Musée Carnavalet
The Musée Carnavalet in Paris is dedicated to the history of the city. The museum occupies two neighboring mansions: the Hôtel Carnavalet and the former Hôtel Le Peletier de Saint Fargeau. On the advice of Baron Haussmann, the civil servant who transformed Paris in the latter half of the 19th century, the Hôtel Carnavalet was purchased by the Municipal Council of Paris in 1866; it was opened to the public in 1880. By the latter part of the 20th century, the museum was full to capacity. The Hôtel Le Peletier de Saint Fargeau was annexed to the Carnavalet and opened to the public in 1989.
The building, a historic monument from the 16th century, contains furnished rooms from different periods of Paris history, historic objects, and a very large collection of paintings of Paris life; it features works by artists including Joos Van Cleve, Frans Pourbus the Younger, Jacques-Louis David, Hippolyte Lecomte, François Gérard, Louis-Léopold Boilly, and Étienne Aubry, to Tsuguharu Foujita, Louis Béroud, Jean Béraud, Carolus Duran, Jean-Louis Forain, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Johan Barthold Jongkind, Henri Gervex, Alfred Stevens, Paul Signac, and Simon-Auguste. They depict the city's history and development, and its notable characters.
The Carnavalet Museum is one of the fourteen City of Paris museums which have been incorporated since January 1, 2013 in the public institution Paris Musées. In October 2016, the museum was closed to the public for major renovation works. It reopened in 2021 with new rooms and galleries and an expanded collection.
History
The land on which the museum stands was purchased in 1544 by Jacques de Ligneris, the president of the Parlement of Paris, who commissioned the architects Pierre Lescot and Jean Goujon to build a townhouse. In 1548, Lescot and Goujon were taken away from the project to construct the new Louvre Palace; the building was completed in about 1560 by Jean Bullant, whose other notable works included portions of the Tuileries Palace, the Louvre. the Château d'Écouen, and the famous gallery of the Chateau de Chenonceau spanning the River Cher in the Loire Valley.In 1572, the hôtel was purchased by Madame de Kernevenoy, the widow of a member of the Court of Henry II of France, and the preceptor of the Duke of Anjou, who became Henry III of France. Her Breton name was difficult for the Parisians to pronounce, and gradually was transformed to "Carnavalet". During this period, the facade and portals were given lavish decoration of Renaissance sculpture, much of which still can be seen. They were the work of the sculptor Jean Goujon and his workshop.
The mansion was bought in 1654 by the intendant Claude Boislève, who commissioned the architect François Mansart to make extensive renovations in the new classical style. This included raising the height of the facade on the street and on the two wings by one storey, as well as the addition of groups of classical sculpture on the main facade and on the two wings. Boislève had the misfortune of being too closely associated with Fouquet, the royal chancellor who was accused of misusing royal funds to build his own palatial residence. The hôtel and furnishings were confiscated from Boisléve in 1662, and sold at auction. The new buyer rented the hotel in 1677 to Madame de Sévigné, famous for her letters describing the daily life and intrigues of the Parisian nobility. She lived in the Hôtel Carnavalet from 1677 until her death in 1696.
The idea of creating a museum of Paris history was launched by Baron Haussmann, who, under Napoleon III, was in the midst of his grand project of building new avenues, parks and squares in the center of the city. In 1866 he persuaded the city of Paris to purchase the Hôtel Carnavalet to house the museum, and assembled a large collection of history objects and documents. Until the museum was completed, the collection was stored, with the city archives, in the vaults of the Hotel de Ville. In May 1871, in the last days of the Paris Commune, the Communards set fire to the Hotel de Ville, destroying the building, the city archives, and the collection. The door of the original Hotel de Ville, still charred from the fire, is on display in the museum. The collection was gradually rebuilt, and in 1880 the building formally became the museum of the history of Paris.
Many more additions followed, as the collection grew. In 1872, the building was enlarged on three sides, largely using vestiges of buildings demolished during Haussmann's construction of the Grand Boulevards in the center of the city. At the beginning of the 20th century, two new wings were added in the rear, which enclosed the garden. An even larger expansion program was begun in 1913 by he architect Roger Foucault. The project was interrupted by the First World War, but resumed after the war and was finally completed in 1921, doubling the exposition space in the museum. The new buildings finally enclosed the Cour Henri IV and the courtyard called "de la Victore".
Expansion continued. In 1989, a nearby mansion, the Hôtel Le Peletier de Saint Fargeau, was purchased and connected with the museum. This hotel was also built in the middle of the 16th century, and was originally known as the Hôtel d'Orgeval. It was purchased by Michel Le Peletier and passed on eventually to his grandson, Le Peletier de Saint Fargeau, who was a representative of the nobility in the Estates-General of 1789. In 1793, Le Peletier voted for the execution of Louis XVI, and was murdered, in revenge for his vote, on January 20, 1793, the same day as the execution of the king. The Hôtel Le Peletier de Saint Fargeau was annexed to the Carnavalet. It was opened to the public in 1989, commemorating the bicentennial of the French Revolution.
The museum was closed in 2017 for a major renovation, and reopened in 2021. The museum as of 2021 had forty decorated rooms and galleries, and 3800 objects on display. The total collection, included 625,000 objects.
Exterior
Exterior sculpture
The statue of Louis XIV in the costume of a Roman emperor, is one of the very few images of him which survived the French Revolution. It was made by sculptor Antoine Coysevox and depicts the King in the costume of a Roman emperor. Before the French Revolution it was placed before the Hotel de Ville, and was moved to the museum in 1890.The facade features a statue of "Immortality" by Louis-Simon Boizot. During the Revolution, Boizot was a member of the Commission des Monuments in 1792. From 1805 he was a professor at the Academie des Beaux-Arts, where, among other works, he executed the sculpture for the Fontaine du Palmier erected in the Place du Châtelet, Paris. The gilded "Victory" was the centrepiece of the fountain, and celebrated Napoleon's triumphant return from Egypt. It was finished in 1806, and placed atop a column with sphinxes spouting water at the base. The statue on display at the Carnavalet is the original model of "Immortality", holding olive wreaths in both hands.
Collections
The current collections on display are presented within the two 17th century residences, the Hôtels Carnavalet and Le Pelletier de Saint-Fargeau. Some rooms have their original decoration intact, while others have been recreated with furnishing and decoration of a certain period. They include furnished rooms from historic residences from the 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. The displays cover 3900 square meters, laid out in eight "parcourses" or sequences of rooms from different periods.Lutetia, Prehistory and Antiquity
On its lowest level the museum displays an extensive collection of art and practical objects recovered from neolithic sites and from the ancient Gallo-Roman of Lutetia. The gallery also displays objects found in the 1990s at the first permanent settlement known in Paris, in the neighbourhood of Bercy. This discovery included objects related to agriculture, fishing, and raising livestock, dated to 65004500 BC.Discoveries on display include a whole pirogue, or long, narrow canoe made from a single tree trunk. It dates to about 2700 BC, during the Neolithic period. It was discovered in the early 1990s, along with several other pirogues that were even older, at a site located near the modern Rue Henri-Farman in the 19th arrondissement, on what was then a channel of the Seine. Other items on display from this period include earthenware cooking pots, early ceramics, wooden tools, necklaces of otter teeth, and carved female figures. They date back long before the first written description of the village in 52 BC in Julius Caesar's De bello Gallico.
During the Bronze Age a Gallic people called the Parisii settled in the area and founded Lutetia. Its location is traditionally held to be on the Île de la Cité, but their presence is not documented on the left bank of the Seine before the 1st century BC, when Julius Caesar recorded his visit to their leaders on the Île de la Cité. Early coins minted by the Parisii are also displayed, dating to between 90 and 60 BC, with a masculine head in profile, and a horse on the reverse. The coins were used in the extensive river commerce of the Parisii on European rivers. Following the Roman conquest of Gaul by Julius Caesar in 52 BC, the minting of the coins as stopped.
Following the Roman conquest in the 1st century BC, Lutetia was centred on the left bank, occupying an area of about 130 hectares. Like other Roman cities, it was constructed around the intersection of north–south road and an east–west road. Nearby was the amphitheater, near Rue Monge and still present, in much-modified form; and the Forum, at Rue Soufflot, where the government buildings were located. The Roman port was on the Ile-de-la-Cité, and there was a smaller settlement on the right bank of the Seine. Extensive excavations in the 19th century uncovered the paved streets; three large Roman baths; and residences. A group of sculpted heads are on display, which were discovered near the state of the Roman amphitheater in Paris in 1885. The statues had oak crowns, and represented either gods, or the Imperial family.
Two large Roman necropoles, or cemeteries, proved a particularly rich source of discoveries for the museum. The southern cemetery, the Necropole of Pierre Nicole, near Val-de-Grace, was the most important under the High Empire, and was used until the fourth century AD. The excavations there between 1870 and 1970, uncovered some four hundred sepulchres, with furniture, sculpture and inscriptions. The Necropole of the Gobelins, in the Faubourg Saint-Marcel, was smaller, and was used in the later, or Low Empire. The most valuable discovery there was a set of surgical instruments dating from the second century AD.
The excavations of the amphitheater site were particularly meticulous; they were directed by Thèodore Vacquer, who became under-conservator of the Carnavalet Museum in 1870. One especially important discovery by Vacquer was the fresco on the wall of the house of a wealthy Roman, with colors still largely vivid, discovered under the current rue de l'Abbaye-de-l'Épée. Other objects discovered include a sword from the Bronze Age ; a fourth-century bottle used for perfume, wine, or honey.