Musée des Arts et Métiers

Museum · Arts-et-Métiers (3rd)Paris,France

A medieval Paris priory church filled with machines, Blériot's Channel monoplane hanging where the altar stood and early cars parked in the nave.

The Musée des Arts et Métiers hangs the first aeroplane to cross the English Channel inside a medieval church. Walk into the church and you stand under high stone vaults instead of gallery ceilings. Louis Blériot's 1909 monoplane hangs above the choir, where the altar once stood, wood and wire and stretched cloth. Early cars stand where the congregation did, and a steam wagon of about 1770, often called the oldest surviving self-propelled vehicle, sits among them. Seven collections of instruments, looms, engines and telegraphs fill the floors above. A pendulum swings the length of the nave, but it is a copy. Find the original brass ball in a case nearby: it is dented, and the dent is recent. Léon Foucault hung that ball on a wire in 1851 to show that the Earth turns, and the wire broke in 2010. The building around it was a monastery church long before it held machines. The Revolution shut the priory down, and the state handed the buildings to a new school of trades, founded so that any citizen could come in and study working machinery. That is still roughly what the place does.

Worth knowing

HistoryHow a priory church ended up full of machines

Saint-Martin-des-Champs was a Cluniac priory whose choir was begun in the 1130s. In 1798 the state handed the buildings to a new school of trades.

Good to know

Save your attention for the church at the end — You can walk the seven collections briskly, but the church is where you will want to stand still and look up.
You will have most of the cases to yourself — The crowds that fill the big museums by the river never reach here, and a weekday morning can feel close to empty.
Children fix on the moving things, not the glass cases — The automata and the big machines hold their attention, while rows of brass telescopes and barometers lose it fast.
Walk round to rue du Vertbois for the priory wall — Part of the monastery's thirteenth-century fortified enclosure still stands in the street, with a round tower at the corner.

Things to do

1
Look straight up at the aeroplane that crossed the Channel
Walk to the far end of the church, past the machines, and look straight up. The aeroplane above you is wood, wire and stretched cloth. Find the open frame behind the propeller where the pilot sat with nothing around him, and the wing ribs showing through the fabric.
2
Find the clockwork musician who really strikes the strings
In the automata display, look for a seated woman holding two small mallets over a dulcimer, a board strung with wire. She is not miming. A turning barrel in the base works her arms so the mallets land on the strings, and she plays eight tunes. Marie-Antoinette bought her in 1785.
3
Walk round the steam wagon built to haul cannon
Find the three-wheeled machine with a round copper boiler, shaped like a cauldron, hanging out in front of the single wheel that steers it. The engineer Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot built it about 1770 so the French army could move artillery without horses. It managed walking pace, and every quarter of an hour or so it had to stop while the fire was built back up.
4
Look up for the twelfth-century animals behind the choir
Behind the altar end of the church a curved walkway loops round the outside of the choir. Here the stone was stripped bare. In the rest of the church the painted decoration that a nineteenth-century architect added is still in place. Raise your eyes to the tops of the columns: carvers put lions among the leaves, and monsters with birds' bodies.