The Paris Musées, the museums the City of Paris runs itself

Map of 8 locations in Paris, France

Fourteen museums in Paris belong to the city rather than the state, pooled since 2013 into a single public body that handles their collections, exhibitions and buildings. The practical consequence is an access rule worth knowing: permanent collections are free to everyone, and only the Catacombs and the Notre-Dame crypt charge at the door, while the writers' houses and sculpture studios ask for a ticket only when a temporary show is running. What they have in common beyond the funding is the kind of building they occupy, studios and private houses kept as their occupants left them, plus two exhibition palaces the city never gave back.

Places in this collection

  • Musée Zadkine — Ossip Zadkine lived and worked in this house and studio off the rue d'Assas for some forty years, and the collection traces his Cubist peri…
  • Musée de la Vie Romantique — The Hôtel Scheffer-Renan was the painter Ary Scheffer's house, and the museum built inside it keeps George Sand's jewellery along with a pl…
  • Maison de Victor Hugo — Hugo took the second floor of the Hôtel de Rohan-Guéménée on the Place des Vosges from 1832 to 1848, and the museum holds his furniture, me…
  • Petit Palais — Charles Girault's building went up for the 1900 Universal Exhibition and was kept afterwards as the city's fine arts museum, so the collect…
  • Catacombes de Paris — The remains of more than six million Parisians were moved into the disused limestone quarries beneath Denfert-Rochereau, and the ossuary is…
  • Musée Bourdelle — Antoine Bourdelle worked for Rodin before building a reputation of his own, and the museum is his actual studio, house and garden in the 15…
  • Maison de Balzac — Balzac rented the Passy house between 1840 and 1847 and wrote most of La Comédie humaine in it, and the museum keeps his manuscripts, proof…
  • Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris — The city's own twentieth-century collection sits in the east wing of the Palais de Tokyo, put up for the 1937 international exhibition to d…

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