Musée Carnavalet — Histoire de Paris

Musée Carnavalet occupies two adjoining Marais mansions, the 16th-century Hôtel Carnavalet and the 17th-century Hôtel Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau, and has told the story of Paris since the museum opened to the public in 1880. The collection spans prehistoric river-dredged tools, Gallo-Roman fragments recovered beneath the city, medieval guild signage, and royal-era furnishings through to the French Revolution, the Second Empire, and the 20th century. Among the named pieces are Revolutionary-era relics including a model of the Bastille carved from one of its own stones, Marie Antoinette's personal effects from her final imprisonment, Napoleon III's Second Empire salons transplanted room by room, and Marcel Proust's reconstituted cork-lined bedroom from Boulevard Haussmann. The building itself is a period piece: courtyards, carved stone facades attributed in part to the sculptor Jean Goujon, and boiserie-panelled rooms salvaged from demolished Parisian townhouses. Curatorially the museum runs chronologically, moving visitors from prehistory on the lower levels up through the ancien régime, the Revolution, and into the 19th and 20th centuries on the upper floors, with period rooms reassembled to match their original addresses. A major renovation completed in 2021 modernised circulation, added accessible entrances, and restored the historic courtyards, leaving the museum in excellent condition with updated lighting and climate control for the more fragile paintings and textiles. Because the permanent collection is free, the museum draws a mix of Marais residents, school groups, and visitors researching the city's Revolutionary period, and it remains one of the few Paris museums organised entirely around the biography of the city rather than a single dynasty or artist.