The most striking feature of the life of René Cassin is its extraordinary diversity. His life was not the playing out of a personal project he framed from his early years, but rather it was like all our lives, filled with improvisations, with doors closing, and others opening in unanticipated and unplanned ways. In effect, Cassin lived several lives, at times overlapping, and at times sequential. These multiple facets of his life framed the major state celebration on the centenary of his birth, when his remains were transferred to the Panthéon in Paris on 4–5 October 1987.

Cassin had been buried in 1976 in the cemetery of Montparnasse in Paris. His fondest wish, he said repeatedly, was to have his remains transferred to the Panthéon. Through his widow’s efforts, and those of the Union Fédérale and other admirers and old friends, the President of the Republic, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, decided in 1980 that his wish would be fulfilled and that his remains would indeed be transferred to the Panthéon. His successor François Mitterrand carried out this decision seven years later.