Pantheon: Resting Place of France's Great and Good

AFP | "La Convention Nationale" statue inside the Panthéon in Paris shown on September 15, 2015.
AFP | "La Convention Nationale" statue inside the Panthéon in Paris shown on September 15, 2015.
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Pantheon: Resting Place of France's Great and Good

AFP | "La Convention Nationale" statue inside the Panthéon in Paris shown on September 15, 2015.
AFP | "La Convention Nationale" statue inside the Panthéon in Paris shown on September 15, 2015.

Josephine Baker, the French-American dancer and singer who fought in the French Resistance and later battled racism, will become the first black woman to enter the Pantheon, France's most hallowed resting place, on Tuesday.

The domed mausoleum in the heart of Paris, modelled on the Pantheon in Rome, holds the remains of legendary figures in France's history from the worlds of politics, culture and science, AFP reported.

Seventy men including the philosophers Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau lie next to literary luminaries such as Alexandre Dumas, Emile Zola and Victor Hugo.

Only five women before Baker were allowed through its grand portals, which are crowned with an inscription proclaiming: "To great men from a grateful nation."

- Camus refusal -
The declaration has long been a red rag to feminists, who see it as deeply sexist and regularly protest to have it changed.

Simone Veil, a former French minister who survived the Holocaust and fought for abortion rights, was the last woman to be admitted in 2018.

She joined the scientist Marie Curie, Resistance heroes Genevieve de Gaulle-Anthonioz, Germaine Tillion and Sophie Berthelot, who was buried alongside her chemist husband Marcellin Berthelot.

The French president decides who has the right to be laid to rest there.

President Emmanuel Macron rejected a campaign earlier this year to rebury the French poet Arthur Rimbaud there, both to honour his work as a poet and his newfound fame as a gay icon.

However, descendants can overrule the president, as happened when the family of existentialist writer Albert Camus thwarted a bid in 2009 by then-president Nicolas Sarkozy to move his remains to the Pantheon.

Veil's admission prompted a sharp rise in visitors to 860,000 a year, but a far cry from the millions who flock to the Eiffel Tower.



Europe Just Had Warmest March on Record 

A person poses for a picture near pink cherry blossom trees on Cherry Blossom Avenue in downtown Bonn, Germany, April 7, 2025. (Reuters)
A person poses for a picture near pink cherry blossom trees on Cherry Blossom Avenue in downtown Bonn, Germany, April 7, 2025. (Reuters)
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Europe Just Had Warmest March on Record 

A person poses for a picture near pink cherry blossom trees on Cherry Blossom Avenue in downtown Bonn, Germany, April 7, 2025. (Reuters)
A person poses for a picture near pink cherry blossom trees on Cherry Blossom Avenue in downtown Bonn, Germany, April 7, 2025. (Reuters)

Europe experienced its warmest March since records began, as climate change continues to push temperatures to unprecedented levels, European Union scientists said on Tuesday.

Globally, last month was the planet's second-warmest March on record - exceeded only by March in 2024, the EU's Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said in a monthly bulletin.

March continued a run of extraordinary heat, in which 20 of the last 21 months saw an average global temperature of more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (35 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times. Last year was the planet's hottest on record.

The global average temperature in March was 1.6 degrees Celsius higher than in pre-industrial times.

The main driver of climate change is greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels, according to the scientific consensus among climate scientists.

Samantha Burgess, strategic lead at the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, which runs the C3S service, noted that Europe also experienced extremes in both heavy rain and drought.

Europe last month recorded "many areas experiencing their driest March on record and others their wettest March on record for at least the past 47 years," Burgess said.

Climate change is making some regions drier, and fueling the heatwaves that can make droughts more severe, by enhancing evaporation rates, drying out soil and vegetation.

But the warming of the planet also exacerbates the heavy rainfall that can cause flooding. That's because warmer air holds more moisture, so storm clouds are "heavier" before they eventually break.

Arctic sea ice fell to its lowest monthly extent last month for any March in the 47-year record of satellite data, C3S said. The previous three months had all also set a record low for the respective month.

C3S' temperature records go back to 1940, and are cross-checked with global temperature records going back to 1850.