Museum of the Liberation of Paris – General Leclerc – Jean Moulin

Museum · Denfert-Rochereau, Montparnasse (14th)Paris,France

A Paris tollhouse museum standing over the air-raid shelter from which the Resistance directed the city's 1944 uprising, left as it was.

The Museum of the Liberation of Paris sits in a tollhouse from the 1780s, and its real exhibit is twenty metres underneath it. In the last week of August 1944 the city rose against the German garrison. The police occupied their own headquarters and barricades went up in the streets. The fighting ran for six days, until an armoured division reached the centre and the German commander surrendered. The Resistance commander for Paris, Henri Rol-Tanguy, directed that fighting from an air-raid shelter under this square, dug in 1938 for the city's water engineers. It is still down there. Upstairs the museum is built around two men who never met. Jean Moulin was sent into occupied France to bring the separate Resistance groups under one command; he was arrested in 1943, tortured, and died in German hands. Philippe Leclerc took a column of Free French soldiers across Africa and led the division that entered Paris. Their lives run in parallel down the same rooms, in letters, false papers, uniforms and film. A spiral stair of a hundred steps leads down to a corridor of small rooms, where the switchboard and the camp beds have been left exactly as they were.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Entry is free, but shelter places are limited — The museum costs nothing. The day's places for the shelter visit are handed out at the desk first thing in the morning and go quickly.
The square has two matching stone pavilions — The museum is inside one of them, and the entrance to the Catacombs is close by on the same square, so check which door you are walking into.
Paris tells its own story here — The museum was made by the city about the city, so the 1944 uprising is told street by street rather than as a military campaign on a map.
The museum moved here on purpose — It stood in Montparnasse until 2019 and was brought to this square precisely because the command shelter is underneath it.
The underground part is not for everyone — The shelter visit means a hundred steps down with no lift, low ceilings, and the same stair back up, so some visitors cannot do it at all.

Things to do

1
Go down the hundred steps
The stair to the shelter spirals down from a door in the museum floor. Count the turns as you go. At the bottom the air is cooler and the noise of the square above stops completely. This is the room from which the Paris uprising of August 1944 was directed, and the switchboard is still on the wall.
2
Find the milestone standing by the entrance
A white marker just over a metre high stands against the wall by the glass doors. Its dome is ringed with stars and its front carries a red flame. One panel reads Saint-Martin-de-Varreville – Paris, 562 km. That is the distance from the Normandy beach where Leclerc's division landed on 1 August 1944 to this square. The other panel records the oath Leclerc's men swore at Koufra, in the Libyan desert, in 1941. They would not lay down their arms until the French flag flew over Strasbourg cathedral, and it did in November 1944.
3
Read Moulin's life and Leclerc's side by side upstairs
The galleries run Moulin's life and Leclerc's along parallel walls, year by year. Walk one wall to the end, then walk the other back. Jean Moulin was born in 1899 and Philippe Leclerc in 1902, and the two men never met. Moulin was dead by July 1943, and in August 1944 Leclerc drove his division into Paris.
4
Look closely at the false papers
Among the cases upstairs are identity cards made by hand: the right paper, the right stamps, a photograph and a name that belonged to no real person. Get close enough to see the ink. Each card was the only thing protecting the person who carried it, and a badly made one got its holder killed.