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Paris’s history updated for the present at the Musée Carnavalet

After five years of closure and a €55m refit, the often overlooked museum reopens with new spaces covering the past century

There will be plenty of unfamiliar sights when the Musée Carnavalet, which is devoted to the history of Paris, reopens on May 29 after a five-year renovation. One of them feels especially significant: when visitors reach the rooms devoted to the French Revolution, they will no longer be greeted by a portrait of Louis XVI. The French king has been replaced by a painting of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, the era’s key civil rights document.

The change of perspective was made possible by a complete overhaul of the museum, carried out with accessibility and coherence in mind after a century and a half of haphazard expansion. The City of Paris bought the main building, a 16th-century hôtel particulier in the chic Marais district, in 1866. The goal was to house its collections as well as archaeological finds and items donated by the public, but they grew so large that the overall space quadrupled over time. In the 1960s a second, adjacent hôtel was attached to the Carnavalet to accommodate it all. 

That made visits somewhat chaotic: before the museum closed in 2016, prehistoric discoveries were situated just steps away from Napoleon-era ornaments. “The renovation allowed us to rethink the pathway from start to finish, in chronological order,” says Valérie Guillaume, the Carnavalet’s director since 2013. The scale of the project was such that she says she hardly had time to miss the visitors: “There was just too much to do.”

The result is elegant rather than showy. The Carnavalet’s superb collection of shop and building signs, spanning four centuries, still greets visitors in the same airy gallery, but one of three new curved staircases, all in black and warm wood tones, now leads discreetly to the upper floors. 

The improved exhibition spaces should give a new lease of life to the Carnavalet, which is often overlooked by tourists in favour of Paris’s bigger, brand-name museums. It’s a shame because, unlike the Louvre or the Musée d’Orsay, the Carnavalet — once Italo Calvino’s favourite museum, according to his autobiography Hermit in Paris — is free, like all other city-run museums. Visitors are only charged for temporary exhibitions (the first will be devoted to the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, June 15-October 31). 

The Carnavalet is one of 14 museums run by the City of Paris, and the renovation was lavishly funded by the French capital, to the tune of €55m (94.5 per cent of the total cost). “It’s the history of Parisians,” says Carine Rolland, Paris’s deputy mayor for culture. “We really wanted to bring it into the present.”

The new permanent exhibition does just that: while previously the Carnavalet’s collections took visitors only to the 1910s, additional rooms now cover the 20th and 21st centuries. They remain fairly modest, especially when it comes to the past two decades (memorialised mainly through photographs of events including the November 2015 terrorist attacks), but Guillaume intends to keep acquiring recent artworks and memorabilia.

More impressive is the newly opened basement, devoted mainly to the prehistoric, ancient and medieval history of the city. A lost gargoyle from Notre-Dame de Paris has made it out of the Carnavalet’s 615,000-strong reserves; the collections also feature the first known stone inscription mentioning the “Parisii”, the Gallic tribe that gave its name to modern Paris, previously known under its Roman name, Lutetia.

Elsewhere, major attractions have been given a little more space to impress. A recreation of Marcel Proust’s bedroom, made possible by the donation of the author’s original furniture, is no longer stuck in a small alcove. Context has been added, including audio recordings of In Search of Lost Time. 

The Carnavalet’s many other period rooms have retained their vivid effect. Out of them, the sweeping ballroom decor designed by Josep Maria Sert i Badia in the 1920s for Paris’s Hôtel Wendel, lifted in 1989 to be displayed at the Carnavalet, is enough to make you want to waltz across the otherwise empty room. Painted red drapery lends the character-heavy murals, inspired by the Queen of Sheba, a sense of theatrical movement, even snaking through billowing clouds on the ceiling.

The history of Paris is so full of twists and turns that it remains a sensitive subject in France. That’s especially true of the 19th century, when successive revolutions led to imperial regimes, attempts at democracy and even the shortlived, utopian socialist government of the Paris Commune, exactly 150 years ago. When the Carnavalet opened, less than a decade later, it displayed what the scholar Felicity Bodenstein called “secular relics”, including Napoleon’s toothbrush, in an attempt to appeal to visitors’ emotions and build a narrative around France’s “great men”.

Now the Carnavalet is at pains to change that narrative and learn from recent scholarship, as the French revolution rooms indicate: in addition to altered displays, Guillaume is installing new audio recordings of speeches and individual stories, highlighting different facets of the events. “We wanted to provide additional elements and perspectives,” the director says.

Renewed attention has also been paid to religious diversity in the city, with rediscovered medieval Jewish tombstones, and to the history of Parisian women — starting with the 17th-century writer Madame de Sévigné, who once lived in the Carnavalet’s main hôtel particulier and called it her “Carnavalette”.

While the pandemic pushed back the reopening, initially scheduled for 2020, it didn’t have as much of an impact on the closed Carnavalet as on other French museums — although it did create some difficulties. “The maker of the new display cases is German, so with mandatory quarantine, we had a very long wait every time he needed to be here over the winter,” Guillaume says.

In late May, the new Carnavalet will compete with the many cultural institutions reopening after six months of Covid-related restrictions. Still, between the anniversary of the Commune and the recent, divisive bicentenary of Napoleon’s death, it has plenty to contribute to French cultural life — and, for foreign visitors, it may be just the right introduction to Paris’s many controversies.