Simone Veil, the former minister and Holocaust survivor who led the battle to legalise abortion in France, will be buried in the Panthéon today with all the pomp and symbolism the French republic can muster.

Veil’s death last year sparked a wave of emotion in France, with thousands signing a petition requesting she be buried in the secular mausoleum, the giant marble building in Paris’s Latin quarter which has become the final resting place for the country’s most illustrious citizens.

Veil, who will be joined on her final journey by her husband Antoine, a high-ranking civil servant who died in 2013 after 67 years of marriage, will be only the fifth woman to be buried in the Panthéon. It was originally built in 1790 as a church to outdo St Peter’s Basilica in Rome and St Paul’s in London.

Veil was 16 in March 1944 when she was arrested in Nice by the occupying German forces just days after passing her baccalaureat. She was deported with her family to the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. They were later moved to a second camp at Bergen-Belsen, where Veil’s mother Yvonne died of typhus shortly before the camp’s liberation by British forces in April 1945. Her father and brother were last seen on a prisoner transport bound for Lithuania, but never returned. Simone and her sisters, Madeleine and Denise, survived the war, but Madeleine, the eldest, died in a car crash in the 1950s.

Returning to France after the war, Veil studied law and political science at Sciences Po university and began campaigning for European reconciliation and women’s rights. In 1974 she won what many saw as her biggest political and personal victory by convincing the Assemblée Nationale to legalise abortion despite bitter opposition in what was at the time still a fundamentally Catholic country.

Simone Veil in 1974. Veil died aged 89 in 2017. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

She served as a minister in several governments and was president of the European parliament between 1979 and 1982. She was repeatedly voted as one of the country’s most trusted and popular figures. Sunday’s interment is expected to feature many symbols of the EU – of which Veil was an unfailing supporter – and the Holocaust. The couple’s coffins, exhumed from Montparnasse cemetery last Friday, will be taken to the Panthéon from the Holocaust memorial in the city’s Jewish district in the Marais, where they were placed draped with tricolours to allow members of the public to pay tribute.

They will be carried by members of the Republican Guard along Rue Soufflot on a blue carpet chosen by the presidential palace to represent “peace, the United Nations and Europe”, and will enter the Panthéon to the 1963 song Nuit et Brouillard by Jean Ferrat, a popular hymn to those persecuted for opposing the Nazi regime and victims of the concentration camps. Inside, the cortege will stop three times during which the choir will sing and films on Europe and the Holocaust will be shown. After an address by French president Emmanuel Macron, there will be a minute’s silence and a rendition of La Marseillaise.

On Monday, the coffins of Veil and her husband will be placed in the crypt alongside other eminent French personalities said to have shaped the national identity, including François-Marie Arouet, known by his pen-name Voltaire, the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, Emile Zola and the celebrated French resistance hero Jean Moulin.

Out of more than 70 illustrious figures whose tombs are in the crypt, only four are female. The first was Sophie Berthelot, wife of the chemist Marcellin Berthelot, who was buried in 1907, but it was not until 1995 when Marie Curie’s remains were moved to the Panthéon that a woman was accepted in her own right. It took another 20 years before two more women were added: resistance fighters Germaine Tillion and Genevieve de Gaulle-Anthonioz, a niece of President Charles de Gaulle.About 1,000 guests will attend the ceremony, including former presidents Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande. Five screens will relay the service to the public outside. At Veil’s state funeral last year, Macron said in his eulogy: “You brought into our lives that light that burned within you and that nobody could ever take away.”

Last month, the Paris metro authorities named a station after her when the “Europe” stop became “Europe – Simone Veil”. Commemorative coins and postage stamps bearing Veil’s image will also go into circulation later this month.