Musée Carnavalet

Museum · Le Marais (3rd)Paris,France

Paris's own history museum in a Renaissance mansion, built from the physical debris of the city Haussmann demolished, whole rooms and shopfronts rebuilt inside.

The Musée Carnavalet is the city's own history museum, and much of it is the physical debris of Paris. Dugout canoes pulled from river mud at Bercy, old shop signs in painted wood and forged iron, a jeweller's shop designed by Alphonse Mucha, the bed Marcel Proust wrote in. Whole rooms lifted out of demolished houses stand rebuilt inside, so you walk through them rather than look at them. The building is salvage too, down to a stone arch of 1555 carted here from the Île de la Cité. The museum exists because the man demolishing old Paris decided somebody should keep the pieces. While Haussmann's crews cut boulevards through the medieval streets, the city bought this Renaissance mansion on his own advice, to hold whatever the wrecking turned up. Then that first collection burned: it was stored in the Hôtel de Ville, and Commune fighters set the city hall alight with everything inside it. So the museum opened with almost nothing of its own, and nearly everything you walk past arrived later as a gift. It holds more than six hundred thousand objects and shows fewer than four thousand.

Worth knowing

Good to know

The oldest Paris is under your feet — The cellars were closed to the public until the museum reopened in 2021, and the route through the collection now begins down there.
Look for the rooms kept for Madame de Sévigné — She rented this house from 1677 until she died in 1696, and her letters to her daughter read like a diary of Paris.
Charles Le Brun decorated one set of rooms here — He painted them for a private house on what is now the place des Vosges, years before Louis XIV made him the court's chief painter.
Some works hang at knee height on purpose — About one in ten was hung at a child's eye level, so children can look straight at them instead of being lifted up.
Late afternoon on a weekday is the quietest — School groups fill the rooms through the morning, and weekends bring crowds who walk in on impulse rather than plan a visit.

Things to do

1
Find the 1555 arch whose street was demolished
Cross the courtyard, past the bronze Louis XIV that has stood there since 1890, and keep going to the Drapers' Courtyard. The arch set into the wall once spanned a lane on the Île de la Cité. Only the carved brackets under the vault are original stone; the rest was recut when it was rebuilt in 1886.
2
Name each shop sign's trade before you read the label
Stand in front of the signs and work out what each one advertised: a basin for the barber, a key for the locksmith, a sheaf for the baker. Then check the label. Paris had no working street-numbering system until 1805, so the sign was the address, and it had to work for customers who could not read.
3
Look into a jeweller's shop rebuilt inside the museum
Georges Fouquet's shop interior was taken out of a building on rue Royale when the shop was modernised in the 1920s, then rebuilt here piece by piece. Stand at the opening and look up. Peacocks, coloured glass, stucco waves and bronze figures were all designed by Alphonse Mucha in 1901 as the setting for selling jewellery.