Abstract EN:

The creation of the Pantheon in 1791 can be interpreted as the natural outcome of the celebration of great men, a literary and social practice which gathered momentum throughout the eighteenth century the formerly lesser genre of the academic eulogy, a truly lay kind of discourse, had by then superseded the funeral oration. A previous watershed was the year 1758, when the Academie proposed the eulogy of great men as the topic of its oratorical contest. This grave rises to a commemorative experience of the civic past which involved all the arts and developed its own visual representations. Eminent men of letters (Diderot, Rousseau, Voltaire) became the focus of public scrutiny, and the fact that they were both read and observed as individuals triggered radical changes in the public image of the writer. By the tue of the Pantheon, attention to great men was deflected from their learned psyche in favor of monumental fetish-like icons, with spectacular effects in the case of Marat. The Pantheon turned out to be a fragile and paradoxical institution, however, for in no way was the revolutionary time-experience attuned to the distant perspectives of the collective memory. And yet the cult of great men did not vanish with the Thermidor reaction, as the rehabilitation of men of letters and the Girondins testifies. Then Mme de Staël and Chateaubriand made this practice their own and even turned it against Napoleon in person.