The French Revolution began while building work was ongoing and by the time the Panthéon was finished in 1790 Louis XV's successor Louis XVI was in deep trouble. The fate of the new building was surprisingly high up the priority list of the revolutionaries and one of the several new fledging citizen assemblies took a vote on the Panthéon on 1791 and decided to make it a kind of secular church - a mausoleum for the people judged to be France's most distinguished citizens. Before that, you may have heard it when US cabaret dancer Josephine Baker was inducted into the Panthéon, or in the weeks before the addition of Armenian WWII resistance fighter Missak Manouchian to the Panthéon.