tradition, and is where new Kings of Sweden go to get all gonged up. Indeed, lying a few vaults up from the father of modern taxonomy is none other than Sweden’s patron saint, Eric IX, a.k.a Erik the Lawgiver, who is portrayed in some legends as having all the attributes of a fair and just ruler. This despite whisperings that he chased a lot of monks down into Denmark. Perhaps ‘just’ in the mould of the pale moth, the somewhat sharp-elbowed Vladimir Putin.
Anyhow, the reason Erik IX is lying in Uppsala Cathedral is that his claim to the throne wasn’t quite as watertight as it needed to be. This being the twelfth century, an age of gallic loyalty and brittle laws. Eric died after he was man handled out of mass one Sunday, and beheaded by a souped-up mob led by the ice-cold Danish prince, Magnus Henriksson. Whilst the devil was supposedly to blame for Henriksson’s heavy-handed aggression, there were likely a few smug grins and a ‘cheers to that’ amongst Sweden’s exiled monks, when news of King Erik’s violent death hit the wires. Anyway, Upssalla Cathedral – nothing wrong with it all.
That said, it’s not the Pantheon.
The Pantheon is an icon, a Nigel Mansell of neoclassical architecture, set in the Latin Quarter of Paris. The Pantheon was initially a church, dedicated to Genevieve, the patron saint of the city, who made a name for herself by diverting the marauding, wet lipped Huns in their charge on the city of lights back in 451. She did this, apparently, with a ‘prayer marathon’ suggesting – given Attila’s Huns had a bit of form – that perhaps there was also some BOFF! THWACK! KAPOW! with a few stale baguettes. Anyway, the Pantheon is where Linnaeus’ long-distance admirer Jean Jacques Rousseau is stuffed, for the Pantheon is now a mausoleum for the remains of high-achieving French citizens.
Wind it back to the beginning, and it was Clovis who originally built the Church. ‘Not Clovis, King of the Franks’ you whisper. Yes he, the same Clovis who was the founder of the Merovingian dynasty which hot-rodded it over the Frankish kingdom in the fifth century. For those whose geography is a bit more Google maps, the Frankish kingdom covered an area that was pretty much most of Western Europe bar Spain – too feisty; and Italy – then, as is now, basically ungovernable and not worth the hassle.
Come the 1700s – much to Clovis’ likely chagrin – the Church was beginning to look a little tired, and King Louis XV nodded his approval for a touch of the Grand Designs. When King Louis asked his Director of Public Works who was the best architect he knew, there was a shuffle of shoes and a muffled response. ‘Parler plus fort, vous cretin’ the King allegedly yelled, to which word reached him that Jacques-Germain Soufflot was his man. Now Soufflot, like many a youthful student, had loosened his sails at the French Academy in Rome which spawned a whole generation of neo-classical designers. Soufflot came to be known for his ‘strictness of form, firmness of colour and – perhaps what clinched it for King Louis – his rigorous attention to detail.’ There would be Elizabeth line budgetary issues for young Soufflot. Whilst the Pantheon is no question his most famous work, purists will coo that it is the Hotel Marigny, a lobbed croissant away from the Elysee palace, that is a far better representation of his personal style. Go check in; surprise the spouse. Cue linen sheets and ferrero rocher all round.
Like any such project, there was a lot of sucking of pencils, and several iterations, but what Soufflot got through the local planning officer, was a sort of Greek cross, with four naves and a very big dome on top. He also threw in a classical portico, one imagines an even number of Corinthian columns and, as a flourish, a peristyle with triangular pediment on the main façade. A few bits and bobs were added later, but that was essentially it. Problems though. Problems lay ahead. Like many a government funded initiative, progress got slammed by a sticky economic wicket and twenty two years after the foundations were laid, it was still not finished. Soufflot then died, never to see his masterpiece finished. The re-worked Church was finally given it’s last lick of lacquer some ten years later just as the social and economic fabric of France started to properly pop apart at the seams with the coming of the French revolution.
Standing on the steps one morning in 1790 the Marquis de Vilette – an itchy politician known for his lack of manners and ‘interest’ in other politicians – announced that Genevieve’s church should be turned into a temple devoted to liberty. The small crowd mustered a throaty cheer that got caught by the wind and was whipped off over the Seine. Hmmm. Anyway, the Marquis’ idea had legs and after the death of the Compte de Mirabeau, a politician with a politician’s back story involving gambling debts, one presumes a lot of booze, and more than one fumble with a maid in a linen cupboard; it was decided that the church would become a temple of the nation. In went the Compte. He was soon followed by Voltaire and a clutch of revolutionaries with bloodied heads and wide, surprised, eyes.
Before plans for a café and a gift shop could be signed off, enter stage left: Napoleon Bonaparte, the Simon Cowell of the day, who quickly struck a deal with the Pope and agreed to turn lots of former churches, including the Pantheon, back into churches. Amen to that. That said, the crypt of the Church kept the bones of its decaying glitterati, which family members could access via a new door. Once Napoleon was packed off to the island of Helena, for a bit of much needed me-time, Louis XVIII flipped the whole lot over to the Catholic church and hired a painter to replace the fresco of Napoleon on the inner dome with a fresco of…. himself. Power does that.
This being France, then, it wasn’t long before there was another uprising, this one the July Revolution which saw Charles X out, and his cousin, Louis Philippe, in. Perhaps feeling a little insecure given the spittle and steam of revolutionary values, Louis Philippe quickly re-branded it back to the Pantheon. When he later fled to Switzerland, one blustery Tuesday night after being given the wink that ‘they’re coming’; the new government decided that was that, and the Pantheon would once again be a ‘Temple to humanity’.
You would thought that would have been it, but peace sat uneasily across France and very soon there was another political flare-up, this one involving a deliciously cold coup d’etat, and Louis Napoleon – nephew of the exiled Emperor and the immediate beneficiary of the coup – ordered the Pantheon to be turned back, once again, into a church. By this stage even, Genevieve was getting a little miffed by the back and forth, and it took the death of Victor Hugo, the national treasure and author of Les Miserables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, to finally level it all up. When Victor died, the government rightly decided enough was enough, and the Pantheon was restored once more to its Temple of Great Men status. Hugo – yep – straight in next to Clovis.
And that’s pretty much that.
The last one in was no great man, but a great woman: one Simone Veil, a lawyer and respected politician, and Auschwitz survivor; who died in 2018.
Worth a visit.
Hepburnsays 