Major hack! It's a TAZ in the city of light!

It is one of Paris's most celebrated monuments, a neoclassical masterpiece that has cast its shadow across the city for more than two centuries.

But it is unlikely that the Pantheon, or any other building in France's capital, will have played host to a more bizarre sequence of events than those revealed in a court last week.

Four members of an underground "cultural guerrilla" movement known as the Untergunther, whose purpose is to restore France's cultural heritage, were cleared on Friday of breaking into the 18th-century monument in a plot worthy of Dan Brown or Umberto Eco.

More from The Independent:

Members of UX, including students, but also lawyers, nurses and even a public prosecutor, have turned instead to nocturnal invasions of public buildings and Métro stations. "Lazar", a spokesman for the Untergunther group, told the French national newspaper, Le Monde: "We are not squatters. These are urban no-go zones. We use them for non-political, creative gatherings, such as film festivals and renovating the country's architectural heritage."

Undercover restorers fix Paris landmark's clock