The Musee Carnavalet, housed in two ancient mansions, is Paris’s official museum of itself, with exhibits from pre-historic times almost to the present, so it’s obviously not a quick-visit museum. It re-opened last year after a five-year closure for renovation.
The renovation was needed because the museum had become stuffed with way too much to see and a way too confusing layout. Despite all efforts at making it easier, it’s still not straightforward. But one change certainly makes it more accessible to visitors: the narrative signs are now bilingual.
A quick look at the one above is a reminder that unrest, revolt, revolution have been part of Paris for a very long time, too, and despite the museum not really planning it that way, I had fun following its ‘souvenirs of revolution,’ starting with the Medusa door ornaments installed on the town hall in 1652 after a revolt had destroyed the previous doors. Medusa survived the burning of the Hotel de Ville during the 1871 commune; the doors didn’t.
A long hallway connecting exhibit areas is lined with historical images in more or less chronological order; every few feet there are scenes of disorder, revolt and revolution.
Although you can find information, mostly in narrative signs, about earlier revolts and conflict between King and rising merchant classes, the biggest selection comes with the 1789 French Revolution and its aftermath, which includes placards and some souvenir goods with revolutionary slogans, including the desk set in the middle, with a slogan borrowed from the American Revolution: Live Free or Die, still to be seen on New Hampshire license plates.
Major events appear in a number of forms, including paintings. First, the scene of the Tennis Court Oath, in which the Third Estate and allies in the Estates General declared themselves a National Assembly and swore not to leave until the King accepted a constitution. Below that, Lafayette pledges loyalty to the new republic in 1791; the boy at right is his son, named for George Washington.
A model of the Bastille prison; the attack that seized the Bastille and freed its prisoners marked a new turn and is often thought of as the start of the Revolution, although many actions preceded it. After that, a contractor named Pierre-Francois Palloy hired hundreds of workers to demolish it. Much of the material was recycled, but Palloy also had many bits turned into souvenirs.
The heat of the Revolution and its anti-clerical turn led to other demolition as well, including the chipping off of the word ‘Saint’ from street signs, and the wrecking of royal tombs in the Saint-Denis Basilica. Later regimes restored them.
A poster announcing a committee responsible for guaranteeing food and other critical supplies. Below that, Napoleon’s proclamation of his coup d’etat.
And then, after several years of turmoil and factional fighting among different groups in the revolution, Napoleon returned to Paris and, under various titles, took power and ultimately proclaimed himself Emperor.
After the fall of Napoleon and restoration of the Bourbon monarchy, Paris continued to be a center of unrest and intrigue under increasingly autocratic Kings Louis XVIII and Charles X. The market scene below, by an English artist, captures some of the unsettled feel.
In 1830, after he attempted to disband the Parliament and impose press censorship, riots in Paris and other cities drove him from the throne.
He was replaced by his then-popular fifth cousin, King Louis-Philippe, supported by industrialists and bankers. In the scene below, crowed gather at Paris’s city hall, where he was welcomed by the now-aged but still-revered Lafayette.
Less than twenty years later, in 1848, a now-unpopular Louis-Philippe was forced out, and a Second Republic proclaimed. Its first President, Louis Napoleon, a nephew of Bonaparte, who soon made himself Emperor, and instituted a revolution of another sort: Shown here, he hands Baron Haussmann the authority to essentially remake Paris.
Before Haussmann’s plans were completed, though, Napoleon III and France lost the Franco-Prussian War and a Third Republic was proclaimed, one which did not go over well in Paris, where many distrusted its leaders. From March through May of 1871, Paris was governed by a network of committees, known as the Paris Commune of 1871.
The Commune acted on many working-class issues, including wages, hours of work, rights of women and more, including this proclamation authorizing tghe painter Courbet to re-open and re-organize the city’s museums. The Commune eventually fell to forces of the new republic; thousands of communards were executed in the aftermath, and others such as Louise MIchel, who later returned and became an important figure in France, were forced into exile.
The Carnavalet Museum itself had a role in the Commune period. The 16th-century building was bought by the city in 1866 to be a museum, on Haussmann’s request. It was expanded to include parts of adjoining buildings demolished by Haussmann’s rebuilding work, and finally opened in 1880, but with a smaller collection than intended: Items intended for the museum had been stored in the basement of the city hall, which was burned in May 1871.
The museum became part of its own history again in 1944, just after the liberation of Paris. The museum’s staff, which had spent the war essentially ignoring instructions from the Vichy government to display pro-German and pro-Vichy propaganda, posted an appeal in September 1944 asking citizens to share pictures of the days surrounding liberation the month before. In November, while the war continued elsewhere, the Musee Carnavalet opened its first post-occupation exhibit.
The stormy events of 1968 make an appearance as well, with an array of political posters from the student and worker revolt that shook the nation and inspired a wave of movements around the world. This one shows ‘the power of the people’ bowling over all the established parties, from left to right.
And, for last, an unplanned collaboration between the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, who took the photo of students confronted by police, and Sunny, a youth who added the flowers and the comment: “It’s a face to face in black and white; a touch of red to please…Flowers for understanding and love.”
We all take our meanings and souvenirs of events, large and small. With 625,000 objects in its possession and 3800 on display, the Museum has chosen, and as we view it, so do we.
