With the entry of Marc Bloch into the Pantheon this Tuesday, June 23, Emmanuel Macron will have brought nine personalities into the Pantheon during six ceremonies. He thus equals his distant predecessor François Mitterrand, who for thirty years held the record for the number of pantheonizations.
Historian and resistance fighter killed in 1944 by the Gestapo, Marc Bloche joined the Pantheon this Tuesday evening alongside his wife and assistant Simonne Vidal. Before them, seven other personalities entered it during Emmanuel Macron’s double mandate: Robert Badinter in 2025, Missak and Mélinée Manouchian in 2024, Joséphine Baker in 2021, Maurice Genevoix as well as Simone and Antoine Veil in 2018.
Like Marc Bloch, the first pantheonized member of the Fifth Republic was a resistance fighter. In 1964, six years after his election, General de Gaulle brought Jean Moulin there. From this ceremony history has remembered the famous speech by André Malraux and from which comes the phrase “Enter here, Jean Moulin, with your terrible procession. »
This will be the only pantheonization that the founder of the Fifth Republic will have decided. After him, neither Georges Pompidou nor Valéry Giscard d’Estaing requested a transfer to the necropolis where personalities who have marked history are buried.
A presidential choice under the Fifth Republic
Until the 1980s, pantheonizations remained very rare, as was the case before the Fifth Republic, with the exception of Napoleon I, who pantheonized more than forty ministers and generals at the beginning of the 19th century. While a constituent assembly previously decided who would enter the Pantheon, Napoleon Bonaparte granted himself the privilege during the First Empire.
Under the Third and Fourth Republics, it fell to the deputies, who proposed and decided to pantheonize or name historical personalities through a legal text. Under the Fifth, this choice falls by default to the President without any official text governing either the necessary criteria or the form of the ceremony. Since then, several heads of state have punctuated their mandates with these pantheonizations.
Marie Curie, first woman to enter the Pantheon
François Mitterrand is the first to have used this presidential prerogative extensively. He brought in seven personalities during six ceremonies. Among them are René Cassin, Jean Monnet and Abbé Henri Grégoire. In April 1995, a few weeks before the end of his second term, he also pantheonized the physicists Pierre and Marie Curie, making the latter the first woman honored in the funerary monument.
His successors gave him a less prominent place during their mandates. Jacques Chirac will only carry out two pantheonizations (André Malraux in 1996 then Alexandre Dumas in 2002). Nicolas Sarkozy tried in vain to bring Albert Camus into the necropolis in 2009, but his family was opposed to it. In 2011, he still symbolically inscribed Aimé Césaire during a tribute ceremony. As for François Hollande, he will bring four resistance fighters (Jean Zay, Germaine Tillion, Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz and Pierre Brossolette) into the Pantheon during a single ceremony in 2015.
Announced in 2024, the entry of Marc Bloch will be an opportunity for Emmanuel Macron to pay tribute to the author of The Strange Defeat. He intends to honor him “both as a hero, a Resistance fighter, a committed intellectual and republican, a professor and historian, and as a conscience,” he declared to Le Figaro.
The coffins of the resistance fighter and his wife will not contain their bodies but symbolic objects, medals, photos and letters from his wife to his children as well as the spiritual testament of Marc Bloch written in 1941.
