While in Russia they timidly wind down discussion of moving the long-suffering body of Lenin from Red Square, and all but ignore the dismantling of the necropolis at Novodevichy Convent, in France the subject of famous graves is at the centre of attention

A petition is being put to the President for re-interment in the national Pantheon; it has already been signed by 10 former ministers of culture and various eminent figures of the intelligentsia. The subject is two notable nineteenth-century poets, Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine.

The romance of Rimbaud and Verlaine was vivid and intense, and it remains a subject of debate. The poets suffered in their day from homophobia, were hounded and even prosecuted, if one can connect with this the eighteen-month prison sentence Verlaine received after his attempt to shoot Rimbaud in 1873.

Indeed, you can watch the 1995 film Total Eclipse, with the sweet-faced DiCaprio as the young Arthur Rimbaud and the rather unprepossessing David Thewlis as Verlaine, whom you most likely know as Remus Lupin in Harry Potter. It shows precisely the characteristic features of that relationship: how Verlaine, for instance, stubbed out cigarettes on his wife, set fire to her hair, threatened to strike her in the face, quarrelled with his mother-in-law and was, in general, a rare scoundrel.

The initiators of the transfer of the graves do, in fact, note that including these names in the Pantheon would be not only just from the point of view of history and literature, but also simply topical in today's circumstances, adding that it is unseemly for such great men to lie so far from the centre of Paris. That is to say, it is pure opportunism.

There is no historical justice in it at all: if we speak of history, the Pantheon admits the names that made up the glory of France in the world, and I rather doubt that many of you could recite anything by Verlaine or Rimbaud from memory. True, Rimbaud's The Drunken Boat was repeatedly published in the USSR and was a favourite to translate; it was translated so often, to be honest, that the translators alone could fill an entire ship. On the score of literary justice one might argue, but on the whole the two really were good poets of their time, and could represent the guild of poets in that graveyard. Especially considering that, of the 75 people buried in the Pantheon, the majority are politicians, soldiers and scientists, while literature is represented by the names of Voltaire, Rousseau, Dumas, Hugo and Malraux; of these, poetry was practised a little by Voltaire and a good deal more by Hugo, who was admitted, after all, chiefly for political reasons.

But the argument from topicality gives away the true motive for their inclusion: the whole conversation has been started simply because they were homosexuals. Does it not strike you as strange, this attempt to admit precisely the two of them as a pair? The authors of the petition consider it the only proper course to re-inter the two of them together in the principal resting place of the great men of France.

If you are acquainted with their views in life, they laid no claim to elitism or even patriotism, rebelling in every way and shunning the mass culture of their time, the values of the society of the day and its generally accepted social rituals. So they might well have found burial in the Pantheon unacceptable; Rimbaud, for that matter, mocked the Pantheon outright. It turns out that present-day politicians are simply using two dead men in their own manipulations.

But what I object to most is the proposal to re-inter Rimbaud and Verlaine precisely in the context of their having formed a couple for a time. If in life they shared a bed, and this, incidentally, found no weighty or fundamental reflection in their work, why bury them now in each other's arms? If, on the other hand, the point is merely that two poets are needed in the Pantheon, then take Rimbaud and Éluard: they have far more in common in their work. Better still, let us bury Baudelaire in the Pantheon; he was plainly a more brilliant phenomenon in world poetry than all those listed.