A year and a half after his death, former Minister of Justice Robert Badinter will enter the Pantheon this Thursday, October 9. A ceremony that will be attended in particular by the Head of State Emmanuel Macron, despite the current political crisis, as well as Élisabeth Badinter.
In an interview with our Libération colleagues, Robert Badinter’s widow explains that her late husband’s body will not be in the coffin and will remain in the Jewish square of the Bagneux cemetery, in Paris, where he already rests. “What we wanted was not to separate,” she explains, specifying that she did not have the right to join her husband when he died.
Instead of the body, four objects will appear in the coffin taken to the Pantheon: Robert Badinter’s lawyer’s robe and three books: Idiss, which he wrote in tribute to his grandmother, a biography of the deputy Nicolás de Condorcet, signed by the couple and Things seen By Victor Hugo.
“It is difficult to say what each vault contains”
It is not the first time that a coffin enters the Pantheon without the remains. In 2015, the coffins of resistance fighters Germaine Tillion and Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz contained only a handful of soil, because their family had refused to allow their bodies to leave the family cemetery. A request accepted at the time by the Elysée “with great understanding.”
“We are very happy that Germaine enters the Pantheon, but we do not want her body to leave the family tomb. I hope she is not separated from her family,” the niece of resistance fighter Émilie Sabeau-Jouannet then explained to Le Progrès.
The cases of Robert Badinter, Germain Tillion and Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz are by no means isolated. “It is very difficult to say what each vault contains. No expert opinion has ever been carried out,” Pascal Monnet, historian and administrator of the monument, told Franceinfo in 2015.
“For Voltaire and Rousseau this remains a mystery. Some bones were observed at the end of the 19th century, but without knowing if they were indeed those of the two great philosophers exhumed almost fifteen years after their death,” he cites as examples.
Another example is the case of Nicholas de Condorcet, who entered the Pantheon in 1989, 200 years after the French Revolution. Died in 1794, the philosopher was buried in a mass grave in Hauts-de-Seine, but searches failed to find his body. As for Jean Moulin, it was the “supposed” ashes of the resistance fighter that entered the Pantheon in December 1964.
In other cases, only a part of the body of the deceased rests in the Parisian monument. For Léon Gambetta, transferred to the Pantheon in November 1920, only the heart appears there, in an urn. The inventor of writing for the blind, Louis Braille, was buried without his hands, which were left in his family crypt in Coupvray, in the Seine-et-Marne. Therefore, it is sometimes difficult to reconcile family wishes with the tax paid by the State. In 2011, the poet and politician Aimé Césaire entered the Pantheon, but neither the urn nor the ashes were moved there. He always wanted to be buried on his native island, Martinique, a wish continued by his family.
Robert Badinter is the seventh personality to enter the Pantheon, since Emmanuel Macron came to power in 2017, after the Manouchian couple, Joséphine Baker, Maurice Genevoix and the Veil couple. In June 2026, the historian and resistance fighter Marc Bloch, shot by the Nazis in 1944, will in turn enter the Parisian monument.
Source: BFM TV
