French rights icon Simone Veil secures coveted place in

French Holocaust survivor and rights icon Simone Veil, who died last week aged 89, will receive the rare honour of being inducted into the Pantheon, President Emmanuel Macron announced at her funeral today.
Veil will become only the fifth woman to be laid to rest in the Paris monument, which houses the remains of great national figures, and only the fourth to be allocated a spot on her own merits.
She will join Polish-born French scientist Marie Curie; two French Resistance members who were deported to Germany, Genevieve de Gaulle-Anthonioz and Germaine Tillion; and Sophie Berthelot, who was buried alongside her chemist husband Marcellin Berthelot.

Among the other luminaries buried in the secular mausoleum are writers Voltaire, Victor Hugo and Emile Zola.
Veil was deported to Auschwitz in 1944 while still a teenager.
She survived the concentration camps that claimed the lives of her mother, father and brother, and went on to become an indefatigable crusader for women's rights and European reconciliation.

Her biggest political achievement was pushing through a law to legalise abortion in France in 1974 in the face of fierce opposition.
Several hundred dignitaries, relatives and friends attended her funeral today at the Invalides military hospital and museum in Paris.
Draped in the French tricolour, her coffin was borne into the museum's courtyard by members of the Republican Guard and set down on the cobbles on a wooden bier.

Macron told the mourners he would bestow the Pantheon honour on her and her husband Antoine, who died in 2013, to show "the immense gratitude of the French people to one of its most loved children.